Year: Pre-Imperium Era – Over 10,000 years before the Battle of Arrakeen
Time: Local Sietch Reckoning Unrecorded – Before the Fremen, before the Guild
There was no wind, only the silence of ancient sands untouched by footfall, unpierced by cry or scream. The planet Arrakis then scarcely more than a whisper in Imperial records was a dead place by most reckonings. Waterless, barren, and quiet, it held only the great worms and nameless reptiles that skittered through the heat shimmer. But even among the things that ruled this crucible of evolution, there was something else older, more alien.
It was the desert that felt him first.
A tremor, soft as breath and vast as nightmare, moved beneath the dunes. Grains of sand leapt silently skyward in a perfect ring over one hundred meters wide before settling again, as if bowing to a presence too ancient to ignore. But there was no rhythm to this tremor. No staccato thumping of the Shai-Hulud's passage. No warning of wormsign. This… was something else.
Something deeper.
Beneath kilometers of strata, in a pressure-sealed tomb of stone and sand, he stirred.
I remember dying.
The thought was not one of language, not truly. It formed like a ripple in a molten sea of memory. He had once walked under blue skies, felt rain upon a shell like hardened tar, and seen men so small they could not grasp what he was. He had died in fire no, within fire. He had been Dah'ren Mohran, the Leviathan of the Sand Sea. The great elder dragon of the Monster Hunter world.
And now he was here.
The awakening had not been sudden. He did not bolt upright like a dreaming man. He emerged like tectonic drift an hour to blink, a day to twitch his tail, a month before his massive armored body shifted even a few meters.
He was colossal. In his old world, the Guild had measured him at over 350 meters long from snout to tail, with a girth greater than most vessels of war. On Arrakis, under the gravitational softness of its environment and the pull of an unfamiliar moon, he was even larger. With the centuries and the slow absorption of geothermal energies, his body had grown. Now he measured well over 450 meters in length. His back was a jagged continent of scaled ridges, and his mouth broad enough to crush a spice harvester in a single bite dripped with hardened minerals like the crust of ancient lava.
When he moved, it was like the motion of a small tectonic plate. Sand did not simply shift it folded, rolled, and heaved. He was slow, yes. A creature of weight and ancient strength. But when provoked, when compelled to strike, he was swift in terrifying bursts. His mass was a weapon, and inertia his most loyal ally.
He clawed upward, blind in this new world's light, breaching through kilometers of dead sand like a sea serpent surfacing for air. His emergence shattered a desert plain the size of a city, throwing rocks into the sky like artillery fire. And then he paused his massive head tilting as he sniffed the air.
There was no prey. No rival. No human.
Then why am I here?
It was a question that lingered not as philosophy, but instinct. Something had called him, displaced him across realities, into a universe where gods were bred in laboratories and empires ruled with melange-addicted seers.
Time passed differently for him. He slept, then stirred, then wandered. Each of his movements, even if they were months apart, left scars upon the surface of Arrakis. Craters mistaken for collapsed lava tubes. Valleys formed by the scraping of his dorsal ridges. And over time, he came to understand that he was alone not just in species, but in kind. He was not a sandworm. He did not swim beneath the desert like they did, nor did he vibrate the earth with drumming resonance. They avoided him instinctively. They did not hunt him. They feared him.
When the early sietch peoples came not the Fremen yet, but wandering Zensunni pilgrims some claimed they had seen the Earth shudder. They saw ridges move across the night horizon, like a chain of mountains crawling against the stars. Their ancestors etched crude likenesses into stone walls beasts not unlike the worms, but with mouths split wide and tusks that jutted like shattered spires. They told stories by firelight of the "Makers That Were," creatures older than the worms, birthed by a time when Arrakis herself had fought against becoming a desert world.
None believed the stories would last.
Centuries passed. The Zensunni evolved into the Fremen. Sietches became more permanent, hidden within the rock. The stories of the Titan faded into myth, then into half-remembered fragments.
They called him "Ur-Shai-Hulud," or "The Hollowed Leviathan," spoken only by the old women of the sietch in tones reserved for shadows and curses. He was not worshipped like the worms. He was not summoned. He did not come to the thumper's call.
The Fremen knew to listen for wormsign circular patterns of approach, rapid. But his presence was marked by silence, by the sudden absence of all movement. No drumbeats beneath the feet. No rumble. Just stillness, as if the world held its breath.
Some scouts vanished without trace. Entire spice caravans would go silent, and when the sand cleared days later, all that remained were fields of crushed metal and collapsed dunes. No wormsign. No tracks. Just destruction.
And then once, only once in living memory a young Fremen warrior on his first foray saw him. Just a glimpse. A canyon opening in the sand. A mouth wider than the sietch. Eyes like molten gold behind obsidian lenses. Armor like basalt mountains. It looked at him… and then turned away.
He never spoke again.
By the time of the Corrino Empire's dominion, and the slow rise of the Harkonnen over Arrakis, tales of "The Slumbering God" had become taboo. Even the Sardaukar, hardened beyond reason, spoke only in private of expeditions that vanished without a trace in the deep desert. Those who probed too far, too deep, often found their ornithopters crushed in the sand like insects in the palm of a careless titan.
He had not aged. He had not diminished. But he had changed.
He learned the shape of this world. He did not understand politics or spice or Bene Gesserit schemes. But he knew the rhythm of the dunes. The paths of the worms. The meaning of survival. He watched silently. Observed. And once every few decades, when something large enough crossed his path, he fed.
His roar, when it came, echoed across the desert like a sandstorm made audible a deep, thunderous cry that shook ancient rock and sent every sandworm within a hundred kilometers diving for safety. The Fremen heard it only once in three generations, and when they did, they whispered prayers not to be taken next.
He had become legend.
And he still slept, somewhere beneath the vastness of the southern desert, as the stars turned overhead. Waiting. Watching. Dreaming.
But soon… others would come. A boy born of prophecy. A duke cast into exile. A war that would engulf all of Arrakis.
And when they did, perhaps the Slumbering God would rise again.