Samir Duran

Samir Duran and Emil Narud were two of the many names used over the millennia by a xel'naga in service to the fallen Amon. Long after his master's defeat, this shapeshifting being wove himself into the conflicts between terran, protoss, and zerg, taking guise after guise in pursuit of a single goal: to bring Amon back into the material universe and create the hybrid. His true nature was known to almost no one until shortly before his final death in the Void.

A xel'naga in many guises#

The being known as Duran was a devoted servant of Amon, laboring to resurrect his master for thousands of years after Amon died. He claimed to have served in Alpha Squadron before Arcturus Mengsk brought down the Terran Confederacy, and as the old order collapsed he took command of a small commando squad called the Confederate Resistance Forces, dedicated to striking at Mengsk and his new Terran Dominion. As Duran he spoke with a liquid accent, favored the C-10 rifle, and presented himself as dutiful and loyal, his knowledge of tactics making him invaluable to every commander he served. Few among his comrades would ever have believed the truth.

The Brood War and the betrayal of Stukov#

When the United Earth Directorate launched its first attack against the Dominion on Braxis, Duran offered his services to Vice Admiral Alexei Stukov. Stukov was suspicious but accepted, and Duran won the invaders a route to the back door of Boralis. As special advisor to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, Duran helped plan the theft of Dominion battlecruisers at the Dylarian Shipyards and the assault on Korhal, and pressed for the destruction of the psi disrupter, the lost Confederate weapon capable of crippling zerg communication. When Stukov secretly had the disrupter reassembled, Duran convinced DuGalle that the vice admiral was the traitor and was authorized to execute him. Duran shot Stukov and fled to activate the weapon's self-destruct, but a dying Stukov revealed to DuGalle that Duran was the real traitor, possibly infested, and the UED shut the self-destruct down.

Duran escaped to join the zerg, reappearing at Sarah Kerrigan's side to introduce her to a defeated DuGalle. As Kerrigan's consort and advisor he counseled her through the destruction of her former allies, the kidnapping of Matriarch Raszagal from Shakuras, and the manipulation of Zeratul into slaying the second Overmind. Once the Overmind and its cerebrates were gone and the sector's zerg had returned to Kerrigan's control, Duran quietly disappeared.

The hybrid experiments#

Duran traveled to a dark moon, where he and a team of mercenaries worked on a protoss-zerg hybridization project at the behest of, in his own words, a far greater power. He called the hybrid the completion of a cycle, a reference to the life cycle of the xel'naga, in which the ancient race regenerated itself by merging two species of purity of form and purity of essence. To the preserver Zamara, however, his work was a perversion, one that would set a monstrous fusion of protoss and zerg loose upon the universe. Zeratul discovered the project while tracing protoss energy signatures to the moon, and Duran uncloaked before a stasis cell holding a finished specimen to tell the Dark Prelate that he was many millennia old, had worn many names, and served a far greater power. The encounter left Zeratul deeply uneasy and marked the first time anyone suspected what Duran truly was.

Doctor Emil Narud#

Before the Second Great War, the xel'naga resurfaced as Dr. Emil Narud, head of the Dominion's Hybrid Breeding Program, and built Skygeirr Station atop a xel'naga temple to create more hybrids. He befriended Valerian Mengsk, who believed Narud a genius on the zerg and xel'naga, and the two founded the Moebius Foundation together. Narud devised a plan to modify the xel'naga relic called the Keystone so that it could convert the zerg mutagen within Kerrigan and her Swarm into energy enough to resurrect Amon. He also infested and experimented on the rescued Alexei Stukov, earning a hatred that would one day return for him.

Through the Moebius Foundation, Narud hired Tychus Findlay and Jim Raynor to recover the pieces of the Keystone, then maneuvered to keep the device from Kerrigan. At Space Station Prometheus he attempted to seize the artifact and the de-infesting Kerrigan by force, revealing his contact with Arcturus Mengsk before cloaking and fleeing with the relic. He used it to resurrect Amon at Atrias.

Death at Skygeirr and in the Void#

In the final stages of the Second Great War, Kerrigan led the Swarm against Skygeirr at the urging of an escaped Stukov. Narud awakened his hybrids and held the Tal'darim in reserve, driving a null zone beam at Kerrigan as five temples amplified his power. When Stukov deactivated the temples the null zone left Narud weakened and vulnerable. As Kerrigan entered Amon's temple, Narud caught her off guard by taking Raynor's form, then shifted to her own human shape and impaled her on a psi blade. Kerrigan answered by tearing into him with her wings, and with his dying breath Narud told her that Amon was alive and she would see him soon.

He was not yet finished. Narud returned to the Void, where he served as jailer to the xel'naga Ouros. When Kerrigan, Raynor, Stukov, and Hierarch Artanis led their joint invasion of the Void to destroy Amon, they cornered him there. Stukov stepped forward, named him Duran, and reminded him of Braxis. When Narud assumed he had come to gloat, Stukov answered that he had only come to say goodnight, and destroyed him with a psychic blast. This time his death was permanent.