Leto Atreides II

Leto Atreides II was the third and final ruler of the Atreides Empire and its first and only God Emperor, reigning from 10219 AG until his assassination in 13728 AG. The pre-born son of Emperor Paul Muad'Dib Atreides and his Fremen concubine Chani, Leto was the twin brother of Ghanima Atreides and grandson of the planetologist Liet-Kynes. To secure humanity against extinction he bonded his body with a colony of sandtrout, surrendering his human form for a near-immortal hybrid existence, and pursued the Golden Path across thirty five hundred years of iron rule. To his worshippers he was the God Emperor; to his enemies he was the Tyrant of the Known Universe.

Birth and upbringing#

Leto and his twin sister Ghanima were born in the Fremen stronghold of Sietch Tabr on the final day of their blinded father's rule. Their mother died shortly afterward, succumbing to the dangerous amounts of spice she had taken to counteract the contraceptives that Princess Irulan had placed in her food. Paul's prescience had anticipated the birth of his daughter, but Leto's arrival went unforeseen. The twins' spice saturation in the womb caused a rapid gestation and gave them full pre-born awareness, the same condition that had afflicted their aunt before them.

After their mother's death and their father's disappearance into the deep desert, Leto and Ghanima became the legal responsibility of Paul's sister, the Regent Alia. Though granted a fine upbringing, largely under the care of their great-uncle Stilgar at Sietch Tabr, the twins received little attention from their aunt, who was increasingly possessed by the ego-memory of her Harkonnen grandfather and enthralled by the mysticism gathering around the family name.

Visions and the deep desert#

At nine years of age the twins drew the attention of their grandmother, Reverend Mother Jessica, who returned from Caladan to interview them on behalf of the Bene Gesserit, the Sisterhood being anxious about the danger of Abomination but eager to salvage their breeding work. Recognising that the children's latent power threatened her unstable daughter, Jessica pressed her Fremen allies to protect them.

Leto's prescient powers began to emerge at this time. Guided by visions of the long-lost sietch of Jacurutu and of a "skin that was not his own," he perceived the Golden Path that his father had glimpsed and turned away from. Unlike Paul, Leto came to understand both its dangers and its painful necessities for averting humanity's destruction. After he and Ghanima fought off an attack by trained Laza tigers sent by the vengeful Wensicia Corrino, the twins separated. Ghanima conditioned herself to believe her brother dead so that no Truthsayer could betray his whereabouts, while Leto slipped into anonymity in the deep desert.

Transformation at Shuloch#

Pursuing his visions to Jacurutu, Leto was captured by the Iduali Naib Namri and the Atreides Warmaster Gurney Halleck under what were believed to be Jessica's orders, intended to test the pre-born child against ancestral possession through an overdosed spice trance. Despite being drugged he hypnotised his guardian, escaped into a sandstorm, and rode a worm into the deep desert before allowing himself to be taken at Jacurutu's cliff-enclosed prison colony of Shuloch.

There, at the labour camp's sandtrout farm, Leto used his spice-saturated blood, ancestral experience and prana-bindu control to trick the leathery sandtrout into bonding with his flesh. They covered everything but his face and ears in a living membrane that made him invisible to captive worms and drastically augmented his strength, speed, reflexes, durability and water conservation, at the cost of his fertility and his human skin. So armoured, he escaped Shuloch and crossed vast distances of desert on foot. Beyond the broken Shield Wall he met the Preacher, the figure his father had become, who both admired and lamented his son's commitment to a path Paul himself had refused.

Ascension to the Golden Lion Throne#

Reunited with Gurney Halleck and Stilgar, father and son travelled across Arrakis breaching the qanat of every sietch and village to destabilise the planet's ecology and Alia's grip on power, earning Leto the name Desert Demon. They returned to Arrakeen to confront Alia. The Preacher was killed after inciting his sister's own priests against him, and in the struggle that followed Alia overcame her grandfather's possessing influence and took her own life. Leto claimed the title of God Emperor and married his sister to consolidate the throne, a union that was purely legal given his sterility. Ghanima instead took Farad'n Corrino as her life partner, on the condition that he surrender his family's Sardaukar to the Crown, though their descendants would always be known as Atreides. In that same year Leto began the diaries that would become known as the Stolen Journals.

The Golden Path and the iron reign#

To pursue the Golden Path Leto seized the Bene Gesserit breeding program and ordered a new ghola of the Swordmaster Duncan Idaho from the Bene Tleilax to command his Royal Guard, the first of a long series resurrected whenever each predecessor died of time, duty or rebellion against him. His rule was enforced by Fremen warriors and former Sardaukar, and in time by a new army of women he christened the Fish Speakers, judging that a female military force would govern with less wanton violence than male armies. He confiscated the atomics and spice reserves of the Great Houses, suppressed the Mentat order, banned personal shields to conceal his lethal sensitivity to Holtzman fields, and restricted travel to isolate his subjects in their native cities.

As his body matured across the centuries, so did his planet. Arrakis was terraformed into a green and temperate world of forests and rivers, fulfilling the dream of his grandfather Liet-Kynes, but the high moisture proved deadly to the venerated sandworms, which nearly became extinct, while the Fremen themselves grew soft and decadent. Only the northern Sareer, domain of his Citadel, remained as desert. By the age of thirty five centuries Leto had grown into a creature roughly seven meters long, more than two meters across and weighing some five tons, with only his lean human face still uncovered by the sandtrout hide. His senses became extraordinarily acute, able to identify pheromones at a few parts per million, while his leathery body left him largely numb to touch. After millennia of prana-bindu discipline his mastery of the Voice was unequalled, and he could perfectly mimic the voices of his ancestors.

Conspiracies and the final death#

Across his long reign Leto endured and survived numerous attempts on his life. He punished the academic dishonesty of the Nine Historians by burning them upon pyres of their own falsified works. A Duncan Idaho ghola, fearing replacement, fired on him with a contraband lasgun and was crushed beneath Leto's weight, the lasgun traced back to the Ixian ambassador Iyo Kobat. Face Dancers of the Bene Tleilax ambushed his peregrination disguised as petitioners, and two Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers carried a useless vial of poison he found too amusing to punish. He fell in love with the Ixian ambassador Hwi Noree, a clone engineered beyond his prescient sight, and resolved to marry her even as he recognised her as part of a plot to reawaken his humanity.

Learning that Ix neared the creation of machines able to replace Guild Navigators and end the dependence on spice, Leto judged that the next stage of the Golden Path required his own end. He arranged for the rebellious Siona Atreides, a descendant of Ghanima, and a final Duncan Idaho to be paired together. As his entourage crossed the high ferry bridge over the Idaho River, Siona and Duncan ordered the Fish Speaker Nayla to sever its supports, plunging Leto and his court into the waters below. Stripped of his outer flesh by the corrosive currents, he beached himself and, in a final conversation, directed Siona and Duncan to his hidden spice hoard at Sietch Tabr, granting them stewardship of the Empire and the knowledge that their descendants would be invisible to oracles like himself. With his death his body ruptured into sandtrout that returned the desert to Arrakis and, in time, gave rise to new sandworms.

Legacy#

In both life and death Leto II was a deeply controversial figure. His dissolution loosed a chain of events across the following fifteen centuries, including the Famine Times and the Scattering, in which humanity dispersed beyond the reach of any single ruler exactly as the Golden Path demanded. Many of the old power brokers were destroyed or weakened by his draconian rule and his monopoly on melange. His state religion endured on his homeworld, which became known as Rakis, where the Church of the Divided God venerated him alongside his father and grandmother as one of the Holy Triumvirate of Heaven. It was believed that a pearl of his consciousness survived within every sandworm born of his division, a belief later supported by the worm-pacifying gifts of his distant descendant Sheeana Brugh. Among those returning from the Scattering he was remembered as Great Dur, or Guldur.