Amon

Amon, known across the ages as the Dark Voice, the Fallen One, the Dark God, the Eternal One, and Truth-bringer, was a malevolent xel'naga bound to the Void who set out to break what he saw as the corrupt cycle of his own kind and bring all life to an end before remaking it in his image. He created the Overmind and the Zerg Swarm, uplifted and then abandoned the protoss, kept the Tal'darim in thrall, and worked through servants such as Emil Narud to forge a protoss-zerg hybrid race. He has been described as the universe's most ancient evil.

Origins and the broken cycle#

Amon was once a member of a species that possessed purity of essence or form, or both. In that earlier life he sought to become a great being, and per the Infinite Cycle of the xel'naga he was imparted with the essence of the xel'naga elders and ascended to join them. Only after ascending did he learn what the office truly meant: he would seed new life across the universe but could not interfere in its development, and like the elders who had empowered him, he would in time be sacrificed to raise up the next generation of xel'naga. Believing he had been deceived and torn from his previous existence against his will, Amon came to resent what he had become, and later claimed the transformation had been forced upon him.

Billions of years before the Great War, in what would be the last universe to witness the Cycle, Amon became fully disillusioned. While the majority of the xel'naga entered slumber within Ulnar after seeding the new universe, Amon and a group of like-minded followers set out in secret to forge a single master race that would bring the Cycle to an end. The plan would unfold across two worlds and two species, and would take aeons to mature.

The making of the protoss and the zerg#

The xel'naga ordinarily let the life they seeded develop on its own, but Amon and his followers broke this rule. They came to Aiur, where a species of tribal hunters and warriors had arisen, and gifted them purity of form, uplifting the protoss, who came to revere their makers as gods. For a time the protoss lived in harmony, bound by a communal psychic link, but as the tribes drifted apart and cultivated independent egos, Amon judged that he had pushed their evolution too quickly. The protoss grew suspicious of his intentions and began severing themselves from the communal link, and when the xel'naga moved to leave Aiur the protoss attacked their worldships, killing hundreds of xel'naga before Amon and his survivors fled. He kept a number of protoss followers who separated from their kindred, the Tal'darim, whom he promised would one day ascend into hybrid; in truth this was a lie to keep them in thrall.

Driven from Aiur, Amon traveled to Zerus and uplifted the zerg to create a race blessed with purity of essence, prizing their ability to consume the essence of other organisms. To avoid repeating the mistake he had made with the protoss, he bound the zerg to a hive mind and created the Overmind, a sentient entity that embodied that mind. He gave the Overmind thought and reason but withheld free will, forcing upon it an overriding directive to destroy and assimilate the protoss. Only the primal zerg escaped his control. Amon intended to use the zerg and the hybrid to wipe out all life, then dispose of the zerg and reshape creation in his own image.

War among the gods and the long exile#

Before Amon could finish his work on Zerus, the xel'naga at Ulnar awoke and learned of his plans, and waged war upon him. Amon retaliated by unleashing the Zerg Swarm upon his own kind. The xel'naga were devastated, but Amon too was defeated; his body was destroyed, and his consciousness escaped into the Void, where he began plotting his return. Even so, he retained cognition and his influence over the Overmind and the Swarm. The zerg left Zerus to hunt the protoss for assimilation, while one of Amon's servants, who would come to be known as Samir Duran, secretly worked to merge protoss and zerg DNA into the desired hybrid and to forge a new body for his master.

The Overmind was not blind to its plight. It foresaw the apocalypse that would follow an Amon victory and, though unable to defy its directive, worked to undermine the enslavement of the Swarm. Under the pretense of creating a weapon against the protoss, it had Sarah Kerrigan captured and remade into the Queen of Blades, keeping her true purpose hidden even from herself. After the Brood War, Amon's will crept into Kerrigan through the mutagen within her, showing her visions of his return and the extinction of the zerg; she pulled the Swarm back to Char and quietly prepared it for war, though Amon never directly controlled her. Meanwhile his servant, now calling himself Emil Narud, founded the Moebius Foundation under Valerian Mengsk and ran the Dominion's secret Hybrid Breeding Program for Arcturus Mengsk, breeding hybrid on numerous worlds while both men remained ignorant of his true allegiance.

Resurrection#

During the Second Great War, Narud and Valerian Mengsk drew Jim Raynor into collecting a xel'naga artifact, ostensibly to restore Kerrigan's humanity. Narud had secretly modified the device so that, when used on Char to de-infest the Queen of Blades, it would extract the Void energies stored within her rather than simply erasing them. He stole the completed device from Raynor and traveled to Atrias, a Tal'darim-guarded world, where he used the stored energy to restore Amon's power and resurrect him.

Kerrigan, reborn in primal form on Zerus and warned of Amon by the ancient Zurvan, learned the full truth at Skygeirr Platform, where Narud was producing hybrid. She fought through his forces to a xel'naga temple beneath the station and defeated him, and with his last words he confirmed that Amon was alive and would soon return. The phase-smith Karax later confirmed how the resurrection had been achieved, having studied the Keystone and found Narud's modification.

The End War and the Khala#

Amon made his presence felt during the Daelaam's attempt to reclaim Aiur from the zerg. He corrupted the Khala, the psychic bond of the protoss, taking numerous Khalai under his thrall, Artanis among them, and speaking and acting through his puppets. The dark templar Zeratul severed Artanis's nerve cords to free him, at the cost of his own life, but Amon simply seized new thralls. He built himself a host body on Aiur from pieces of the Overmind's corpse and the bodies of enslaved protoss, while his servants carried his will across the sector: the terran Moebius Corps cut through the Dominion, the zerg of Aiur formed an army, and the Tal'darim remained his.

Amon's plans began to unravel as the Daelaam brought the Tal'darim into the fold under First Ascendant Alarak, destroyed his hybrid production facilities, and reactivated the purifiers stored on Cybros. At Aiur, the Daelaam destroyed the psionic matrix that fed the Golden Armada and then his host body, which despite its power proved vulnerable to orbital bombardment and was incinerated moments after it awoke. With Amon still lurking within the Khala, the Daelaam used the Keystone to imprison him long enough for the remaining Khalai to sever their nerve cords, cutting him off from his thralls and banishing him to the Void.

Defeat in the Void#

Banished but undestroyed, Amon continued to grow stronger within the Void, and his eventual return seemed inevitable. Summoned by the xel'naga Ouros, terran, zerg, and protoss forces entered the Void to end him for good. They slew his servant Emil Narud and freed Ouros, who transferred his essence into Sarah Kerrigan, making her xel'naga. Amon was unafraid; he had killed xel'naga before, and his Void crystals surrounded him with a barrier that made him all but invincible. He loosed hundreds of void shades and constructs upon the allied forces and tore the ground from beneath their bases, but Kerrigan and her allies destroyed enough of his crystals to leave him exposed. Defiant to the last, he told Kerrigan she was nothing but a pawn in a flawed cycle who had been manipulated her whole life. She answered that she cared neither for the cycle nor his lies and chose freedom for all life, then destroyed him with a single beam of energy.

Beliefs and powers#

To Amon, death was the highest ideal. He held no love for the Tal'darim who worshipped him, mocking those who fought in Rak'Shir duels and finding amusement when they slaughtered one another by the hundreds. He regarded the protoss as foolish, prideful children, and according to the preserver Rohana the only creatures he truly cared for were his hybrid. He did not see himself as evil; he claimed that the Infinite Cycle brought needless suffering and that by destroying the creations of the xel'naga he was ending that suffering, though Rohana held that his true motive was an intense hatred born of his own forced ascension.

Amon was supposedly immortal and could be slain only by another xel'naga. Even after his first defeat he retained enough cognition to observe and influence events from the Void, where he could manipulate matter, communicate without a conduit, and summon void shades, constructs, and thrashers at will. He could transfer his consciousness into any protoss connected to the Khala, marking his thralls with red eyes and twin voices, and he could reach even disconnected protoss telepathically. He had fought and killed many of his own kind before his exile, and Zurvan held that Amon could rip entire planets apart.