House Corrino

A year after the War of Assassins, Duke Leto Atreides throws his support behind an attack meant to return House Vernius to Ix. The machine-world has fallen under Tleilaxu control, and the assault is the first move in a larger fight over who holds it.

Emperor Shaddam IV, meanwhile, resents how heavily the Imperium depends on the spice melange of Arrakis. He starts the Great Spice War, and his people work to produce a synthetic substitute that would break that hold.

The Bene Gesserit follow their own slow plan. They wait for the birth of Jessica's child, though events do not unfold the way their long breeding program expects.

This is the third and final novel of the Prelude to Dune trilogy, set roughly thirty-five years before Frank Herbert's Dune. It gathers the political threads of the first two books and moves among the Imperial court, the Atreides and Harkonnen rivalry, and the aftermath of the Ixian conflict.

The ending leads directly into the world of Dune, with the spice, the Emperor and the breeding plan all pulling toward the same point.