Chapter 10

“It is not wise to go against my desires. You should not deny me the least thing.” - Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV

Godwyn Alexin’s accusation hung in the chamber like a thrown gauntlet: “House Varmoth has betrayed the trust placed in them on Arrakis… I move that House Varmoth’s spice mining rights be revoked immediately.” The Directorship’s white-and-black-ball ritual would be decisive. President Aru called a recess, and the members of House Varmoth held their breath.

They went into the recess like men and women stepping out of sunlight into darkness. Count Lucar moved with a charm that had become a blade: easy smile, calculating step. He sought Lord Morgan, the man who had promised a daughter’s hand and thus promised Varmoth a thread of power at Court. Called into a private corner, Morgan dropped a weight into Lucar’s lap that changed the shape of everything he thought he owned: Count Leopold Varmoth—Lucar’s father—was, Morgan whispered, a bastard son of Emperor Shaddam. The Emperor’s blood ran in Varmoth’s veins. By that lineage, Lucar’s name could wield a legitimate challenge to the Imperial throne.

Lucar’s face appeared very human, with both rage and relief, and the sudden vertigo of entitlement. A seed of destiny had been thrust into his trembling hand. He left Morgan not merely a man pleading for votes but a claimant with a newly revealed inheritance—an argument to be used as leverage, a scandal to be leaked if useful. He returned to the chamber where President Aru called the meeting to order and invited Count Lucar to plead his case.

Count Lucar’s response was a furnace of rhetoric. He accused the Harkonnens of setting traps, of envy, of cruelty that had always sought to swallow Varmoth whole. The Count’s voice carried: his father had died on Giedi Prime and his blood spilt at the hands of the Harkonnens; the spice mining contract had been a test and House Varmoth would not fail. The chamber listened, ledger-minded, and then the legal machinery engaged.

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen answered with the corrosion of accusation—his list of crimes against Varmoth was long, barbed, and theatrical: “My lords, ladies, and honoured stewards of the Directorship of CHOAM, I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, feel obliged to present the case that House Varmoth must forfeit the generous spice mining rights granted to them on Arrakis. Ever since House Varmoth was afforded the gift of a significant spice mining contract in the Cielago Depression on Arrakis, they have been conspiring to disrupt House Harkonnen’s control of Arrakis and more worryingly disrupt the economy of Arrakis. I urge patience whilst I detail a long list of charges: ”House Varmoth deliberately created civil unrest in Arrakeen and turned the people against the city’s appointed administrators, House Seraut, and then refused to assist in resolving the water shortage that followed, leaving citizens to die of thirst. This was not mere incompetence; it was active destabilisation of my steward’s authority and of the planet’s fragile social order.

“When invited as an honoured guest to Giedi Prime, House Varmoth, in league with known subversive dissidents, planted an incendiary device intended to threaten my life.

“In addition, Count Lucar of House Varmoth personally slaughtered my kin, Vassily Harkonnen, over some minor insult.

“House Varmoth illicitly transported a citizen of Giedi Prime and took her to Arrakis against all lawful procedure and without the sanction of the proper authorities.

“In Arrakis, House Varmoth incited a riot and disrupted the lawful collection of water fai, demonstrating a systematic campaign to humiliate and bankrupt House Harkonnen.

“In addition, House Varmoth failed to pay their own water fai; worse, they paid in urine—an act of obscene contempt for both the necessity of water and the dignity of contractual obligation.

“House Varmoth has allied with bandits who are hijacking Harkonnen water carryalls, thereby enabling the very theft and murder that threaten Arrakis’s survival.

“I have heard reliable rumours—rumours I present for the Directorship to consider—that House Varmoth has made allies of Fremen elements, those same fanatics who have, for decades, disrupted spice production. To fraternise with those who use the desert as a weapon against organised harvests is to place profit above planetary stability.

“And finally, and perhaps, most crucially to this Vote of No Confidence: House Varmoth shows a catastrophic lack of skill in spice mining. Their incompetence has cost the lives of spice harvester crews and they have lost valuable machines to the sand. In fact, their Count was nearly devoured by a maker-worm himself, whilst visiting a harvester—a spectacle of reckless mismanagement and disregard for the primitive dangers of Arrakis.

“My lords, the sum of these actions is clear: House Varmoth’s presence on Arrakis is corrosive, dangerous, and intolerable. They have interfered with my appointed stewards; they have conspired with rebels and criminals; they have shown contempt for the most sacred of Arrakis’s commodities—water—and treated its exchange as an instrument of insult; and they have proved themselves unable to conduct the spice operations entrusted to them without bleeding men and machines into the desert.”

Baron Harkoonen gestured towards CHOAM Director Aru: “I therefore support House Alexin’s request to ask this Directorship to withdraw House Varmoth’s spice mining rights, to strip them of contract and charter on Arrakis, and to reassign those rights to a house capable of honouring the duties demanded by the desert.”

Director Aru responded: “I thank you both for the evidence presented. The Directorate will now vote on the motion of no confidence in House Varmoth and the withdrawal of their spice mining rights.”

The white and black balls were cast in cloth like ecclesiastical bones. President Aru tallied. The numbers came back 6–5 in favour of House Varmoth—the vote of no confidence failed. The chamber exhaled, then closed. The victory was thin as silk. It carried the scent of borrowed promises and purchased debts; it carried also the knowledge that winning a vote is not the same as survival for House Varmoth.

When they left the chamber, Zetan Ben Zeev, House Varmoth’s Envoy on Kaitain, touched Lucar’s sleeve with a secret on her breath: Alexzander Harkonnen had been found dead, likely poisoned. The Court whispers tightened into a knot. The Emperor had also requested an audience.

The audience hall was a theatre of power made manifest. From the high, black-marbled floor rose concentric terraces like the ribs of a vaulted ocean; light, diffused through facets of opal and polished glass, spilled in cold bands across the room. The hall’s pillars were columns of carved stone and metallic inlays, each one a chronicle of conquered contracts and treaty lines. Steps led up to the throne—an elevated dais wrapped in a cascade of cloth and metals—so that the Emperor could show himself as both summit and sentinel. Behind him, a tapestry of woven spice-gold and imperial purple told of dynasties in stylized knots: Corrino lions, banners of compliant houses, sigils braided into an imperial map.

Shaddam sat upon the throne as a man who understood theatre and necessity—the weight of his robe less a garment than a gravity. He was surrounded by courtiers, by Fenring’s quiet movement as if the Count were a shadow with a smile. The Emperor’s voice, when it came, had the soft cruelty of a man who had learned to measure outrage; he congratulated House Varmoth on their work in the Cielago Depression and said the grant had been his choice, a test for an up-and-coming House. Lucar, standing in the innate awkwardness of those who suddenly imagine crowns, thanked him and pressed his question: did the Emperor suspect Harkonnen involvement in Leopold’s death?

Shaddam’s face did not change in the lines that mattered. He spoke of this being a very serious accusation and that the Harkonnens were a necessary, odious pillar of the Imperium—stalwart keepers of Arrakis, efficient in their brutality—and he would not, without evidence, disgrace a House that had long been useful. He urged rivalry as a seasoning that stirred the polity. When Lucar begged for Imperial assistance, hinting at the newly found truth that he was the Emperor’s heir, Lucar asked for protection, for open sanction against the Harkonnen threat that darkened their days. The Emperor’s expression sharpened into a blade of courtly disdain. “You have antagonised a great House and now you come grovelling?” he said, his words turning the plea into humiliation. “Go and sort out your own problems and mine not the throne’s charity.” The audience ended like a sudden thunderclap.

Lucar left the throne room with the taste of salt in his mouth. He had known that Imperial sympathy is a currency rarely spent; he had hoped for a different economy. Instead, the Emperor’s refusal was a pivot toward action: the House must rely on its own arms, its own devices, and its own alliance web.

Back on Arrakis, the rites of alliance were still practicalities. Lucar married Angelika Morgan in a ceremony that seemed to answer the universe’s hunger for spectacle with something even brighter. The wedding was an intersection of silk and lightning: guests in moth-thread and opera finery, the air heavy with incense that tasted faintly of spice. In the centre of the courtyard, a fountain had been erected—an engineered spectacle where water did not merely fall but struck an electrical ballet. Spouts rose in a jagged, lightning-shaped column; the water was caught in fields of charged glass so that each droplet hummed with a contained storm. Light struck the surface and scattered in shards like lightning. Vows were exchanged under the symbol of a chrysalis arch—the Bastial’s carved silhouette—and when the ceremony ended, Lucar and Angelika leapt onto the giant moth. Wings beating, they rose above the revelry and, in a moment that would be carried as an image of hope and hubris, they rode the moth into the early red sky of Arrakis, disappearing like the promise of dawn.

Hope, however, is brittle in a world where survival is engineered by scarcity. Days later, Arrakeen’s waterworks began to stutter and fail. Rations shrank, and the people muttered prayers that tasted of desperation. The House Varmoth guard answered. Evidence of sabotage was not easily cast aside when pipes leaked and the thirsty cough, breathing in the sand-scarred air of Arrakis.

Dali and Lavro were the first to find catastrophe at a water treatment plant: valves sheared, pumps thrown off their bearings, a torrent where there should have been a gentle flow. Amid the chaos, a black-clad figure slipped like a shadow between leaking pipes. House guards boxed him in, and Dali tackled him. The saboteur bit down on a concerted, false tooth and died by his own quick poison as if obedience were a religion. Dali, hard-eyed and practical, searched the body and found a knife with the Harkonnen sigil—a signature of hate and a message left like a smear.

Lavro used Mentat discipline to quiet the panic: he traced valves with a methodical mind, found the feeders that could be sealed, and slowed the waste with surgical precision. This water plant’s bleeding was staunched.

Lucar and Kleya rode toward a second water treatment plant on the back of a giant moth, House elite soldiers fanning out like an immediate garrison. The scene was similar: mechanical damage and the unfamiliar smell of moisture in the air. Lucar, blunt in his questioning, pressed the foreman until names loosened. A figure ran—quick by habit—and the soldiers chased. They captured him. He prepared to bite down and end himself like a perfected sacrament of silence; however, Kleya used The Voice and the man stilled, mouth open, hands frozen. Lucar drew a blade and gouged the small poison tooth from the man’s gums. The man would not speak—he spat blood. The soldiers gagged him and left him bound for questioning. His sigil matched the other.

Lavro and Dali went to the third plant. It, too, had been sabotaged; there were the same patterns of timing, the same destruction. No suspect remained to be taken there, but the pattern was enough: the attacks were coordinated and meant to terrorise a city into distraction and submission.

Hassan scoured supply depots for diversionary acts but found nothing overt at the food stores. He organised muster points and ferrying of troops. He retreated to the Varmoth residency with a knot of fear in his throat when rumours spoke of the Harkonnens in the spaceport.

Then the assault began.

The first explosion was a punctuation mark that drove the day into war. A defence battery burst into flame; the sound was the collapse of the order of Arrakeen. Lavro, in an ornithopter, flew to the shield wall and saw Harkonnen craft descending into guided strikes. At the spaceport, an attack ornithopter landed with the arrogance and disgorged men with Harkonnen sigils. Dali, with a handful of soldiers, met them in ground combat; the spaceport became a place of blades and smoke, a place where courage and blood were spent to buy seconds.

At the shield wall, the Harkonnens bore down like a rusted machine, lasguns cutting stone, leaving an unguarded entrance to the city.

Hassan saw a man setting explosives near the residency shield generator—an agent of sabotage who clumsily set himself alight— his roasting figure a living warning. Hassan’s troops arrived too late to stop his immolation.

Kleya watched the sky and saw the arc of a Harkonnen ornithopter and within rode Piter de Vries. She ordered her house soldiers to fire. The Harkonnen craft erupted, a brilliant combustion of fuel and malice, and Piter, with his calculating face, was gone—burned into a small meteor of cruelty. The fall of Piter de Vries was a small catastrophe for the Harkonnens; but their engine kept spinning. Piter’s death did not end the plan; it only removed one of the minds behind it. Baron Harkonnen would later simply replace Piter with a ghola, a robust imitation of his former self.

Dali’s ground work at the spaceport was savage and close: men met in iron-easy blood, and Dali tasted the red of enemy and friend alike. He fought with the lawless grace of a smuggler who had learned hand-to-hand killing in alleys and cargo holds. The port filled with smoke, and the world narrowed to the business of surviving.

Above the chaos, Lucar rode his giant moth like a king with a sword in his wings. He suddenly saw Glossu “The Beast” Rabban on the ground—brute, rage, a living engine of hate—and his chest filled with a rage. Rabban bore Harkonnen strength, and when Lucar dove, the city below blurred. Rabban aimed his lasgun to cut the head off the Moth. He shot, and Lucar’s moth fell from the sky to the ground. Lucar, miraculously unhurt by the initial strike, unsheathed a kindjal and charged into a duel with Rabban that would become legend.

Their clash became the battle’s centrepiece: a duel small against the roar, intimate amid artillery. Lucar moved with the finesse of one who had charmed and courted survival: step, blade, riposte—the gentle art of a house accustomed to performances. Rabban struck like a hammer, like a man who had learned only to batter. They exchanged blows that rung against the lines of sword and flesh. Lucar found openings—he drove his blade under a pauldron and drew blood—but Rabban’s weight and hate carried force beyond finesse. For every elegant cut, Rabban returned a savage lash.

The duel continued with both men calling on hidden reserves and primal energy. Lucar’s blows began to have purpose beyond victory: he aimed to mortally wound the beast that threatened his House, to remove a menace and win a final theatre for honour. Rabban, smelling triumph and desire to hurt, grinned the way the violent grin of a predatory animal does.

Rabban seized a moment when Lucar’s defence opened—an impulsive answer to a feint—and he drove his long, cruel blade through the Count’s chest. The world narrowed in Lucar’s mouth to the metallic taste of blood. He had no time for regret, only a bright, distant awareness that the House’s future might not achieve the destiny he had promised. His hand, still clasped on the hilt, slipped with slow grace, the kindjal falling from his fingers. The sky darkened and then momentarily brightened with a flash of lightning marking the end of House Varmoth as Lucar fell to the ground.

Lucar’s men saw a leader whose charm had been answered in brutality; his friends saw the end of a thread that had been spun into a Count’s promise. Rabban roared; the Harkonnen line surged. House Varmoth’s defence, keyed to the will of a man, found that its pattern of command had been cut. Without Lucar’s voice, the House’s shape was less penetrative, less organised, and, though Kleya and others tried to bind the bleeding wound, the momentum tipped.

The Harkonnens pressed. With Lucar gone, their orders became cruel and clear: destroy. House Varmoth, though brave and measured, could not find a breath of unbroken will in the teeth of the Harkonnen tide. The city fell to the strategy of oppression: harried defenders, cut supply lines, controlled wells. In a night of force and insinuation, the Harkonnens drove Varmoth from Arrakis.

They left the planet like a moth with a broken wing. The CHOAM contract became meaningless under post-battle pressures and the leverage of an enemy that had razor teeth and a willingness to use them. Where Varmoth had collected friends and allies, now backs were turned.

Back on Thundäruk, the cliffs and the Chrysalis Bastials received the returning House: luminous domes that had sheltered their cities blinked like stunned eyes, lightning still hammered the sky, and the wind that had once been a ritual now carried the news of shame. House Varmoth returned, but they did not return as conquerors. They returned as a House that had learned the cost of flirting with power. The galaxy’s ledger recorded them now as a House Major, had failed in their Arrakian endeavours, their revenues once again shrinking to what they had once known.

Lucar’s body was given to funeral rites measured and moth-silent. The marriage to Angelika—which for a brief, glittering moment had promised elevation—became a legend shadowed by the Count’s fall. Though Angelika bore a son to continue the Varmoth lineage, she held the image of her fallen hero, remembering the moment two lovers flew on a moth; the moon remaining, a flash of beauty that grief could not entirely erase.

Lady Kleya assumed the mantle of leader of House Varmoth until the young heir was old enough. She had been consort, and she assumed leadership with the quiet whisper of inevitability. Her Bene Gesserit training made her the right steward for a House that must now preserve what it could. With a new, sharper sense of duty, she remained patient, gathering intelligence from her House Morgan allies. Under Kleya, Varmoth’s enterprises were tempered—no grand ambitions for imperial crowns, only the work of rebuilding, of manufacturing the Bastials, of tending to the ritual thunder that called their people together.

Lundrak continued his own dark liturgies—secrets and eliminations, bargains and chess-moves—while Lavro returned to the laboratories, to the technological designs that had first given them a chance. Dali went back to the quieter, more profitable errands of the smuggler’s life; Hassan took his place at Kleya’s side as loyal servant and watchful spy. The House had been severed of its leading figure, and the survivors were left to stitch meaning into the scar.

In the end, House Varmoth’s fall read like a parable the Imperium would cite: aspiration can be welded to hubris; alliances are fragile threads; the desert accepts no easy triumph. The Varmoth sigil—moth-and-lightning—remained a proud, melancholy icon in their bastials. They had flown high and fallen hard. They had tasted the Emperor’s favour and felt his denial. They had learned that votes can be won and wars lost; that a thin majority in ivory chambers is a poor substitute for the discipline of arms and the steadiness of armoured diplomacy. They returned to Thundäruk with fewer allies, a broken claim, and a new leader who would govern with restraint.

Lady Kleya, perched above steaming maps and reports, looked out over her chrysalis city as a storm gathered on the edge of the world. She felt the chill of the future like a moth’s wing against her skin: fragile, delicate, but capable of holding light.

Kleya thought of an ancient wisdom to focus her mind: “It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.”

House Varmoth would live. The moth’s wings beat on.