Narud

Narud was a xel'naga in the service of the fallen dark god Amon, a shapeshifter who wore many names and faces across the millennia. The terran agent Samir Duran and the scientist Dr. Emil Narud were but two of the identities he used to bend the wars of the Koprulu sector toward a single end: the return of his master and the creation of the protoss-zerg hybrid. Long after Amon was banished to the Void, Narud worked to manipulate the terran, protoss, and zerg into conflict so that the ashes of their wars could be turned to his master's purpose.

The devoted servant#

Narud was the devoted servant of Amon, and he labored to resurrect his master for millennia after the dark god died. When Amon and the xel'naga loyal to him were defeated and banished to the Void, Narud survived and set about carrying out his master's plans on his own. His aim was for the protoss to be assimilated by the zerg so that the hybrid could be created, and to gather the energies of an ancient xel'naga keystone powerful enough to draw Amon back from the Void.

He considered himself superior to other beings, and that condescension showed through whenever he set aside his disguises. His low opinion extended even to the zerg, which he regarded as a broken tool fit only for the scrap heap. He was a vastly intelligent and powerful being, knowledgeable about both zerg biology and protoss technology, able to generate a null zone and survive being struck by it, to throw psionic bolts, to form a psi-blade without any focusing device, and to change his shape at will.

Samir Duran#

For much of the early conflict Narud wore the guise of Samir Duran, a terran soldier who claimed to have served in Alpha Squadron before Arcturus Mengsk brought down the Terran Confederacy. Sensing the shift in power, Duran took command of a small commando unit called 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 at Braxis, Duran observed the attack and then offered his services to Vice Admiral Alexei Stukov. Stukov accepted the offer out of shared enmity, though he remained suspicious of the newcomer. Duran won over Admiral Gerard DuGalle and rose to special advisor, offering sound tactical counsel through the UED campaign. He advised the destruction of the recovered Confederate psi disruptor, lest its capture jeopardize the UED plan to enslave the second Overmind, and helped plan the assault on Korhal.

Duran was a traitor to the UED from the start. On Aiur he allowed Mengsk and Jim Raynor to escape through the warp gate, claiming communications failures had kept him from receiving Stukov's warnings. When Stukov secretly had the psi disruptor reassembled, Duran convinced DuGalle that the vice admiral was the real traitor and was authorized to execute him. Duran shot Stukov and moved to trigger the disruptor's self-destruct, but the dying Stukov warned DuGalle that Duran was the true traitor and possibly infested, and the UED shut the countdown down in time.

Duran escaped to the zerg and reappeared as the infested consort of Sarah Kerrigan, introducing her to DuGalle before the two slipped away under a swarm of mutalisks. He counseled Kerrigan through her campaign against the UED, suggesting she strike her allies while they rested and devising the diversion at Talematros that let her seize Matriarch Raszagal from Shakuras. Once Raszagal had been used to bait Zeratul into slaying the new Overmind, Duran quietly disappeared.

The dark moon and the hybrid#

Duran traveled to a dark moon, where he and a team of clandestine mercenaries worked on a protoss-zerg hybridization project at the behest of what he called a far greater power. He spoke of the hybrid as the completion of a cycle whose role in the cosmic order had been preordained when the stars were young.

Zeratul found the project while investigating protoss energy signatures on the moon. Duran uncloaked before a stasis cell holding a finished specimen and spoke with the dark prelate, claiming to be many millennia old and to have worn many names. The encounter deepened the mystery of who Duran truly was, and left Zeratul horrified at what was being made. The preserver Zamara would later judge Duran's work a perversion, warning that a successful unification of protoss and zerg would loose a monstrous power upon the universe.

Dr. Emil Narud#

In the years before the Second Great War, the xel'naga adopted the identity of Dr. Emil Narud, presenting himself as a white-haired man of middle age with a soft accent. He was made head of the Terran Dominion Hybrid Breeding Program, combining protoss and zerg genetic material to create alien supersoldiers with technology far beyond terran reach. He built Skygeirr Station atop a xel'naga temple and bred more hybrid there with Dominion backing. Central to his scheme was a plan to modify a xel'naga relic, the keystone, so that it could convert the zerg mutagen in Kerrigan and her Swarm into energy enough to resurrect Amon.

Narud befriended Valerian Mengsk, the aspiring archaeologist and heir to the Dominion, who came to believe him a genius on the zerg and the xel'naga. Together they founded the Moebius Foundation and designed Space Station Prometheus, a hidden laboratory in the Kirkegaard Belt where Narud continued his hybridization work. He let Valerian know the experiments existed, but never how far they had advanced. Narud was also responsible for the suffering of Alexei Stukov, who was re-infested in his custody and experimented upon personally at Skygeirr Station.

The Second Great War#

When the Second Great War came, the Moebius Foundation hired Tychus Findlay and Jim Raynor to recover the pieces of the xel'naga device, in defiance of a Dominion ban on trading alien artifacts. As Raynor's forces gathered the components, they clashed with Kerrigan's Swarm and the Tal'darim, who held many of the pieces. When Kerrigan struck the Foundation's research campus on Tyrador VIII, Narud asked Raynor to purge the data cores so she could not learn where the remaining artifact pieces lay, warning that the fate of the sector could hang on it.

The war's first phase ended with Kerrigan's defeat and de-infestation at Char by the assembled device. Hybrid waiting nearby collected the energy released, which would later serve to resurrect Amon. Seeking a zerg expert, Raynor and Valerian brought the de-infested Kerrigan to Narud at Space Station Prometheus. His repeated attempts to examine her and his secrecy about the station unsettled the rebels, and Kerrigan found his psionic resonance hauntingly familiar without placing it.

Narud's hospitality was a trap. He had repair teams sabotage the rebels' ships and had their scientist Egon Stetmann seized, then sprang an ambush at a dinner meeting where he was revealed to be in contact with Arcturus Mengsk. The ambush failed, Kerrigan and her protectors escaped with Stetmann, and Narud fled the station with the artifact, narrowly escaping fire from the Raiders. He carried the relic to Atrias, a Tal'darim world, and there resurrected Amon.

Skygeirr and the Void#

In the final stage of the Second Great War, Kerrigan led the Swarm against Skygeirr Station at the call of an escaped Alexei Stukov. Narud told her she was not welcome and woke a host of hybrid, declaring the Swarm a broken tool fit only for the scrap heap. As Stukov deactivated the five temples amplifying his power, Narud's strength faltered. He drove a null zone beam at Kerrigan, held the Tal'darim in reserve in the station's depths, and in their final clash took the form first of Raynor and then of Kerrigan's old human self, impaling her on a psi blade. Kerrigan struck back and mortally wounded him. With his dying breath Narud revealed that Amon lived and that she would see him soon.

Narud was not finished. He withdrew to the Void, where he served as jailer of the xel'naga Ouros. When Kerrigan, Raynor, Stukov, and Hierarch Artanis led a joint invasion into the Void to destroy Amon, they fought through void shades and cornered him. Stukov stepped forward, named him Duran, and asked if he remembered what had been done on Braxis. When Narud assumed he had come to gloat, Stukov answered that he had come only to say goodnight, and destroyed him with a psychic blast. This time the death was permanent.