Bhekar Ro

Bhekar Ro was a Fringe World in the distant reaches of the Koprulu sector, orbiting a single orange star, settled by terran colonists who had fled the civil strife of the Confederate inner worlds. A hardscrabble farming community for forty years, it became the site of the Battle of Bhekar Ro when a buried xel'naga artifact awoke and drew the protoss and the zerg down on the colony.

Climate and colonization#

Bhekar Ro originally had "greasy gray skies" that frequently gave way to unpredictable, violent storms of sonic intensity occurring year round, with hailstorms and laser lightning scarring the surface. After the activation of the xel'naga artifact, the climate became far more serene, with white clouds replacing the gray throughout the atmosphere.

The world was settled around 2460 by colonists escaping the civil strife of the Confederate inner worlds, who hoped it would be a "promised land" beyond Confederate reach and cut off contact with the Terran Confederacy five years after arriving. They found harsh conditions and poor, rocky soil, raising whip-barley, triticale-wheat and salad-moss to survive. A corps of scientific personnel aided the first decades, but recurring outbreaks of spore plague eventually forced the abandonment of most scientific work as priority shifted to survival.

Life on Bhekar Ro was brutal and short. Mortality rates were high, and virtually every colonist lost a friend or family member. Adulthood was considered to begin at fifteen, with marriage and parenthood typically following before eighteen, and the few colonists unable to cope psychologically tended to grow careless and die early. Confined to a relatively small geographical area, the survivors formed a tight-knit community whose known members included the Bradshaws, the Brens, the McCarthys, the Warners, and others.

The Battle of Bhekar Ro#

In 2500, after the close of the Great War, a storm uncovered a xel'naga artifact buried on the world. The colonist Lars Bren was absorbed by the artifact while investigating it, which caused it to emit a strong psychic signal that attracted both the protoss and the zerg. With the Confederacy recently defunct, the colonists requested aid and received it in the form of the Terran Dominion's Alpha Squadron, drawn in by the distress signal and by Mengsk's wish to investigate the alien activity.

The conflict was resolved by the artifact itself, which released an energy creature that destroyed the military forces converging on the site. The creature's birth also inadvertently changed the climate and improved the quality of the soil in the valley near the artifact, and the colony survived the ordeal.

Aftermath and later years#

In 2502, a female Terran Dominion ghost perpetrated a massacre of many of the world's inhabitants. By the later stages of the Second Great War, Bhekar Ro had become host to a mass migration of terran refugees, the surviving community absorbing arrivals from across a war-torn sector.