Terrible Purpose (Dune Fanfiction)

Chapter Fifteen

This chapter is brought to you by:  Tempus Vernum by Enya.

Nyla watched as Paul fought the 'thopter's controls. She grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, her higher awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. She felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.

The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but her inner sense began to see through the curtain.

He must find the right vortex, she thought.

For a long time now she had sensed the storm's power diminishing, but still it shook them. Paul waited out another turbulence.

The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the 'thopter left.

Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.

"Paul!" she screamed.

Nyla placed a calm hand on her mother's, in a near-futile effort to calm her nerves. The turbulence is nearing the potential of ending, she thought.

The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the 'thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out - a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.

Nyla looked down, and saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert - moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.

"We're out of it," Jessica whispered.

Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.

"We've given them the slip," he said.

Nyla felt her mother's pulse pounding through her wrist, as Jessica forced it to calm. Nyla's time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces for almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.

It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.

"I don't like the sound of our wing motion," Paul said. "We suffered some damage in there."

They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of Nyla's prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and she sensed herself trembling on the verge of a revelation.

She shivered.

The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and she found herself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, she felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But she thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.

"I shall not fear..."

Cause and effect: she was alive despite malignant forces, and she felt herself poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without the litany's magic.

Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through her memory: "What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us? "

"There's rock all around," Jessica said.

Nyla shook her head to clear it. She and Paul looked to where their mother pointed, and saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. Nyla felt wind around her ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm's doing.