The journey back from my outpost to my main base was routine, a familiar trek across the crimson dunes. I had spent weeks at the new outpost, scouting and securing the territory, and it was time to return for supplies. In my mind, I thought of the filtered water, the stronger shelter, the small comforts I kept there. I thought of home.
As I crested the final dune, the one from which my base should have been visible, my heart went cold. The familiar silhouette against the sky was gone.
There was nothing. Nothing but the sand and the wind, as if my home had never existed.
For a moment, I refused to believe it. My navigation had to be wrong. But the rock formations were the same; this was the place. I approached the site slowly, a knot of dread tightening in my gut. At first, I blamed the desert. A freak storm, I thought, or the shifting of the deep sands. But the ruin told a different story.
It wasn't a crater. The structure hadn't been blown apart; it had been consumed. Scoured and half-swallowed by the sand, it looked like the carcass of some great animal gnawed down to the bone. As I walked through the wreckage, I searched for the cause, but I found nothing.
It took me some time, sifting through the ruin, to understand what had happened. The realization came when I found it: the master shield emitter. It was silent and cold. It hadn't been shattered by wind or sand; its core had been precisely and cleanly disabled from within. An electronic kill switch.
And in that moment, the terrible truth fell into place. There had been no warning, no signal to my outpost, because the silence was the message.
The Empire hadn’t sent ships or bombs. They had flipped a switch from orbit, turning off my protection and leaving my home helpless. They had sentenced it to death and let Arrakis serve as the executioner, all without a sound. They didn't just punish me for my insolence; they demonstrated how effortlessly they could erase me, how little I mattered. A ghost receives no notification of its own exorcism.
I now understand. The greatest threats do not always announce themselves with a roar. Sometimes they come as a quiet act of betrayal from a power you depend on. To survive, I must not only be a ghost to the Empire's patrols, but to its technology as well. I must sever every tie, every dependency. What is given by an empire can always be taken away, and next time, I might be inside when the shield goes dark.
There was nothing left for me there but ghosts and sand.
But before I turned my back on the wreckage for the last time, I paused. I laid a hand on the cracked foundational stone that had sheltered me and touched the hardy leaf of a desert plant that had given me its water. I thanked them both, quietly, as you would thank old friends before moving away forever. Then, I began the long, quiet journey back to my outpost at Jabal Eifrit Al-janub. It is no longer just an outpost; by necessity, it is now my home. Standing where my life's work had been, seeing how easily it was unwritten from the world, I finally understood a deepest truth of Arrakis.
Everything here is ephemeral. The shelters we build, the paths we walk, our very lives—they are all temporary marks on a canvas that is constantly being wiped clean. To survive is to accept this truth, and to live is to make your mark anyway, knowing the wind will one day come for it.
Project by Ninaiemeyer ( @nina )
#DuneAwakening
