Three thousand five hundred years have passed. Leto II, son of Paul Muad'Dib, has merged with the sandtrout of Arrakis and transformed into something no longer human - a vast, near-immortal worm-creature who rules the known universe as a tyrant-god. Leto's Golden Path - a prescient vision of the only future in which humanity survives - demands millennia of enforced stagnation, and he has made himself the instrument of that stagnation. Around him, a series of Duncan Idaho gholas serve and rebel, a young woman named Hwi Noree tests his remaining humanity, and the seeds of rebellion grow in the very oppression he has engineered. A novel about the loneliness of absolute power and the terrible logic of long-term survival.