Ihan-rii: the protoss sect that slept for millennia and woke to reclaim Tyrador

The Ihan-rii are a fanatical sect of protoss who broke from their kindred millennia ago and have lived on the fringes of the Koprulu Sector ever since, worshipping the xel'naga and holding that they alone are their true descendants. Their name is Khalani for "Great Teachers", and their return from stasis in the years after the Second Great War put an ancient protoss claim on a world terrans had spent generations settling.

Who are the Ihan-rii?#

They are protoss warriors who left the rest of their species behind thousands of years ago and built a religion on the conviction that they are the sole heirs of the xel'naga, which is a claim no other kindred accepts. They observed the other protoss and the zerg for years and emulate much of their technology. They believe that if they fight with valor they too will reach godhood. Runes carved into their ships and walkers profess their devotion and loyalty and ward against heretics. Council elders rule them.

Their equipment is built from an animated semi-organic stone: light, durable, flexible and chemically inert, which makes it well suited to deep-space vessels. How the material is made stays inside their templar archives along with their religious texts. Repurposed xel'naga artifacts support the rest of it, among them dynamos and the relics they call nebula wells, and much of what they build runs on void energies. A few designs, their warp prisms and photon cannons included, were modeled after wildlife from their homeworld.

The religion reaches into individual lives. Early on, an Ihan-rii is bound to a void crystal attuned to their psionic signature, and at maturity that crystal is sharpened into a spearpoint. Dead warriors are entombed in sarcophagi resembling immortals, which carry their remains into battle. Many of them are still out in deep space, in stasis aboard their ships, waiting for a call that needs answering.

Why did the Ihan-rii come back to Tyrador?#

Their fleet drifted in stasis at the edge of the Koprulu Sector until a distress call from Zeratul reached them, and when they could not trace where it had come from they set course for their old capital instead. They had populated that world long ago and named it Arakyr. Terrans know it as Tyrador IX.

Many of the warriors needed time to get their bearings after so long asleep. The awakening by a signal from Zeratul is likely a nod to the Zeratul co-op commander, whose protoss are augmented with xel'naga technology and use a similar skin set.

The battle of Tyrador IX#

The Ihan-rii arrived to find their homeworld ruled by terrans and besieged by zerg under the Cerberus Program. A raven belonging to the Knights of Tyrador spotted the fleet, and the Knights sent a Behemoth-class battlecruiser out to parlay. The Ihan-rii answered with a group of oracles.

As the city of New Canaan fell, Ihan-rii ships blindsided the zerg attackers. The first ground landings went badly, with lurkers slaughtering the opening waves, but Cerberus mutalisks that had been overwhelming the Knights found the protoss ships a far tougher proposition. Together the two forces pushed the Cerberus zerg back.

Sharing a planet#

Afterward the Ihan-rii met the powers of the Koprulu sector in Tyrador command centers, where a number of factions tried to recruit them to political agendas. The settlement reached was a split planet: Tyrador IX shared between the Terran Dominion and the Ihan-rii, with borders drawn and terran mining allowed to continue. The protoss resettled, raised fleet beacons to call in any other remnants of their civilization, and mined void crystals at the southern pole. Their pylon network glowed brightly enough to be seen from orbit.

Then the resentment surfaced. Terrans had hunted several species of spiritual significance to the Ihan-rii to extinction, and terran development had dropped the air quality. Ihan-rii wandered into terran armories and claimed they had mistaken them for museums. A terran delegate visiting their settlement was messily vaporized by their gateways. Along a contested border, Knights of Tyrador factories exploded into glowing green craters for no reason anyone would state.

Both sides armed up while denying it. The Ihan-rii warped in robotic constructs and capital ships at speed and insisted the purpose was ceremonial, and they put up a shield battery network they described as defense against unruly wildlife. The Knights answered by reinforcing missile turrets and pushing their starports harder.

Symbols and skins#

The Ihan-rii symbol is the xel'naga carving from Ulnar with the central face swapped for a protoss one, which states the sect's whole argument in a single image. The symbol on the capes of their high templar is the one found on the xel'naga doors at Ulaan.

An Ihan-rii unit skin set was released in the BlizzCon 2019 War Chest, and a building skin set followed in War Chest 6. One oddity sits in the fiction: some of their units, adepts among them, are described as having slept for a long period, even though adepts were only created at the close of the Second Great War.