Rohana: the last grand preserver

Rohana was a grand preserver of the protoss and one of three sisters who kept the memories and emotions of their entire species bound within the Khala. She and her sisters conceived the arkships, persuaded the Conclave to bury them beneath the cities of Aiur, and then entered stasis aboard those vessels to wait for a catastrophe none of them expected to survive. She alone woke. Roused in 2506 by Hierarch Artanis aboard the Spear of Adun, Rohana became the war council's living archive during the End War, a bitter critic of the Daelaam that had replaced the empire she remembered, and the single vessel through which Amon spoke to his enemies.

Three sisters and the memory of a species#

Rohana served in the era of the Protoss Empire, during the Golden Age of Expansion, as one of three grand preservers. She and her sisters Orlana and Shantira held every memory and every emotion of the protoss connected to the Khala, a burden that made them less advisors than the living record of the race itself. Even before her long sleep Rohana was ancient, having lived well beyond the thousand year span usual to her kind, and her expertise ran toward military matters rather than the quieter sciences.

The founding disaster of her life's work was an oversight. Two motherships were caught in the gravity well of a neutron star, their khaydarin crystals failed, and both craft were destroyed with more than eight thousand protoss aboard. That a small error could erase so many at a stroke offended the sisters' sense of what the empire owed its people. They resolved to build a bulwark against the random tragedy, something that would carry the protoss through a calamity no fleet could stop.

The arkships#

Working with scientists of the Khalai Caste, the grand preservers designed and built the first arkship, a vessel larger than a zerg leviathan and capable of holding thousands of protoss in stasis, manufacturing squadrons of warcraft daily and waging a prolonged war entirely on its own. Its systems carried redundancy upon redundancy, and a synthetic star at its solar core could power it for centuries. The ship was christened the Spear of Adun. Two more followed over the centuries after, the Memory of Nezin and the Pride of Altaris.

The sisters had advised three, on the reasoning that failsafes themselves require failsafes. When a judicator of the Conclave asked how many more the empire should lay down, Rohana argued at first for many. Years of reflection changed her answer entirely. Reviewing all the memory she held, she concluded the arkships had been built too early, and that the nature of her people would see them spent preemptively against a threat rather than held back for the moment after the worst had already happened.

She and her sisters carried that conclusion to the Conclave and won the argument. The three arkships were buried in vast launch bays cradled beneath cities of Aiur, each holding thousands of templar in stasis. The grand preservers went into the ships with them, accepting that they would not all live to be revived, so that whoever uncovered an arkship in the empire's darkest hour would find a preserver waiting to guide them. On the day Rohana entered the Spear of Adun she was seized by a certainty she could not shake: that she alone would wake.

Awakening beneath Aiur#

She was right. The Memory of Nezin and the Pride of Altaris were destroyed during the fall of Aiur, and their preservers with them. Only the Spear of Adun beneath Khor-shakal survived intact, and Rohana slept on through the Great War, the exile on Shakuras and the founding of the Daelaam.

Artanis woke her in 2506, in the middle of the reclamation of Aiur, after Amon had returned and turned the Khala into a leash. Rohana learned of her sisters' deaths and carried on. Offered the severing that had freed the rest of the crew, she refused. She would remain connected and hold Amon back herself, she said, because the Khala was the only thing that had ever made the protoss one people. Artanis accepted the risk while warning her plainly that corruption would mean her execution, and she took her place in the war council, calling on the memory of the race to advise him.

The critic in the war council#

The Daelaam that Rohana woke into was not the empire she had recorded. She said so, often. She spoke openly against the Nerazim serving aboard the ship, against the terrans Artanis courted as allies, whom she regarded as primitive and lesser, and above all against the purifiers. When the fleet approached Endion she protested the reawakening of the ancient machines on the grounds that they had turned on the protoss once already. Fenix answered that anything would turn on what it saw as a slavemaster. Artanis released the stasis field around Cybros regardless and took the purifiers into his alliance, and Rohana's role drifted from councilor toward dissenter.

Amon made the cost of her refusal plain. After the siege of Korhal he took her and used her mouth to speak to Artanis directly. She insisted she could hold him, and Artanis had her sealed in a stasis pod rather than let him loose in the ship. At Ulnar she was awed by the scale of the xel'naga construct, a place she had known only as myth, and there Amon took her again, using her to taunt Matriarch Vorazun with the destruction of the universe while Vorazun demanded he release the preserver.

Reading the enemy#

Amon's arrogance eventually cost him. During one of the possessions that followed the destruction of his hybrid breeding works, Rohana turned the connection back on him and looked into his memories. She saw that he had made the zerg and turned them against his own kin, that he meant to end the current cycle, and that he intended his kin's creations to suffer for it. She learned too that his host body was finished and that he would loose the Golden Armada the moment the Daelaam reached Aiur.

Artanis told her the link had proved invaluable and that it now had to end. Rohana formed a psi-blade and cut her own nerve cords, putting herself beyond Amon's reach. Perhaps, she allowed afterward, history did not need to be recorded with perfect clarity, nor with all the emotion that came bound to the memory.

Aiur reclaimed and the road to the Void#

During the second invasion of Aiur she coordinated the executors as they tore down the psionic matrix that would have handed Amon the Golden Armada. Artanis hesitated at the prospect of fighting fellow templar and persuading them to sever the Khala; Rohana told him he would manage it, since he had already managed her. She commanded the Spear of Adun through the defense of the Keystone as Amon was drawn out of the Khala, and the Golden Armada picked the arkship apart around her. Ship and preserver both survived, and Aiur passed back into Daelaam hands.

Two years later, when the Daelaam and their allies returned to Ulnar to carry the war into the Void itself, Amon's remaining servants tried to destroy the temple by overloading the celestial locks that held it stable. Rohana led the defense of the locks, holding open the door that the last grand preserver had spent an age of her people's history preparing them to walk through.