Evgeny Harkonnen: patriarch of a disgraced House

Evgeny Harkonnen was an elder of House Harkonnen and the uncle of Griffin, Valya and Tula Harkonnen, a man who passed nearly the whole of his long life under the weight of his family's disgrace. He belonged to the generations of Harkonnens who lived far from power, exiled to an isolated world while the feud with House Atreides festered unresolved, and he watched that feud take his nephew Griffin and drive his nieces into the Sisterhood. In old age he presided over what remained of the family alongside his grand-nephew, Baron Harrow Harkonnen, and he met his end in the reign of Emperor Javicco Corrino, not by illness alone but by the deliberate hand of the niece he had never trusted.

A family in exile#

Evgeny lived with his family on an isolated planet, driven there by the disgrace that had attached itself to the Harkonnen name. The House that had once counted itself among the powers of the Imperium had been reduced to obscurity, and its members endured the kind of poverty of standing that no wealth could remedy: exclusion from influence, from honor, and from the company of the Great Houses.

Within that exile, two responses to the family's condition took shape in the younger generation. Evgeny's nephew Griffin Harkonnen committed himself to the slow work of improving the family's status, laboring patiently within what channels remained open to a disgraced House. His niece Valya had no patience for slowness. She saw the source of their ruin in Vorian Atreides, the man whose lies about their family had cast them down, and she pressed Griffin to find Vorian and force him to take those lies back, believing that a retraction would restore the standing that generations of quiet effort had failed to recover.

The cost of Valya's ambition#

Griffin did as his sister urged. He went to find Vorian Atreides, and he ended up dead.

The family laid the blame for his death where they believed it belonged, on Valya, whose impatience had sent him to it. The wound did not close; it deepened. Valya persuaded her sister Tula to kill several members of the Atreides family in retaliation, and the killings angered the family further. Where Valya saw vengeance and the settling of an ancient score, Evgeny and the rest of the household saw only more ruin gathered onto a House that had already lost too much.

Valya left them. She committed herself to the Sisterhood and did not come home. For Evgeny the estrangement lasted the better part of his remaining life, and the years turned him bitter while his grand-nephew Harrow, a Baron of the diminished House, grew up hungry to restore its former glory.

The return of Valya#

Years later Valya returned to the family home for the first time since she had left to join the Sisterhood, arriving with the Sister Theodosia at her side after the pair had been escorted out of the imperial palace. Evgeny greeted the sight of her with the words of a man confronting something he had written off long before: he said he never thought he would live to see her return.

Age had not softened his judgment of her. Evgeny distrusted Valya and told Harrow plainly not to trust her either. Harrow did not listen. Drawn by his aunt's promise to restore the family name, he joined the High Council with Valya as his Truthsayer and stood before the Landsraad to demand an investigation of the Bashar Desmond Hart for the murder of Pruwet Richese. The petition collapsed in spectacular fashion, and when Harrow and Valya came home defeated, Evgeny offered no comfort. He taunted Valya over the failure and reminded Harrow that he had said all along that she was only ever out to help herself.

Death at the family home#

The quarrel between uncle and niece did not stop at the failed petition. Evgeny and Valya argued over the decisions she had made all those years before, the choices that had cost Griffin his life, set Tula to killing, and led Valya to abandon her family for the Sisterhood. In the middle of the argument Evgeny began to struggle to breathe.

His treatment was within reach, but not his own. Valya picked it up and kept it away from him, holding it out of his reach while he fought for air, until he fell to the floor and died. The household record placed his death on Salusa Secundus, in the home where the remnant of the family lived.

Theodosia witnessed the argument and the killing. Afterward she took on the form of the dead Griffin, a transformation that cost her pain, and told Valya in his shape that she had done the right thing, the reassurance Valya wanted. Harrow attended his grand-uncle's funeral in the days that followed, carrying with him the regards of the aunt whose hand had ended the old man's life. With Evgeny died the last voice in the family that had never stopped blaming Valya Harkonnen for what her vendetta had cost the House.