Chapter 21: Judgement Of Mortals
Dune awoke with a sharp gasp, his body lurching forward before collapsing onto the ground. His breath came ragged, uneven, as if his own lungs were struggling to accept that he was back.
The weight of his memories crashed down on him all at once. Every scar, every decision, every lesson learned in blood. He was whole again. It all came flooding back: childhood, the loss of Ned and Atlas, his own death, and the humiliation at the hands of Matiane. He remembered his past and present selves, his parents, his father... and with that, a consuming anger.
His fists clenched, nails digging into his palms as his teeth ground together. Useless idiot. The words hissed through his mind like venom. You made mistakes. You trusted the wrong people. You let yourself become weak.
The trial had stripped him of everything, his past, his instincts, his identity. What remained had been a hollow shell.
A naive fool who sought friendship, who believed in allies, who fought with some misguided sense of righteousness instead of survival.
Dune was not that person. He had never been that person.
He was cold. Calculated. A person who understood that survival was not about kindness, it was about strength, about control.
And yet, for a time, he had been reduced to something pitiful, something fragile.
The thought made his stomach twist with disgust.
He took a slow, steadying breath, forcing his rage into something sharper, more precise.
Hatred coursed through him, hatred for the world, for everything in it. He wanted to destroy it all, to burn it to ashes. But something held him back. His memories stopped him. His own self, born in trials, stood in his way like a barrier of water against a raging inferno.