Alia stands on the platform of her temple, the Fane of the Oracle, watching pilgrims, vendors, minor diviners, townfolk, and wary Fremen disperse. The growth of her cult disgusts her, but Alia believes abandoning the temple would endanger everyone. Alia notices the newly popular Dune Tarot among the vendors and suspects it may be meant to cloud prescient vision.

Alia retreats to her private quarters, dismisses Stilgar’s assigned guards, and bathes. Alia feels haunted by a shadowy male presence in her future that prescience cannot identify. Disturbed by desire and restlessness, Alia enters her training room naked and begins sword practice against a shielded target dummy.

Alia drives the training machine beyond normal limits, reaching eleven lights, a level more dangerous than even expert swordsmen usually attempt. Paul enters with Stilgar and disables the machine by throwing a knife through the shield onto the deactivation point. Paul and Stilgar are alarmed by Alia’s recklessness, while Stilgar recognizes a sexual and emotional crisis in her behavior.

Stilgar bluntly tells Paul that Alia must have a mate soon or there will be trouble. Alia reacts with anger and embarrassment, but Paul weighs Stilgar’s observation and accepts it as a practical necessity, deciding that he and Alia will discuss it privately later.

Paul then explains that Irulan’s information, supported by Stilgar’s intelligence, suggests the Guild is preparing a major attempt to capture a sandworm and start the spice cycle on another world. Alia argues that Fremen accomplices must be involved, since offworlders could not capture a worm. Paul and Alia recognize that the attempt may succeed in taking a worm, though creating melange elsewhere would require much more of Arrakis’s ecology.

The discussion turns to the limits of prescience. Alia connects the Dune Tarot to an effort to obscure possible futures, and Paul admits he has not seen the Guild’s target world. Stilgar is shaken to hear that Paul and Alia cannot see everything, so Alia explains that their vision is elevated but still blocked by hidden distances. Stilgar accepts the metaphor but notes that any hidden danger must still cross visible ground.