Saren Arterius

Saren Arterius was a turian and the longest-serving turian member of the Spectres, the elite operatives who answered directly to the Citadel Council. For more than two decades he was an agent of the Council's will, renowned for ruthless efficiency and feared throughout the unsettled border regions he policed. After acquiring an ancient artifact, Saren fell under the influence of the Reaper Sovereign, and as its indoctrinated agent he turned on the Council, leading the geth in an assault on the Citadel itself. His pursuit was the first great task of Commander Shepard.

A turian Spectre#

Born in 2139, Saren followed turian tradition and entered the military at fifteen, advancing to active service after only a year of training. In 2159 he became the youngest turian ever accepted into the Spectres. Intelligent, cunning, and capable, he quickly earned a reputation for ruthless efficiency; though disturbing rumors surrounded the brutality of his methods, his results were never in doubt, and he remained the Council's top agent throughout his career. He recruited and inducted others into the order, including Avitus Rix and Nihlus Kryik, usually after being impressed by their military performance.

Saren held little regard for life and would not prioritize saving it unless the Council demanded it or there was information to be gained. He was said to follow two principles in tension with one another: never to kill anyone without a good reason, and that one could always find a reason to kill someone. He became an outspoken opponent of human expansion, believing the Systems Alliance had grown too aggressive in pressing humanity toward dominance in Council space. His hatred was traced to the First Contact War, in which he was said to have lost a brother, and from that point he disliked humanity. His mutual antipathy with the human officer David Anderson dated to a failed joint mission years before.

The artifact and Sovereign#

Years before his fall, Saren came into possession of research pointing to an ancient artifact, and he dedicated himself to finding it, believing he had located a weapon that could control the geth and humble humanity. In the course of those preparations he encountered Sovereign. Through the ancient Reaper he learned the fate of the countless civilizations of the distant past, and rather than wield Sovereign as a weapon as he had intended, Saren resolved to save the galaxy's races by aiding the Reapers, reasoning that proving the worth of organics through servitude was the logical answer to an enemy that could not be defeated outright.

Sovereign, however, had its own designs. The longer Saren served it, the more deeply he became indoctrinated; his free will was gradually sapped and supplanted by the Reaper's desires, so subtly that Saren remained convinced he was right. He became Sovereign's most powerful and visible agent, drawing the geth from behind the Perseus Veil to serve the ship they revered as a machine-god, with Saren as its prophet. The asari Matriarch Benezia, who allied with him hoping to lead him back to a better path, was instead indoctrinated herself and became his most powerful ally.

War against the galaxy#

As Sovereign's agent, Saren committed horrific crimes against the people he had sworn to protect. When a Prothean beacon was unearthed on the human colony of Eden Prime, he led the geth there to use it and find clues to a device called the Conduit, and murdered his old friend Nihlus Kryik in cold blood. His attempt to destroy the colony and cover his tracks failed when the Normandy and Commander Shepard responded faster than he had anticipated.

The Council at first refused to believe one of its most decorated Spectres had betrayed it, and Saren's past with Anderson clouded the hearing. Only after Shepard recovered firm evidence, including an audio file proving Saren had attacked Eden Prime, did the Council revoke his Spectre status, though that did little to slow him. Saren continued hunting for the Conduit while building his forces: he sought to breed an army of rachni revived from a captured queen and to control an army of krogan through a cure for the genophage, and he extracted the location of the Mu Relay from the Rachni Queen's mind to guide his search.

Doubt and the Battle of the Citadel#

As his power grew, so did Saren's fear that Sovereign's indoctrination was affecting him. At his research base on the tropical world of Virmire, where he ran a krogan breeding facility, he added a laboratory to study indoctrination and learned that the more control Sovereign exerted over an individual, the less capable that individual became. He convinced himself that as long as Sovereign needed him to find the Conduit, his mind would remain his own. When Shepard confronted him on Virmire and warned him that he was indoctrinated, Saren denied it and escaped, but the accusation bred doubt. Sensing his conviction faltering, Sovereign gave him further cybernetic implants that all but eliminated his free will, and Saren came to think of himself as the future: a fusion of organic and synthetic, possessing the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.

Saren reached the lost Prothean world of Ilos before Shepard and used the Conduit to travel directly to the Citadel, bypassing its defenses while Sovereign and a geth fleet assaulted it from outside. He made for the station's master control unit, intending to hand the Citadel to Sovereign and open the relay that would bring the rest of the Reapers from dark space. Shepard followed through the Conduit and confronted him. In some accounts Shepard convinced Saren that, indoctrinated or not, he still had the power to stop Sovereign, and the broken Spectre shot himself to prevent the relay from opening, thanking the Commander before he died. In others, Shepard was forced to fight him atop the Council platform, and Saren fell to his death. Either way, Sovereign reanimated his corpse, burning away the flesh to reveal the full extent of his cybernetics, and forced the body to fight one last battle before Shepard's team destroyed it. The construct's ruin corrupted the signal Sovereign used and helped lay the Reaper open to the Alliance fleet. Though Saren was a traitor in the eyes of the galaxy, Shepard understood that he had, in a terrible sense, been right: the Reapers would return.