MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

001. Unquiet Arrivals Are Quotidian..

To a union of people who have made space travel the fifth paramount force allowed to stand alone and swirl reality to a whim, shaping religions and beliefs and tampering power, a hangar is the cradle of life. Its forever open doors are making it into a temple whose cult has always looked up and worshipped the possibility of expecting gifts from amongst the blankets of stars, ghostly dying for their moments of prayer to make the solitude a little less bitter. 

These lost souls hangars gathered between fortified walls as cold as the bottom of the oceans and underneath tall ceilings meant to home titans, were all but seeking the relief from loneliness. They looked up in hope of miracles and amongst the many religions of the Known Universe, space travel provided to these hangar a reason for pilots and shy observers alike, to unanimously get on their knees and scream in terror for it was often now that crafts flew off the ground and returned all the same, save for the stardust of wonder. 

Roars marked the landing. Sounds without descriptions have long been embedded into the minds of the people such that the noise was a buzz and the thrill of the engines died down to a monotonous occurrence, hardly worthy of the sanctity of what act they blew the trumpets for. Landing itself came with its thunderous applause in steam, smoke and the opening of the shell of the conduit of Gods, so that the wiser Icarus may safely step out. 

Icarus. A legend of the Old Earth, who, like all legends do, became a myth, then a lesson, and now but a saying stuck on the tongues of annoying elders like dust was stuck to the most interesting books which, in heaviness, were never picked up.

"Did you see that?" Mercury Yaranes was the unsung ovation to the glory which was space travel. In its purest form, convention was stuck in the curls of her brown hair and made her almost mature skin shine with beads of sweat she shed inside the Ehyan ship now landed in Caladan's main hangar. It was a ship whose shell would only ever fit one, defeating, rebelliously so, the purpose of these cradles and of the solitude worshippers desired to rout forever and scorn by each step they took in their holy exhibition.

Rebellion in religion was an act only Gods could dare claim as their own and defiance hid itself in the unruliness of the shorter hairs covering her forehead, in the even softer ones which never grew since she was a baby and were now suffocated into a grown life behind her ears and right above the back of her neck too. Mercury stepped out of a single-pilot conventional craft as the vessel of all the other remarkable pilots she took after and carried the legacy of; to the common worshippers of hangars, these pilots who roamed in speed all on their own were fearsome devils, outrageous Gods walking amongst men by choice.

"Hard to miss it."

Gurney was a man enamored with the past, bound to look at her and be engulfed by a sacral vanity, pride to be allowed to stare in awe at a distance now closing in with her sliding off the side of the ship from the cockpit and skipping her steps closer while her arms dangled in air for balance and for claiming the joyous and generous life running through her veins; a tree of life spread in her body and twisted around her bones. Youth looked fresh underneath the curls of her hair, underneath the visible yet elegant embroidery of her clothes, carrying the distant and exotic scents of Ehya. 

She came from a planet where the air was sweating and those beads it formed on her skin would turn to vapor that suffocated her whilst keeping her alive between the endless rows of stairs half her height, demanding to be climbed to reach almost any commodity outside her own home. Now, she was on another sweating planet, whose air now gave her colder sweats. Only a few steps towards the most prominent guard of House Atreides had already claimed a shiver and passed on the present of goosebumps which spread like a disease under a suit too thin and airy for storms and rain.

That was why Gurney carried a coat, tailored for her by the same masters who dressed the Duke's family, whom he had pledged himself openly to. This was but a replica that he carried, a newer version which had to uphold the legacy of at least ten others which had warmed Mercury Yaranes' through growing up.