In a prologue set centuries after the novel’s events, archaeologist Hadi Benotto reveals the discovery of original journals and audio recordings of the late God Emperor Leto Atreides II. The writings have been decrypted using the same Guild Key that deciphered The Stolen Journals, the classic text attributed to Leto and translated by the Spacing Guild centuries before. Leto was the last Emperor of the Imperium, and like his father, Paul Muad’Dib, he had the cognitive powers of a Kwisatz Haderach—a term used by the religious society known as the Bene Gesserit to denote a kind of messiah, one who possesses both universal prescience and ancestral memories. In the discovered writings, Leto describes his disorientating experiences of prescience and the acuity and magnitude of his awareness across space and time. He is both himself, the singular Leto, and all the threads of his ancestors’ memories. Although these memories are valuable, Leto wearies of their repetitious sameness and relegates these moments to “only the past” (5).

The central action in the novel takes place at the end of Leto’s millennia-long reign, roughly 3,500 years after the events of Children of Dune. Most chapters begin with an