C'tair Pilru: rebel of occupied Ix

C'tair Pilru (10136 AG to 10175 AG) was an Ixian who was instrumental in restoring House Vernius as the rulers of Ix. Born into privilege as the son of the planet's ambassador to Kaitain and a Spacing Guild banker, he grew up in the Grand Palais of Vernii beside his identical twin, the future Guild Navigator D'murr Pilru. Where his brother passed the Guild's final test and vanished into the Navigator hierarchy, C'tair failed and remained behind. When the Bene Tleilax conquered Ix and renamed it Xuttah, he disappeared into the underworld of his occupied homeworld, posing as an ordinary workman by day and building an underground resistance in the shadows. His years of sabotage, and his support on the ground when Prince Rhombur Vernius launched his counterattack, helped return the planet to its rightful rulers.

A son of the Grand Palais#

C'tair was the son of Cammar Pilru, Ix's ambassador to Kaitain, and S'tina Pilru, a Spacing Guild banker. While his father attended to diplomatic duties with the Emperor and a thousand functionaries on the Imperial capital, C'tair and his identical twin D'murr lived with their mother in one of the wings of the Grand Palais of Vernii, the great subterranean city of Ix. The brothers were mentored by the inventor Davee Rogo, who taught them how to keep an open mind.

As they grew, the twins groomed and prepared themselves to become Navigators. Both enjoyed flirting with Kailea Vernius, the daughter of the ruling house, who played the twins against each other, and the brothers carried on a mock rivalry for her affections.

The Guild test#

When the twins were seventeen, their mother brought them into the Guild Embassy Building to take the final rigorous test for acceptance into the Guild. Each was sprayed with spice. D'murr opened his mind, feeling the melange press into his every pore and cell, and envisioned himself as a revered Navigator expanding his awareness to the farthest reaches of the Imperium.

C'tair could not open his mind. He failed the test, was taken out of the building, and was told that he would never see his twin again. The Guild kept its word: D'murr was absorbed into the Navigator hierarchy and cut off from his family, while C'tair remained on Ix, an ordinary man in a city that would soon cease to belong to its own people.

The occupation of Ix#

When the Tleilaxu conquered Ix and renamed the planet Xuttah, C'tair Pilru went into hiding rather than submit. He passed his days posing as an everyday workman, invisible among the labourers of the occupied city. Guided by a "vision" of his old mentor Davee Rogo, he began to collect technological remnants and to construct a device from the scavenged parts. In time he joined forces with Miral Alchem, a woman with a Bene Gesserit background who had survived the takeover, and together they started an underground resistance on the planet.

After a few years in hiding, C'tair stole a crude interstellar communicating device and improved it until it could carry his words across space. With it he transmitted messages to D'murr, begging his brother for help to free captured Ix. D'murr, whose body and mind had already adapted into those of a steersman, promised to do what he could for the people of Ix, but the Navigator had come to feel that the problems of humankind were beneath his concerns. The rebellion would have to be won on the ground.

Miral Alchem and the war of sabotage#

Fighting side by side against the occupation, C'tair and Miral Alchem came to love one another. Their campaign gained a sharper edge when the first shipment of explosive wafers arrived from Prince Rhombur Vernius, the heir of the deposed house, then living in exile on Caladan. Shortly after the shipment arrived, C'tair and Miral engineered a coordinated attack on four different sites of the Tleilaxu infrastructure in Vernii City. The strike succeeded, but at a price C'tair would not learn for years: he never saw Miral again after that attack. She had been captured by the Tleilaxu and changed into an axlotl tank, and her body was made to produce the flawed imitation spice of Master Hidar Fen Ajidica's Project Amal.

C'tair fought on alone until the Sisterhood sent him an unexpected ally. Mother Superior Harishka had dispatched the Bene Gesserit commando Cristane to Ix to investigate the origins of Project Amal, warning her that the order had already lost a spy there, Miral Alchem, who had reported the disappearances of Ixian women taken by the Tleilaxu Masters. Cristane travelled disguised as a man, since Tleilaxu women were unknown, and as soon as she reached Vernii she was discovered by C'tair, a Vernius loyalist who took her to his headquarters. For weeks the two worked as saboteurs in the city, questioning and killing Tleilaxu servants, and they developed a sincere friendship. They even shared a kiss, but C'tair was continually reminded of the moments he had shared with Miral, his lover and partner.

Obeying the orders of the Sisterhood, Cristane resolved to enter the Tleilaxu laboratory to search for Miral and the secrets of Amal. C'tair disguised her as a Tleilaxu servant for the infiltration. Inside, Cristane found that Miral had been turned into an axlotl tank along with many other women, and she placed an explosive disc on Miral's tank before she was run down by Sardaukar guards. Captured and unmasked, Cristane was herself turned into an axlotl tank in Miral's place.

The liberation of Ix#

The reconquest came at last when Prince Rhombur, having overcome his complacency, planned a counterattack alongside Duke Leto Atreides and Duncan Idaho. Supported by House Atreides and by C'tair Pilru on Ix itself, Rhombur was able to retake the planet in the Second Battle of Ix. During the fighting, Count Hasimir Fenring provoked a fire that burned a great part of the Tleilaxu laboratory, destroying the evidence of Project Amal that implicated House Corrino, and with it the bodies of several axlotl tanks, Cristane among them.

At the reconquest, C'tair discovered that his two Bene Gesserit partners had been used for the synthetic melange project. The revelation provoked the fury of Prince Rhombur against House Corrino, whom he now understood had hunted his family in order to break the Guild's control of spice and reorder the Imperium to Corrino advantage.

C'tair died in 10175 AG, the year Ix was freed. His twin died the same year: D'murr, poisoned by the false spice ajidimal while ferrying the Atreides liberation army, brought his heighliner home to the Guild headquarters at Junction before his death. The brothers who had been separated at seventeen, one given to the Guild and one to the resistance, ended their lives in the same season, each having spent himself in the restoration of House Vernius to the rule of Ix.