Edric

Edric was a third-stage Spacing Guild Navigator, ambassador, and conspirator in the failed plot to assassinate the Emperor Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, and topple his newly risen Atreides Empire. His own prescience served to shield the conspiracy from the Emperor's foresight, since oracles had difficulty perceiving one another in the timescape.

The conspiracy against Muad'Dib#

In light of the Emperor's galactic jihad and his twelve-year stranglehold on the Spacing Guild's coveted spice market, Edric allied himself with an elaborate plot against the monarch. His fellow conspirators were the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer Scytale, Paul's embittered wife the Princess Irulan Corrino, and a number of Fremen defectors headed by the Qizarate high priest Korba.

Edric's particular value lay in his prescience, which shielded the conspiracy from the Emperor's foresight, since oracles had difficulty seeing one another in the timescape. He was also tasked with traveling to Arrakis as Guild Ambassador to deliver the Tleilaxu's mentat-ghola of Duncan Idaho as a gift to the young Emperor, a means to destabilize Paul and eventually kill him once the secret trigger phrase planted in the ghola Hayt was spoken. Irulan, meanwhile, was tasked with spiking the meals of Chani with contraceptives to prevent Paul from fathering heirs free of Corrino blood, treachery that drove the Fremen concubine to consume large quantities of melange to restore her fertility at the cost of her health.

Collapse and execution#

The plot was discovered and revealed to Paul by his faithful Fremen follower Otheym, who introduced him to the prescient dwarf Bijaz, a human distrans containing the names of every conspirator. After Paul was blinded by a stone burner, he traveled to Sietch Tabr to oversee Chani's childbirth, which proved fatal. Triggered by the phrase that signaled her loss, Hayt attempted to assassinate Paul but willed himself against it, causing his Duncan Idaho memories to resurface completely. Scytale, wearing the visage of Otheym's daughter Lichna, offered Paul a restored ghola of his dead lover at the cost of his Imperial throne and CHOAM holdings, but Paul refused and killed the Face Dancer. Duncan then killed Bijaz after the dwarf revealed himself as a Tleilaxu Master and repeated the same offer.

With the conspiracy in ruin and Paul exiling himself into the deep desert like the blind Fremen before him, Stilgar executed the surviving traitors: Korba the Panegyrist, Reverend Mother Mohiam, and Edric. Irulan Corrino alone was spared, in light of Paul's mercy and her own grief over losing him, as she renounced her Sisterhood and vowed to protect Chani's newborn twins as her own.

Later eras#

Edric's lineage survived for many centuries, even after the Famine Times and the Scattering. The Jewish Rabbi who later gave sanctuary to the fugitive Reverend Mother Lucilla informed her that the Honored Matres had under their command a Navigator who was "one of the Edrics," a phrase suggesting a breeding plan or Edric-based ghola copies carried far into the future.