EPILOGUE TWO - THE SEED
 

Here the reign of the flesh came to an end, and the dawn of a new existence arrived. Finally we broke free of the shackles that had bound us since man began, and the ascension to a new plane of being was possible. The Cleansing set us free.
-Inscription on the monument on Kapteros, constructed in honour of the 5,000th birthday of "The Cleansing"-
 

Weakly lit strings of differently sized globes, shades of orange and red offset against the darkness, surrounded him for a while, his enhanced vision allowing him to see far beyond the boundaries of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. As he emerged from his spacefold, immense cold engulfed his body, and it was difficult for him to breathe. He was falling.

Pain seared through him - much more intense than any of the other times he had attempted a spacefold by himself. It took him a few moments to realise what his internal diagnostic system was trying to tell him: his bloodstream had been invaded by millions of nanite machines, and they were killing him, slowly but steadily overpowering even the regenerative ability his symbiosis with the sandtrout supplied him with. He looked down at his chest, and saw three hunter-seekers had managed to hit him - these were the devices that had injected the aggressive microscopic machines that were killing him from within.

His physical pain was not what bothered him the most: the knowledge that time had caught up with his vision was many times more painful. The way it happened was the way it was meant to be, Adros realised. Soon, the final circle will be completed. But the price that had to be paid! The products of hundreds of millennia of evolution - almost completely destroyed. Only the seeds I planted will remain after Ix and Tleilax have died.

He continued to fall through the air. Just outside his awareness, another consciousness copied several dozen times and spread out over just as many bodies, a single mind emerging from the mental echoes, was trying to awaken.

Spinning around, he saw a green and blue planet approaching, two moons accompanying it in its procession around a single star. Canopus, he thought. So this is where I was destined to go. To this place the workings of the Spice converge time and time again, forcing the universe to act out a prewritten script.

He saw he was falling towards one of the planet's many seas, the deep blue approaching faster and faster. When the salt water engulfed him, Adros experienced terrible pain, his body being torn apart: the sandtrout detaching, hungry for water. Mechanical devices surrounded him in the water, his bionic implants being released by his rapidly decaying body, but they quickly sank away in the currents.

Adros felt the singular consciousnesses of the other's many bodies disengaging, the loss of coherence destroying all but the most basic capability of thought, after a while nothing but animal instinct remaining.

The last thoughts before Adros died contained the realisation that now the second circle had been completed.

One day, the worms will rule the deserts of Dune.

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