Emil Narud

Samir Duran and Emil Narud were two of the many names used over the millennia by a xel'naga in service to Amon. A shapeshifter who took whatever guise his schemes required, he manipulated the conflicts between terran, protoss, and zerg across decades in order to engineer the protoss-zerg hybrid and bring about his master's return. He served as a Confederate commando, an advisor to the United Earth Directorate, an infested consort to Sarah Kerrigan, the head of the Moebius Foundation and the Dominion's Hybrid Breeding Program, and finally as jailer to the xel'naga Ouros in the Void.

The Confederate and the Brood War#

In his human guise as Samir Duran, the xel'naga claimed to have served in Alpha Squadron before Arcturus Mengsk brought down the Terran Confederacy. Sensing the shifting balance of power, he took command of a small commando unit, the Confederate Resistance Forces, dedicated to striking at Mengsk and his new Terran Dominion. When the United Earth Directorate launched its invasion of the sector, Duran offered his services to Vice Admiral Alexei Stukov. Stukov accepted him as a useful asset against a common enemy while never quite trusting him, and Duran proved his worth, opening a route into Boralis and guiding the invaders to victory.

As special advisor to Admiral DuGalle, Duran helped the UED steal a fleet of Dominion battlecruisers at the Dylarian Shipyards and accompanied the fleet to Tarsonis, where his research team located the psi disrupter, a lost Confederate weapon capable of scrambling zerg communication. Duran argued for its destruction so it could not jeopardize the UED plan to enslave the Second Overmind, overruling Stukov's wish to turn it against the zerg, and was ordered to demolish it personally.

The turncoat#

When the UED pursued Mengsk and his rescuers to Aiur, Duran and Stukov were assigned to guard the flanks against the zerg. As the warp gate activated and roused the Swarm, Duran's forces were out of position, and he claimed communications difficulties had kept him from receiving Stukov's warnings; the resulting chaos let Mengsk and Jim Raynor escape. Stukov, growing suspicious, secretly had the psi disrupter reassembled, and Duran convinced DuGalle that Stukov was the traitor, winning authorization to execute him. Duran shot Stukov and moved to trigger the disrupter's self-destruct, but a dying Stukov persuaded DuGalle that Duran was the real traitor, and the UED shut the self-destruct down.

Duran escaped to join the zerg. After the UED used the disrupter to weaken the Swarm and claim the Second Overmind on Char, Duran reappeared at Sarah Kerrigan's side, presenting her to DuGalle before the two withdrew under cover of a mutalisk swarm. As consort and advisor to Sarah Kerrigan, he offered her the same kind of cunning counsel he had given the UED, helping her turn on her allies, kidnap the matriarch Raszagal from Shakuras, and bring about the death of the Second Overmind. Once the cerebrates were destroyed and the zerg reverted to Kerrigan's direct control, Duran quietly disappeared.

The hybrid project#

Duran traveled to a dark moon, where he and a team of mercenaries worked on a protoss-zerg hybridization project at the behest of a far greater power. The dark templar Zeratul, investigating protoss energy signatures there, discovered the work and confronted Duran beside a stasis cell holding a successful specimen. Duran revealed himself to be many millennia old, the bearer of many names across those ages, and called the hybrid the completion of a cycle whose role had been ordained when the stars were young. To the preserver Zamara, however, his work was a perversion that would loose a monstrous power upon the universe.

In the years that followed, the xel'naga took the guise of Doctor Emil Narud, a white-haired man with a soft German accent, and was made head of the Terran Dominion Hybrid Breeding Program, building Skygeirr Station atop a xel'naga temple to breed hybrid with Dominion support. He befriended the aspiring archaeologist Valerian Mengsk, who came to regard him as a genius on the zerg and xel'naga, and together they founded the Moebius Foundation and built the secret laboratory Space Station Prometheus. Narud also infested Stukov on a scale no zerg could achieve, later imprisoning and experimenting on him at Skygeirr. Above all, he devised a plan to modify the xel'naga relic called the Keystone so that it would convert the mutagen within Sarah Kerrigan into the energy needed to resurrect Amon.

The Second Great War#

Narud's Moebius Foundation hired Tychus Findlay and Jim Raynor to recover the pieces of the xel'naga artifact, never telling them or the Tal'darim who guarded most of the pieces that the device was essential to reviving his master. When Kerrigan attacked the Foundation's campus on Tyrador VIII, Narud asked Raynor to purge the data cores, warning that the fate of the sector hung on keeping the artifact's locations from her. After the device de-infested Kerrigan at Char, hybrid stationed nearby collected the released energy.

When Raynor and Valerian fled with the de-infested Kerrigan, they brought her to Narud at Space Station Prometheus on account of his reputation as a zerg expert. Narud's repeated attempts to examine her and his efforts to conceal the station roused the rebels' suspicion, and Kerrigan found his psionic resonance unsettlingly familiar without recognizing him. A dinner meeting turned into an ambush as Narud was revealed to be in contact with Arcturus Mengsk; he loosed hybrid against the rebels, then cloaked, seized the artifact, and escaped. He went on to resurrect Amon at Atrias.

Skygeirr and the Void#

In the final stages of the war, Kerrigan led the Swarm against Skygeirr Platform at the urging of an escaped Alexei Stukov. Narud told her she was not welcome and awoke his hybrid to kill everything, taunting her that the Swarm was a broken tool fit only for the scrap heap. He held his best Tal'darim troops in reserve and drove a null zone beam against her, but his power slipped as Stukov deactivated the temples amplifying it. As Kerrigan entered Amon's temple, Narud caught her off guard by taking the form of Jim Raynor, then shifted into Kerrigan's own human form and impaled her on a psi blade; she answered by fatally wounding him with her wings. With his dying breath he revealed that Amon was alive and that she would see him soon.

Narud survived even this and returned to the Void, where he served as jailer to the xel'naga Ouros. When Sarah Kerrigan, Raynor, Stukov, and Artanis led a joint invasion of the Void to destroy Amon, they cornered him at last. Stukov stepped forward, asked whether Narud remembered what he had done to him on Braxis, named him Duran, and told him he had come to say goodnight before destroying him with a psychic blast. This time the death was permanent.

Nature and abilities#

Duran considered himself superior to other beings and manipulated them to his own ends, a condescension he let show only when he chose to drop his mask; even the zerg he dismissed as a broken tool. As Narud he could feign earnest humility whenever a role demanded it, and his knowledge of tactics made him invaluable to every commander he served. Few ever knew his true nature: Kerrigan did not learn who he was until shortly before the Second Great War, and Zeratul grew suspicious only after meeting him on the dark moon. As a xel'naga he was a powerful and vastly intelligent shapeshifter, able to generate a null zone and survive its effects, to throw psionic bolts and form a psi-blade without any device to focus it, and to endure wounds that would have killed a lesser being.