The first week in the deep desert was not a journey; it was a slow, rhythmic peeling away of the soul. For Anastasia, who had only turned eleven a few weeks prior, the transition from the silk-lined halls of Arrakeen to the abrasive, howling void of the Great Erg was a trial that should have broken her.
Each day followed a brutal, geometric pattern. They moved only in the "gray-light" of dawn and the cooling shadows of dusk. During the white-hot furnace of midday, they burrowed into "sand-tents"—cramped, suffocating bladders of spice-cloth hidden beneath the lee of rock outcroppings.
The Trial of the StillsuitThe greatest struggle was the stillsuit. For a child as petite and "naive" as Anastasia, the heavy, gurgling apparatus felt like a living parasite.
"It's so tight, Paul," she whispered on the third night, her voice a dry rasp as she sat on a shelf of obsidian. "It feels like it's trying to hug me too hard. And the tube... it tastes like old pennies."
Paul knelt before her, his own face already beginning to hollow out, his eyes turning a darker shade of pre-blue. He adjusted the neck-seal of her suit with a lingering, yandere-like focus. "You must drink the processed water, 'Stasia. Every drop you reject is a piece of your life the desert steals. I won't let it take you."
Jia sat behind them, her hand never leaving the hilt of her blade. She had spent the week in a state of silent, murderous vigilance. Her yandere-level jealousy spiked every time the Fremen girl, chani, approached with a damp cloth or a piece of bird-jerky.
The Influence of the SmallDespite the heat that blistered the lips and the dust that turned the eyes to glass, Anastasia's kindness remained a steady, illogical flame.
On the fifth day, as they crossed a "drum-sand" plateau where every step had to be a broken, non-rhythmic shuffle to avoid the worm, a Fremen elder tripped. His knee joint, stiff from seventy years of desert life, buckled.
Before Stilgar could order the man to be left behind for the "water-count," Anastasia had slipped from Paul's side. She caught the old man's arm with her petite, trembling hands.
"Lean on me, Grandfather," she chirped, her Influence washing over the grim-faced warriors. "I'm very small, so the sand doesn't hear me as much. I can be your walking stick."
The elder stared at her—this eleven-year-old "Goddess" in tattered bridal finery and a grime-streaked stillsuit. He didn't see a burden. He saw a reason to keep walking. The entire tribe slowed their pace to match hers, a silent, collective vow forming in the heat.
The Night of the Blue MoonBy the seventh night, the group reached the edge of the Caza Sink. They were exhausted, their skin grey with salt-films, their minds hallucinatory from the spice-air.
Chani sat near the entrance of their temporary rock-shelter, her gaze fixed on Anastasia, who had fallen into a deep, twitching sleep. Chani's sixteen-year-old face was a mask of fanatical devotion.
"She is changing," chani whispered to Paul, not looking away from the child. "The desert is trying to eat her, but she is turning the desert into a garden. I saw a flower blooming in the shade of her tent today. A desert-crocus. It shouldn't be alive."
Paul looked at his sister. Her "naive" beauty was still there, but beneath it, a new, harder light was beginning to glow. The eleven-year-old girl who loved sea-songs was being forged into something the prophecy hadn't fully described.
"She isn't just surviving, chani," Paul said, his voice a dark, possessive promise. "She's conquering. And by the time we reach the Sietch, the desert will belong to her."
Jia, watching from the shadows, tightened her grip on her knife. The desert, the Fremen, the brother... they all want her,Jia thought. But I am the only one who will still be there when the stars go out.