Fifteen hundred years after the death of the God Emperor, the universe has been transformed by the Scattering - the explosive dispersal of humanity across the galaxy that Leto II's millennia of enforced confinement was designed to produce. Now the old power structures are reassembling on a desert Arrakis reborn, and a young girl named Sheeana has appeared who can command the sandworms. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the most enduring political force in the universe, must contend with the return of scattered populations bearing strange new abilities, the machinations of a resurgent Tleilaxu, and the emergence of the latest Duncan Idaho ghola - who may hold the key to the Bene Gesserit's own survival. Heretics of Dune reinvents the series with a largely new cast while building on everything Herbert established across the previous four novels.