Sarah Kerrigan

Sarah Louise Kerrigan was a psychic terran female who stood at the center of nearly every major conflict of her era in the Koprulu sector. She began her career as a Confederate ghost, defected to become the second-in-command of Arcturus Mengsk's Sons of Korhal, and after Mengsk abandoned her on Tarsonis she was captured and infested by the Zerg Swarm. Reborn as the self-proclaimed Queen of Blades, she came to lead the Swarm, and by the close of the End War she had ascended to become a xel'naga. Her life was bound throughout to Jim Raynor, with whom she shared a relationship that survived even her transformation.

Ghost training and the Confederate years#

Sarah Kerrigan's latent powers first showed during an incident on TarKossia, where she accidentally killed her mother and damaged the brain of her father, Patrick. Confederate agents took her in hand from her mother's burial and conscripted her as a child into the Ghost Program. At eight years of age she scored so highly on the psi-evaluations that the Confederacy had to readjust its entire psionic power measurement scale to account for her.

During training, her most hated instructor was Lieutenant Rumm, who tried to break her sense of right and wrong and force her to demonstrate her powers. When she refused, a neuro-adjuster was employed to weaken her abilities and ensure her loyalty, leaving her withdrawn and introverted. She spent a year undergoing mental torture under Rumm. By the end of her conditioning the Confederacy had broken her down to the point where she could kill without remorse.

Designated Ghost No. 24601, Kerrigan assassinated many of the Confederacy's enemies, her conditioning leaving her physically unable to refuse a direct order from a Confederate superior. In 2489, when senator Angus Mengsk declared Korhal a free world, the Confederacy assigned a trio of ghosts to kill him and his family. Kerrigan was one of the three, and she personally decapitated Angus. She later participated in zerg experiments at the Fujita Facility on Vyctor 5, where the creatures were found to respond to telepathic commands when drugged and isolated.

Defection to the Sons of Korhal#

Arcturus Mengsk, leader of the Sons of Korhal and son of the man Kerrigan had killed, discovered through Umojan sources that she was held at Fujita. He organized a raid to retrieve her, though his soldiers were not told of her significance. By then she was the only experimental subject left alive. The rebels conveyed her unconscious to the battlecruiser Hyperion, removed her neural inhibitor, and woke her to a new life among the rebels.

Kerrigan came to believe in the Sons of Korhal cause, in part through her relationship with Somo Hung, whose parents had been among those killed when the Confederacy depopulated the Fringe Worlds to keep the xenomorphs secret. During an attack on Tarsonis she found Rumm, by then promoted to Major, and took her revenge for herself and for Hung, whom the major had killed. She also captured the third of the ghosts who had murdered Mengsk's family. To her horror, Mengsk revealed that her own role in his family's death made her the third such ghost, but he chose to keep her alive and useful, and her loyalty to him only deepened.

By 2499 her competence in the field was clear to all. She stirred anti-Confederate sentiment on Mar Sara, where she met UNN reporter Michael Liberty, and on Antiga Prime she linked up with Captain Jim Raynor. Their first meeting went badly, her telepathy sensing his less than pure thoughts, but over months of fighting together on Antiga Prime the two became a formidable team. When Mengsk ordered the use of a stolen psi-emitter to lure the zerg against the Confederates, Kerrigan planted it under protest, telling him she did not think anyone deserved to have the zerg unleashed on them.

Betrayal at Tarsonis and infestation#

Aboard Hyperion, Kerrigan and Raynor found themselves sharing doubts about what Mengsk was having them do, and their former antagonism gave way to friendship and then to a relationship. After a raid on a science facility on Orna III, the two grew close, and Kerrigan made Raynor promise that if the darkness in her ever went out of control, he would stop it.

When Mengsk's campaign reached Tarsonis, the Confederate capital, his forces planted psi-emitters that lured billions of zerg to the planet. Mengsk ordered Kerrigan to protect the primary zerg hive from the arriving protoss Expeditionary Force so the zerg could complete the Confederacy's destruction. She completed the mission but was overrun, and Mengsk callously refused to assist her troops, disengaging the rebel fleet from the system. He did so because of her political unreliability and his long-due vengeance for his family. The abandonment was the last straw for Raynor, who left the Sons of Korhal and attempted a rescue, but rising zerg activity forced him to withdraw before he could find her.

The Zerg Swarm captured Kerrigan. The Overmind, sensing her formidable psychic powers, saw in her both a weapon against the protoss and the key to the Swarm's salvation. Unwillingly implanted with a directive to destroy the protoss as part of the fallen xel'naga Amon's apocalyptic plan, the Overmind believed it could resist that control by infesting her. Kerrigan was placed within a chrysalis by the creature Abathur, a painful process that left her badly damaged, and taken to Char, where her telepathic powers reached out and contacted both Mengsk and Raynor. The psychic link with Raynor would persist.

The Queen of Blades#

Kerrigan emerged from her chrysalis as Raynor's Raiders attacked Char, adopting the title Queen of Blades and helping push the terrans back. She confronted Raynor and allowed him to leave. To break the ghost conditioning that still limited her, she raided the science vessel Amerigo for Ghost Program data, after which her abilities developed rapidly. Her impulsiveness allowed the Dark Templar Zeratul to infiltrate and slay the cerebrate Zasz, and she remained on Char to persecute the protoss after the Swarm departed for Aiur. When the Overmind was destroyed at the close of the war on Aiur, Kerrigan learned the true nature of her creation and knew the time for her ascension had come.

During the Brood War, with the Swarm scattered and a new Overmind growing under the cerebrate Daggoth, Kerrigan set out to rule the Swarm alone by eliminating the cerebrates. She seized control of the Dark Templar Matriarch Raszagal, manipulated the protoss of Shakuras into slaying her enemies, and killed the Judicator Aldaris when he tried to reveal her influence. During the United Earth Directorate invasion she assembled a coalition with Raynor, Fenix, and Mengsk against the UED, only to turn on them once the threat was beaten, killing Duke and Fenix. She forced Zeratul to destroy the new Overmind, then let him leave Char to live with his guilt after he slew Raszagal rather than leave her a slave. By the end of the Brood War, Kerrigan was the undisputed ruler of the zerg, alone on her platform and uneasily aware of a greater threat looming on the horizon.

Deinfestation, vengeance, and ascension#

In the years after the Brood War, Kerrigan quietly prepared the Swarm, unaware that a dark influence from Amon crept into her thoughts through the zerg mutagens within her. She created broodmothers to serve as sapient lieutenants and directed zerg evolution toward species with hyper-regenerative properties. When she sensed Zeratul searching for an ancient prophecy on Ulaan, the two sparred, and Zeratul came away with knowledge that she was the key to stopping Amon and his hybrids, intelligence he passed to Raynor with instructions to ensure her survival.

During the Second Great War, Kerrigan drove the Swarm into a massive invasion in pursuit of a disassembled xel'naga artifact. A joint Dominion and Raiders force under Valerian Mengsk and Raynor attacked Char, activating the artifact's energy wave to deinfest her and leave her more human than zerg. Raynor saved her from execution by killing his own friend Tychus Findlay, who had been sent by Arcturus Mengsk to assassinate her. Carried away from Char, Kerrigan recovered in stages aboard Dominion and Umojan facilities, her humanity and her powers returning together, while her grudge against Mengsk hardened into a need for vengeance.

When Mengsk faked Raynor's death and declared victory, Kerrigan embraced her darker nature and turned to the zerg to rebuild the Swarm. She reclaimed Char from the broodmother Zagara and from Dominion general Horace Warfield, and was restored as the Primal Queen of Blades. After learning Raynor was alive and held hostage, she rescued him from the prison ship Moros with the help of Valerian and Matt Horner. The Swarm then converged on Korhal. Kerrigan cut through the palace guard, confronted Mengsk in his office, and after Raynor destroyed the device the emperor used to disable her, she pinned him to the wall and killed him with a surge of psionic energy. By the end of the End War, having taken her revenge and faced the threat she had long sensed, Kerrigan ascended to become a xel'naga.