Emeline: the zealot of Wallach IX

Sister Emeline was an acolyte of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood on Wallach IX during the reign of Emperor Javicco Corrino. Descended from a long line of martyrs, she carried a fervent religion into her training that set her apart from her fellow students. While the other acolytes learned the cold disciplines of the Truthsayer under Valya and Tula Harkonnen, Emeline measured the school against the faith of her ancestors, and when death and shared nightmares broke over Wallach IX she went looking for answers in the order's buried past. What she found there, the erased tradition of the Butlerian sisters, made her the first of the acolytes to follow Dorotea when the dead Reverend Mother walked back into the school wearing Lila's body.

An acolyte of the Sisterhood#

Emeline trained on Wallach IX to become a Truthsayer, one of a small cohort of acolytes schooled by Valya and Tula Harkonnen in the arts of reading truth and falsehood in the human body. In one exercise the students were shown a preserved brain and asked to judge what manner of man it had belonged to. Emeline and Theodosia concluded he must have been a criminal or a sociopath, while Jen alone answered correctly that the man had been a survivor. Tula turned their error into a lesson on the small signs a Truthsayer must learn to detect. In a later exercise the acolytes were set before prisoners and made to judge whether each was telling the truth. Emeline listened to hers and named her a liar.

Her progress did not go unremarked by the school's leadership. When Princess Ynez Corrino was to join the Sisterhood and train for ten years, Tula suggested pairing her with Emeline, who was doing well and could help the princess find her footing. Valya opposed the match, and the two Harkonnen sisters were still debating a suitable companion when other events overtook the question. The Imperial presence reached the school ahead of the princess herself: Emeline was with Theodosia and the acolyte Farouz when Imperial Guards entered unannounced, startling them, sent to arrange accommodations for Ynez.

The creed of the martyrs#

What distinguished Emeline from her fellow students was not talent but faith. Her family's history was written in blood at the Battle of Corrin. After the war her ancestors had been on the ground there, and knowing they would not survive, they created enough of a distraction to buy time for the fleets to come in. From that inheritance Emeline drew a settled creed: human life was sacred, and the giving of it was therefore the most honorable act a person could perform.

She preached that creed when death came to the school. As word spread that Kasha, the Emperor's Truthsayer, had died, Emeline told the other acolytes that all the founding Sisters had been willing to die to follow in Raquella's footsteps, though Theodosia read the death differently, calling it assassination and warning the others to watch their backs.

The creed found its most consequential hearer in Lila. When the young acolyte was weighing whether to take poison and pass through the Agony, reaching into Other Memory to speak with Raquella herself, she came to Emeline and asked whether she had meant what she said about sacrificing herself as a martyr. Emeline answered with her family's story from Corrin and told her that being a martyr was honorable. Lila went through with it. Emeline watched with the others as the girl reached Raquella, then Dorotea, and then slumped to the table, unresponsive. When Lila did not wake, the Truthsayer Avila brought the acolytes in to see her and told them that sacrifices were required for the mission of the Sisterhood, and that Lila was one of many. Emeline was at peace with the death; Lila's wisdom, she held, lived on. The acolytes took turns saying goodbye.

Nightmares and the reckoning#

The peace did not last the night. Emeline had a nightmare and left her bed still sleeping, and Jen found her just before she drew a blade across her own throat. Every acolyte except Jen was suffering the same dreams, and Jen and Emeline reported what had happened to Tula. In the telling, Emeline began turning her Truthsense on Tula herself, probing the teacher's answers, until Jen snapped her out of it and the acolytes returned to their studies.

Tula then gathered the acolytes and had all of them except Jen take spice and draw what they had seen in their nightmares. The drawings began differently for each of them and then converged, every hand producing the same images. The acolytes did not wake when Tula called to them, breaking out of the trance on their own only minutes later. Emeline looked down at what she had drawn and gave the vision its meaning in the language of her faith: God was watching them, and judging them, and the reckoning was here.

From that day she went to the old texts. While the other acolytes continued their training, working with Avila on the redistribution of heat energy, a lesson interrupted when Jen demanded to know what protection any of it offered against the nightmares plaguing them, Emeline read.

The Butlerian sisters restored#

Her reading led her to a buried lineage. Emeline gathered her sisters and told them they needed to band together, and it was into that meeting that Lila walked, alive and on her feet. The shock gave way to a stranger recognition: it was not Lila at all, but her grandmother Dorotea, the Reverend Mother who had died in the school's founding years, now occupying the girl's body. Emeline told her she had been reading about all the Sisters she had asked to speak to. They were the Butlerian sisters, heirs within the order of the war against the thinking machines that had ended at Corrin, and they had disbanded after Dorotea's suicide. Emeline was working to revive their tradition.

Dorotea's answer overturned the school's official history. It had not been suicide. Valya Harkonnen had erased all the sisters who were loyal to Dorotea and had lied to the acolytes about the history of the school. She led them to the mass grave that held the skeletons of those sisters, murdered by Valya, and promised to return the order to the righteous path. To begin, she brought them to the storeroom and destroyed Anirul, the thinking machine the school had kept hidden there, the same machine that housed the breeding index and had been used to keep Lila's body alive. For Emeline, the zealot raised on martyrs' graves, the Sisterhood's secret dead and its secret machine were a single revelation, and the reckoning she had read in the spice drawings had a name.