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peggyao3 · 20 days ago

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Relic - Pt. 14 "A World in a Grain of Sand"

PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Unnamed Ambiguous FMC

SUMMARY: ✧ Dreams are messages from the deep ✧ A woman from the unknown comes to Feyd in his dreams and his nights become his days as he flees to the dreamscape to escape the nightmares that haunt his waking hours.

TAGS: Third person POV, she/her AFAB FMC, explicit sexual content, smut, vaginal sex, vaginal fingering, oral sex, Porn with Plot, Feyd-Rautha's black cum and big cock, Praise Kink, Body Worship, angst/hurt and comfort, drama, fluff, plans within plans, implied/referenced child abuse, implied/referenced abuse, Trauma, mentions of suicidal thoughts, Healing, Strangers to Lovers, falling in love, Vulnerable/ Emotional/Possessive Feyd, Feyd is a sweet baby who did nothing wrong and I WILL pamper him, nurture not nature, Stockholm Syndrome but in a consensual way, lucid dreaming, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, murder, teaching the universe about feminism, female rage, Frank Herbert would frown, No actually he would kneel in front of me, putting the science and the porn in sci-fi, angst with a happy ending

WORD COUNT: 5.4k

A/N: Giving you the eyebrow 🤨 because no one seems to have picked up on a tiny, little, important detail that was to be found in the last chapter, or at least no one mentioned it 😌 Finally I can write what I really crave to write. IT'S SCIENCE TIME 💖

Reposted from my Ao3 💕| Masterlist | Relic Masterlist

Dividers by @saradika-graphics

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Day 31

"I have one last question, little slave," Vladimir Harkonnen drones from his afloat position, a celestial body of massive dimensions in front of the somber backdrop of his throne room, black within black with only a single glow globe illuminating the back of him. He prefers to shun the black sun these days, as glorious as it may be, it brings out the myriad of spider veins beneath his frail, aged skin.

"Yes, Lord Baron?" The unremarkable slave's voice echoes from below.

"What is this… ancient piece of metal in my dear nephew's toy's room?"

"I believe you must know more about it than I do. I assume you had it examined before it was unloaded and brought inside?"

"Naturally!" Vladimir raises his voice. The slave with her bowed head can't see the way the aged Baron squints to get a clearer picture of her. Afloat as he is, she is little more than a splotch of white against black, and an unwelcomely blurry one.

The examination had revealed a human shaped mold, cushioned with gel pads, thick tubes for coolant, a recycling system with residue nutrient solution, solar panels for energy harvesting. No traces of radiation or explosives. It almost seems like the metal box is exactly what the sisterhood had made it out to be. A hibernation chamber for a fossil from another time. However, it wouldn't be the first myth created by the Bene Gesserit.

"I know you are looking for something substantial, my Lord, and so was I," the slave speaks after the Baron's elongated pause. "But I'm afraid the truth is as embarrassing as it is mundane. I've come to believe that she keeps it close out of raw sentimentality. She's a sentimental creature, that woman."

Lilia has always loved danger and the long, twisted inkvine scar on her shoulder from girlhood days is just one proof of that. Perhaps that's why she so effortlessly serves the Baron velvet lies.

"Ah-h-h, like my Feyd-Rautha then. It doesn't surprise me," the Baron drawls, lungs expanding with a raspy heaviness to each intake of air.

In all his years as Giedi Prime's sovereign, Vladimir Harkonnen has never learned that the promise of a kind embrace outweighs the threat of violence tenfold and that a spark of human goodness can sway a servant's loyalty quicker than a snap of a whip.

"She calls it her sarcophagus," Lilia adds with a tiny scoff that doesn't go unnoticed by the Baron now that he has lowered himself and sinks back into the much more comfortable seat of his throne. The intimidation tactic has fulfilled its purpose.

He bellows. "So, she's got good humor too! A pity she's not a boy. I could have borrowed her sometimes."

The obedient set of Lilia's shoulders and her lowered gaze don't betray the noxious clench that has her stomach convulsing. Perhaps this is the only advantage of being a woman in the Harkonnen palace pyramid.

Day 45

The lack of color that had once bothered her into the throes of a slowly crawling depression is now a pleasure. The blackness of her abode has come to serve as the perfect desktop for columns of text and equations, formulations and simulations and hand-written notes that have her mouth moving and her eyeballs racing.

Her sarcophagus leeches the day's sun, side panels open to give way to rotating cooling fans. The Central Processing Unit of the computer that makes up half of the machinery inside buzzes from the strain she puts on it.

Astronaut M2-84 has finally come home and picked up the work of her own, chosen destiny.

Talking to God, Mikhail had whispered to his wife, is what the Lady is doing. But what she really does is think, read, calculate. Engineers born on the cusp of the astronautic age don't have their oily hands in tool boxes. Most of the time, they tell machines how to build other machines, and to do so, one needs to understand the laws of physics.

This is how Feyd-Rautha finds her each night. Sometimes sunken against the cushions of her bed, or slumped over her desk, staring at the wall with dancing pupils. And other times, like tonight, she sits right by her Sarcophagus, shoulder pressed against the humming metal. She claims the connection between computer and chip is quicker this way.

Silently, Feyd's stride carries him across the room towards his precious engineer. Movement catches his attention at the right and the sight he finds causes a slow tilt of his head.

One quarter of her bed is filled out by a misshapen form, tucked under duvet and whalefur. Glugo lies prone on its stomach, limbs folded tightly against its covered body. Only one front arm-leg peaks out and cradles her plushie against its innocent pug face. Something glossy-white with small handles on each side is held in front of Glugo's mouth by tiny face-hands with liquid sloshing inside.

She has tucked Glugo in like a toddler. And, from the looks of it, she has printed it a sippy cup.

Feyd-Rautha feels all sorts of warmth filling out his chest. If because he wants to be tucked in like a toddler, or because his only friend is finally receiving the gentleness it deserves, or because of a different reason entirely, he can't tell. He raises his hand to wave at Glugo who gurgles softly in return, one tiny face-hand unlatching from the cup handle to wave back.

Glug glug glug.

"You're losing weight." Feyd approaches his beloved slowly. "I don't like it."

"One second, I'm at ninety-eight point five. Seven. Ninety-nine."

"Have you found out anything interesting today, my darling?"

He is long past asking what exactly she's doing, why they aren't simply figuring out a way to get his uncle to take his shield ring off so they can get a blade between his ribs. Or rather a sword, to pierce the obscene, fatty flesh costume he calls his body.

"Your spice—" His darling slurs with a concerning jump to her pupils.

"I don't take spice anymore." Feyd tilts his head and squats down before her, lifting his hands to cup her cheeks.

"No, no, that's not what I meant. Ah, wait, what do you mean, not anymore?" Finally, her eyes regain focus and her arms fill with tension, fingers moving up to encircle Feyd-Rautha's strong wrists.

"There's my darling," he smiles with pretty, full lips and glinting teeth, stroking her cheeks. "So, what about my spice?"

"Not your spice in particular." Her hand flings out to gesture at the universe above. "Your spice shares a few molecular compounds with the medication I took to prepare for the cryo sleep."

Feyd-Rautha's features slip into disbelief, a fresh frown carving deep into the smooth expanse of his forehead.

"Why does this surprise you?" She wonders.

"Spice is unique to Arrakis. Power over the spice means power over everything. How could you have had spice back on Earth without sandworms?"

"First of all, spice, much like anything else, is just protons, electrons and neutrons. With the right tools, you could, in theory, synthesize any molecule."

"And you have such a tool in your Sarcophagus?"

"No! God, no." She laughs out loud and curls her arms around Feyd-Rautha's shoulders in a much needed embrace. Her very eyeballs ache and her spine feels calcified from leaning against the sarcophagus.

To him, it must seem like the solution to just about anything might be hidden in her cryo pod or in her precious chip, but it really holds only a fragment of the technological advancements of Old Earth. The last generation before mankind had embarked to the stars was an ingenious one. They had to be, and their knowledge is safely tucked into the 80 Billion terabyte hard-drive of her supercomputer. She may not have all the tools, but the knowledge to build them — in theory.

She taps the top of the cryo pod and hums. "Building molecules from scratch is not like building houses out of toy blocks. You need to accumulate tremendous amounts of energy in a lab environment to trigger complex chemical reactions."

"You've already built a chair from scratch, and a gun. And now a sippy cup for Glugo?" He states with an incredulous rasp of his voice.

"I couldn't bear seeing it drink from dog bowls anymore. And it struggled so much with cups and glasses, Lilia had to change the sheets twice because the poor thing kept spilling everything."

"You… You are fascinating, my darling." She doesn't miss the spark of arousal that lets Feyd's eyes half disappear under a fan of long lashes. "My point still stands, you've built other things before."

"Yes, but the materials were already there, I just had them pressed into the shape I desired." Feyd tilts his head and she cradles his jaw, stroking across the plushnes of his cheeks. "Were you not taught about chemistry?" Slowly, he shakes his head. "Ah, well, I will explain it to you another time then."

Feyd slides his mouth into her palm, groaning softly. "You know so much. How is it possible that you had spice 24 millenia ago?"

"Not spice. I said my pre-cryo medication shares a few interesting enzymes with spice." She slides one palm around Feyd-Rautha's nape of the neck and softly brings their foreheads together. "My people also used to think their own civilization was the pinnacle of all that has ever been. It was unthinkable that maybe the Aztecs or Sumerians were more advanced. That's how you are too.

You think spice is unique to Arrakis and the technological advancements you have derived from the Holtzman effect are the peak of what is achievable, because it suits you so nicely. But human evolution has never been a linear incline. You have fascinating medicine, Gholas and space travel… But who knows, maybe my people were smarter than yours. Maybe our engineers and chemists were smarter."

"You know so much," he moans again and she knows better than to keep boring him with details. One day, when the many other fires in his heart have settled, she can stoke his interest in science. Feyd is smart. He will come to be fascinated by it.

"This universe is devouring itself because there is no innovation," she softly murmurs. "No one dares to go further, look further, break out of the pattern. Maybe they don't want to, because the consequences scare them. Mentats only do as their Lords bid…"

When Feyd's lips close in on hers, with half-lidded eyes and a dreamy stare, her ramblings subside into grateful, blissful silence, choosing to welcome his tongue in her mouth instead.

Day 59

"Silence!"

The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam's voice ripples in the shape of a waveform pattern across the engineer's interface, recorded many decades ago by Baron Harkonnen himself and transferred to the House archive for research purposes.

Other lines of the same encounter, she is certain, were deliberately removed. Such as when the Reverend Mother, then a young woman, had ordered the Baron to hold still so she could mount him and steal the seed out of his body that would sire the Lady Jessica.

She only knows of this story because of Feyd-Rautha, and what it had cost him to learn it, she doesn't even want to know.

"Silence!"

She can only imagine that Piter de Vries' research on the matter might have consisted to a considerable amount of snide mockery, going by Feyd's recountings of the late mentat, hence why the files were so perfectly abandoned and ready for her to pick apart.

Carefully, she separates the impressive cluster of different wavelengths that make up the audio fragment, finding portions all the way from the high-frequency to the low-frequency audible spectrum, some even so low that they are no longer perceived as sound by the human ear.

The astronaut remembers how the Reverend Mother had tested her in an archaic show of deference, forced onto her knees with her hand in a box while the older woman addressed the pain receptors in her brain via an inaudible wavelength. She may not have moved her lips, but that doesn't mean she didn't cause the air molecules to oscillate.

Technically speaking, this renders the mysteriously omnipotent sisterhood into little more than ventriloquists. That image of demystification offers at least a little comfort to the humiliation provided by the memory of searing pain in every nerve.

She reclines in her chair, swallowing against the dry itch in her throat while she strings together a few fairly simple lines of code.

Curiously, the voice doesn't affect her physiology when played from an artificial source, such as the micro speaker soldered onto her chip's tiny board.

She can only assume that by manipulation of the larynx, wielders of the voice can propel pressure waves in a way that a speaker can not. How exactly this forces the human brain into submission, the engineer cannot tell, but she doesn't need to, to tinker on some offensively simple counter magic to the Bene Gesserit's seemingly almighty tool of control.

Noise cancellation is as simple as letting a speaker emit a sound wave with the same amplitude but an inverted phase. The sound waves cancel each other out in destructive interference.

As much as this scientific victory entices her, it frustrates her endlessly that all of the side research she picks up to take her mind off the real problem bears more fruit.

"Refreshments for you, my Lady!" Lilia's voice snaps her out of her brooding thoughts. The maid slips through the door, bringing a tray of fresh fruit and the stimulating citrus drink that her Lady has come to enjoy as of late. "It's been three hours, it's time to take a break."

"Ugh, three? Felt like one." That explains the dry throat. The relic arches her spine and presses her knuckles against her closed lids until tiny flashes prickle across the dark.

Lilia's footsteps close in at her side along with four other pairs of hand-feet. She sets the tray down on the desk.

"And have you made any progress today, my Lady?"

"Not with the one thing that matters, but yes." She reaches for the pitcher but finds her hands gently shooed away by Lilia who insists on pouring the glass for her, tiny bubbles fizzing in the lemon water.

"Oooh! Have you thought about these visions, my Lady?" The handmaid's ears perk up with interest, enamored with the story of how Feyd and her Lady had gotten to know each other in dreams ever since she had indulged her.

Lilia regards the phenomenon of their getting acquainted with the eyes of a romantic. For the engineer however, this is the only topic that frustrates her more than finding a workaround for the Holtzman effect to get past the Baron's shield.

"Dreams, visions, I don't fucking know. I don't even want to think about them because they drive me fucking crazy." The engineer reaches for her glass and drinks with big gulps, making the maid flinch by how forcefully she slams it back down.

The crescent shaped scar she herself had created on Feyd's clavicle when grappling for his blade is the same that had decorated his skin in their lucid dreams. So, visions? But the topics they had discussed during their shared nights are events of the past. It defies logic, it's paradox. The thing that scares her the most, however, is the fact that the Baron's abuse was still real in those dreams. If they truly were visions of the future, does that mean her research is in vain and he will live?

There is no phenomenon that can't be explained, not even prophetic dreams. But not by her, and not yet.

"Sorry," she apologizes and rubs her temples, finding Glugo staring at her with big, milky eyes, one hand-foot clinging to Lilia's skirt. The engineer's heart softens at once and she leans towards her insecure looking friend. "Aw, I'm really sorry, I didn't want to scare you both, my poor, little— Aw!"

Glugo curls four out of its eight limbs around her calves and rests its chin on her knee, pearly eyes aimed unerringly at the pitcher of sparkling drink on the desk.

"That's citrus," she explains. "I don't think you'll like citrus…"

One of the Tleilaxu creature's oily-black hand-feet clutches the table's edge, another incessantly reaches for the glass container.

"Okay, fine, but just a tiny sip. Where's your cup?"

Glugo glugs cluelessly, looking at Lilia for help. Still, both women are uncertain if the being has any grasp on human language, or if it simply recognizes a question by the inflection of one's voice.

The handmaid locates Glugo's cup in the folds of the duvet and quickly washes out the remnants of pink liquid over the sink in the bath before filling a finger of citrus inside. The creature's hand-feet tippy-tap on the tiles, reaching for the shiny container to take its first curious gulp.

Glugo's pug face puckers into a scrunched up grimace at once, face-hands releasing the sippy cup with an indignant noise.

Glurgh!

Day 93

It is a few weeks later, while Feyd and Mikhail are out brawling, that she figures it out.

"M'lord, I really am sorry," Mikhail laments, his flesh stripped of color as the black sun roars down on his bare torso. The na-Baron and he are prowling around each other in a tight circle, unarmed aside from their fists.

"You told me already." Feyd-Rautha's grating voice cuts through the sweltering air. The training ring's roof is retracted, giving way to blazing white skies and a heat that Giedi Prime's life forms have adapted to. "Five times. Another time, and I might just cut out your tongue."

"Ya know I had to take yer Lady to them bath chambers. Baron commanded it, and I can't just—"

"Shut up, boy!" Feyd's boots crunch in the sandy gravel, shoulders rolling. He is stronger than Mikhail, rounded arms and pectorals contrasting a powerful, slender waist. The guard's physique is more wiry, taut muscles stretched across visible ribs. The glorious sun brings out an overabundance of gray scars.

"Boy, eh? Ain't any older than you, my Lord!" Feyd is surprised, tilting his head at the deceptive edges of the guard's features that make him look closer to 40.

"Fine, then shut up, brother!" Feyd bares his teeth and clenches his fists hard, veins rippling across his forearms. "What are the rules?"

Mikhail's fist springs forward and punches Feyd-Rautha in the guts. He nearly doubles over, groaning in pain. Spit drips from his open mouth into the sand.

"Rules?" The guard quips and aims his elbow for the na-Baron's nose. Feyd dodges with a semi-graceful dive to the side, taking the blow to his ear instead. He tastes blood on his tongue.

This man is bold. He has no manners. Feyd likes him.

Mikhail is smaller, thinner, but he fights like a mongrel, like someone whose ferocious survival instincts have carried him from across the svart valta all the way to the royal palace in Barony. And Feyd struggles.

And by the black sun, he loses. Few things have ever excited him so much. After nearly an hour of grappling in the scorching heat, Feyd-Rautha finds himself on his back in the gravel, panting for dear life, ears ringing from the last punch square across his jaw. He barely hears Mikhail's voice when he praises that he had fought well, but he feels the brotherly smack on his sandy chest, right on top of a wicked bruise.

Every bone and muscle burns when he drags himself to his personal bath chambers. It was, undoubtedly, the best fight of Feyd-Rautha's life.

"Lilia! I've got it! I fucking got it, do you see this?!"

Pixelated particles give way to a bullet that cuts through them like a harpoon through water.

"What, my Lady? See what?" The maid dashes into the bedroom from the antechamber with flying skirts.

"It's so simple, I'm so stupid." The relic has jumped up from the desk, fingers twisted like claws around the back of her chair while her chest heaves with laughter and a threat of tears. Lilia, of course, cannot see the baffling results of the simulation on the engineer's interface.

The Lady lurches over to the cryo pod, leaving the tilted chair swaying and falling down on the tiles with a bang. She mutters something along the lines of 'must build it', before her voice dissolves into foreign, ancient tongues and a shiver runs down Lilia's spine. Her voice so alien, her ways so enigmatic, she truly is a relic cracked open, pouring her forbidden knowledge into the world.

But she is also a human and Lilia feels her Lady's voice and shaking body teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown as she snaps open several compartments of the sarcophagus.

"You figured it out, that's wonderful!" This barely gets the engineer's attention, so she curls her fingers around the woman's shoulder, gently forcing her away from the compartments. The relic slumps down with her back to the sarcophagus.

"I need to build it. I know there's laser diodes in there, I only need to—"

"Please, my Lady, you need to breathe deeply. Why don't you explain it to me first?" Lilia squats in front of her, holding her wrists in her warm hands. Her Lady is trembling, her breath too shallow and fast.

"It's so simple, I could build it in an hour."

"Please, do me the favor," Lilia insists and brackets the woman's trembling knees between her own. Finally, her Lady exhales a long sigh and lets her head sink against the humming metal.

"Alright," she agrees and starts with a jittery voice. "So, you're aware of what the Holtzman effect is?"

"Ah, yes, I think so?" The maid hadn't really known the term before her Lady had started rambling about it. "Shields and heighliners?"

The one discovery that has shaped the entire human universe and kept it shackled since then, and the average commoner barely even knows its name. The relic doesn't hold it against Lilia. In a world where “eat or be eaten” takes on a literal meaning, the last thing to worry about is science. So, she wills her voice into calmness. If she's going to try and explain it, she at least wants to do it well.

"The Holtzman effect is responsible for the four major technologies that have made the world into what it is today. The first one — shields. No fast-moving object can pass through a shield, so guns like these?" She points towards her nightstand. "They've been useless for millennia. That's why you've resorted to close combat weapons."

"I was wondering why you went for a gun and not a blade." Lilia tilts her head. Close combat weapons are all that she's ever personally encountered. She knows that lasguns exist and that each Great House has an arsenal of atomic warheads, but every soldier has a sword on their hip, not a gun.

"Melee weapons seem so…" The engineer struggles to find a corresponding word in Galach. "Medieval to me. Archaic. Warfare on Earth was nothing like this."

"What was it like?" Lilia whispers in awe, noticing her Lady's shaking abate second by second.

"You could obliterate entire cities within the blink of an eye. A million different ways to set a home on fire and kill a population from a thousand miles away. It was terrible." Which is why what she has discovered is just as terrible.

The relic continues. "The other three technologies derived from the Holtzman effect are suspensors, glowglobes and space travel. You know why I was in that metal coffin here?" She taps against the sarcophagus. "Because a journey within our own solar system would take several years. You however can travel to the other side of the universe within the blink of an eye, through a quantum tunnel."

Lilia has never left the planet, but to imagine trade and travel without space-folding almost strikes her as ridiculous. All of humanity, reduced to just one, single planet. The cradle of mankind. The thought humbles her.

"And all four of these are based on one single effect?" Lilia considers herself an intelligent woman, but she doubts she can understand what took her Lady weeks to figure out.

"The essence of the Holtzman effect lies in how subatomic particles interact with each other."

"Subatomic?"

"Any type of matter is made of smaller building blocks. This metal for example is made of all kinds of molecules, which are made of atoms, and every single atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons. These are called subatomic particles. Protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of an atom, and you can imagine the electrons orbiting the nucleus almost like planets a sun."

The handmaid quite enjoys that mental image. It's like the smallest particles exist in a cosmos of their own. "So, the Holtzman effect has something to do with protons, electrons and neutrons?" Lilia imagines, if she could have gone to school like she wanted as a girl, it may have been something like this.

"Almost. It gets even smaller. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks, tiniest quantities that cannot be divided any further. I could go into more detail and talk about quantum physics," the relic pronounces a word that is just guttural enough for Lilia to imitate without all too many struggles. "But that won't be necessary for now."

Even though her Lady has stopped shaking, Lilia doesn't want to release her wrists yet. She is glued to the engineer's lips, soaking up what sounds like forbidden knowledge, like having a peek through God's microscope.

"What is a Holtzman shield made of? What do you think?" The engineer wraps her own fingers around Lilia's slender wrists and the maid sinks from squatting on her soles to sitting down on her bum, stretching out her legs on either side of her Lady's.

"I don't know, my Lady. Uh, something that repels?"

"Yes, that's right," she nods encouragingly. "There are several forces in the universe that attract and repel. The most well-known force of attraction is gravity. And electro-magnetism— Opposite poles attract, equal poles repel each other. But there are other forces that work on a subatomic level."

The engineer pauses without urging her and Lilia takes a moment to think.

"I'm guessing there's a subatomic force that keeps these, uh, nuclei together? The protons and neutrons? Because if not, everything would just be falling apart?"

It almost frightens her to imagine what her very own body must look like on its deepest level. A cluster of tiniest quantities, held together by forces as invisible as her Lady's interface.

"That's perfectly true!" The woman from Old Earth beams, fingers clenching around Lilia's wrists. "The force responsible for that is called the strong nuclear force. On an even smaller scale, the strong force holds together the quarks that make up the neutrons and protons, but you already said it just right."

Warmth fills out the handmaid's chest and she slowly begins to understand the feeling that had her Lady nearly panicking earlier. Her own heart drums against her ribs quick and hard.

"Okay, so now what about the Holtzman shield and how can you get past it?"

"For that, we also need to take the other subatomic force into consideration. It's called the weak force. Isn't that creative? Despite its name, the weak force is technically stronger than gravity, but it is only effective at very short distances and it can change one quark type into another. What do you think happens when such a change occurs?"

"Hmmm," the Harkonnen woman ponders. She doesn't want to disappoint her Lady who is putting so much effort into her explanation. "If quarks are the smallest quantities that make up anything, I suppose when something changes on the lowest level, this change translates to the highest level as well?"

"You're a natural, Lilia." Upon that, the maid blushes purple and finally releases the relic's wrist in a sudden burst of shyness. "Such a change can turn one element into another. It happens all the time, in every sun. And also in radioactive decay. This is important."

"How so?"

"Imagine if that radioactive decay was amplified. Imagine throwing a huge amount of energy at a substance that is already sporadically decaying. Imagine a whole chain reaction of it. This is what triggers a nuclear explosion, the kind that obliterates an entire city."

Lilia's eyes grow wide with understanding. "So, that's why, when you shoot a lasgun at a Holtzman shield, it triggers a nuclear explosion?"

"That's right. I believe shields are made up of nuclei and rely on both the strong and the weak force to repel incoming objects on a subatomic level."

"All of that was fascinating, but how does it help us get past the shield?" Suddenly it's us, not you. Lilia has clutched the fabric of the relic's trousers over the knees in both of her fists. What the engineer's poor Feyd-Rautha currently lacks in fascination, Lilia makes up for a hundredfold.

"Oh, that was just the prelude." The engineer's lips twist into an almost mischievous little grin. "It's just what I need to take into consideration, so I don't accidentally blow up the shield and the city instead of passing through it."

"Just the prelude? My Lady, I think I'll go insane if you don't get to the point!"

The relic bursts out laughing. "We're almost done, I promise! Imagine you're riding in a groundcar and next to you drives another one with the exact same speed. When you look at it, it seems like you're both standing still, because the relative speed between both cars is zero." Lilia nods and the engineer smiles knowingly. "Now imagine you're a bullet and you want to pass through a Holtzman shield which only allows slow-moving objects to pass."

"Then I'd need the shield particles to move in the same direction as I do, only a tad slower, so that my relative speed is like that of a slow blade."

"Congratulations, you've just figured out how to trick a Holtzman shield."

"That is absolutely genius, my Lady."

"No, it's actually so simple." The woman shakes her head. "The difficult part is how to put the shield particles into motion, but I've figured something out." She summons the pixelated particles that are only for herself to see once more, nuclei that make up a Holtzman shield, accelerated by a burst of calibrated laser light, and how they give way to a bullet that cuts through them like a harpoon through water.

"Now I only need to build a proper gun," the engineer concludes.

Lilia has never cared much about the rest of the universe, and the universe has never cared much about her. Why would she care if her Lady, who has always been good to her, sets everything on fire?

When the door to Feyd-Rautha's personal bath chamber rushes open, he knows it can only be his darling, because the scanner only recognizes her handprint when he is inside.

The na-Baron is submerged to the jaw in oily-black liquid to soothe his bruises, a diluted version, heavily scented with the essence of exotic fruit and spices. He cannot breathe the unadulterated variant without gnawing memories of horror.

Her hectic footfalls cause him to spin around in the tub with worry, but before he can even utter a greeting, he finds his woman sagging down on her knees in front of him and his face captured in her palms.

"I've found a way!" She sobs.

"You've found a way?"

Tears spill down her cheeks as she nods, bringing her forehead against his. She's found a way. To kill the Baron and destroy the universe.

She is so elated, her joy could make a star rotate, it could set the world on fire. She kisses Feyd hard on the lips, melting against the wet expanse of his chest when he embraces her in his strong arms. His muscles break into tremors just like hers had an hour ago.

All of her doubts have flown away like comets in the sky of a fiery dawn.

"Feyd-Rautha, would you be my husband?"

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

— Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

A/N: Pretty much none of the physical concepts mentioned are made up. I've tried to use real physics to offer explanations for Frank Herbert's fantastical inventions that make the Dune universe so unique.

I'm not even close to the level of genius that I admire in my favorite sci-fi authors, but all of this was so insanely much fun to come up with. I have more ramblings about space travel, suspenders and glowglobes, but they weren't really necessary for this chapter. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I'm very proud ❤️

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