Vergyl Tantor



Vergyl Tantor (211 BG - 177 BG) was the son of Emil and Lucille Tantor. He was born unexpectedly, when the mature couple had fostered orphaned Xavier Harkonnen.

Vergyl grew alongside Xavier. During the Butlerian Jihad he insisted on joining the military. A year after the Honru Massacre and when he was only seventeen, he insisted on joining the Jihad. Returning home after a skirmish, Xavier offered a waiver that would allow young Vergyl to begin training. His father had to sign a special dispensation for him to join the Jihad. His mother had grave reservation but Emil knew that Vergyl would try to join anyway. Emil however intended him to be 'protected' by Xavier.

Xavier had seen to it that his brother had a safe assignmnet and position, stationed on Giedi Prime to help with the building of a monument, rising minimally in the Construction Brigade.

Vergyl when was 21, met and married Sheel, who gave him three children: Emilo, Jisp, and Ulana. During the attack at Peridot Colony, Vergyl was a Cuarto on Giedi Prime overseeing a memorial construction. There, he met Zon Noret and had a training with Chirox.

At the Battle of IV Anbus, Vergyl was ordered to protect one of the two villages before the city of Darits. However the peaceful Zenshiites there poisoned his band and damaged the weapons. Initially this worried the command in the imminent arrival of the machines, but eventually they were not interested in the villages.

Vergyl's next stand would be soon after, above the planet. After the Jihadi forces managed to drive off the machine fleet, Vergyl's ballista in his over-enthusiasm, tried to attack a cymek fleet, who appeared when the Jihadi ships had to suppress the over-heated Holtzman shields. The ship suffered many hits and the crew ejected in lifepod, only to be collected by the cymeks.

Vergyl was the last of the prisoners to survive and was tortured to death by the Titans.

Behind the scenes
In Emil's speech in The Machine Crusade, he mentions that his son joined the military a year 'after Ellram'. However when the massacre at Ellram happened, Vergyl was already in the military. It is possible that Emil (and/or the authors) confused Ellram with the Honru massacre, which actually happened the year before his joining the military.

Appearances

 * Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
 * Whipping Mek
 * Dune: The Machine Crusade