Abathur

Abathur was a unique zerg creature, spun from many species to serve as the Swarm's evolution master and living DNA library. He resided in the evolution pit, where he ceaselessly studied the genetic codes of other organisms and wove their traits into the zerg. Created by the Overmind and later bound to the service of Sarah Kerrigan, Abathur was the instrument through which the Swarm pursued its endless drive toward perfection, and his obsession with efficiency and his contempt for any path other than war defined both his usefulness and his eventual treachery.

Creation and the Queen of Blades#

Abathur was created by the Overmind as a brood of one, spun from many zerg species. Where the Overmind was the will behind the Swarm's drive toward perfection, Abathur was the instrument of that will. At the Overmind's instruction he designed the Queen of Blades, wrapping Sarah Kerrigan in a chrysalis, though he injured her in the process. After the Overmind's death he became feral and purposeless, wandering beneath Char and eating whatever attacked him, modifying any zerg he came across and growing fixated on diversifying the Swarm until the Queen of Blades found him and took him under her command. He developed new strains for her and was given terrans to experiment upon.

Rejoining Kerrigan#

When the Queen of Blades was de-infested at Char during the Second Great War, the Swarm fragmented as the broodmothers vied for control, and Abathur, too strong for Zagara to seize, drifted aboard a leviathan until Kerrigan found him again. To his frustration he regarded Kerrigan and the old Queen of Blades as separate entities, judging her now infected with too much terran matter, and offered to improve her; she refused but let him evolve the Swarm. Kerrigan, suffering from memory loss, could not recall their shared history, and when she eventually learned what Abathur had done to her after her infestation at Tarsonis she told him she would have killed him were he not vital to her plans. Abathur, who saw the work only as work, was puzzled by her anger.

Perfecting the Swarm#

Across the campaigns that followed, Abathur drove the Swarm's evolution by discovering creatures with useful adaptations and weaving their essence into existing strains. On the frozen moon of Kaldir he recommended assimilating ursadon matriarch essence so the zerg could survive the deep cold, and was impressed when Kerrigan revealed she could spin sequences of her own, having crippled a protoss ship from the inside with a parasite she had created. He produced new strains of roach, zergling, baneling, mutalisk, hydralisk, swarm host, and more, drawing on the karak of Calus, the mitoscarab of Nelyth, feral brood lords, impalers, and the lurkers of Cavir, a world once held by Daggoth's brood. On Char he improved the cognitive faculties of Zagara at Kerrigan's order and revived the torrasque strain so that, unlike the originals made by the Overmind, it could regenerate without a greater entity.

On Zerus, the homeworld of the zerg, Abathur held the primal zerg in mixed regard, reasoning there might be good essence to take from them. He provided Kerrigan with reconstituted mutalisks and the new swarm host strain, and defended her as she entered the first spawning pool to emerge as the Primal Queen of Blades. When she returned, Abathur found her genetic strands restructured from the base up, cleaner and stronger than the old Queen of Blades and, he admitted, beyond his understanding. He counseled that the Swarm never return to Zerus, holding that the path of evolution led forward and not back.

Stukov, terrans, and the primal zerg#

Abathur was unimpressed by terran essence, dismissing terrans as a doomed species of primitive structures and recessive traits, and was glad when Kerrigan ordered an end to experiments upon them. He held the primal zerg in similarly low regard, and grew to despise them when he found they had replicated some of the Swarm's strains within hours, imploring Kerrigan to wipe them out. The one terran-derived being that fascinated him was the infested Alexei Stukov, whose subtle interweaving of zerg and terran matter lay on a scale Abathur himself could not achieve; he considered Stukov second only to Kerrigan and doubted that terrans alone could have possessed the knowledge to make him.

Treachery and the One-Day War#

After Kerrigan ascended and Zagara became Overqueen, Abathur's demeanor darkened. He objected to the peaceful new direction of the Swarm and called Zagara a traitor, holding that war between the zerg and the other races was necessary to drive evolution and that peace was stagnation. He was disgusted by the adostra, the peaceful species spun in equal balance from zerg and xel'naga essence, believing the zerg should dominate and infest all other life. Secretly he created a second race from the same xel'naga essence, the chitha, which could be commanded by vocal order, and modified a creature named Mukav to serve as a conduit and as a mind capable of the scheming Abathur would not perform himself.

When Valerian Mengsk and Artanis came to Gystt to observe Zagara's work, Abathur and Mukav directed the chitha to attack the survey teams, hoping to ruin any chance of peace and reignite war. As the conflict known as the One-Day War spiraled outward, Zagara assigned Abathur to keep the Daelaam and Dominion informed, a task he secretly refused so that the zerg would appear more suspicious. His conspiracy was eventually uncovered, and he revealed his motives to Zagara and attacked her with Mukav and his chitha. With the aid of protoss and terran warriors his allies were destroyed, and Zagara tore into him and subdued him, but kept him alive under close watch, since the Swarm still needed an evolution master to survive.

Nature and method#

Abathur was well-mannered and endlessly occupied with connecting DNA, experimenting on strains, and studying the Swarm's enemies, gaining their genetic codes by eating parts of them. He accepted that true perfection was impossible for the zerg, yet held that the Swarm should chase it regardless, and believed it was purpose, an overriding will, that separated the zerg from mere beasts; he was grateful the Swarm had a purpose even when that purpose was merely Kerrigan's vendetta. He saw himself as the most useful part of the Swarm, an assessment Zagara implicitly confirmed by sparing him after his betrayal. He was obsessed with efficiency above all and spoke in a clipped pattern that dropped conjunctions and pronouns, communicating in the most economical manner possible, fitting for a creature that approached genetics the same way.