Valerian Mengsk: the archaeologist emperor

Valerian Mengsk was the second Emperor of the Terran Dominion, succeeding his father, Arcturus Mengsk. A scholar and archaeologist by temperament, raised in hiding and groomed as a secret heir, Valerian forged an alliance with Jim Raynor to deinfest Sarah Kerrigan, broke with his father over her fate, and after Arcturus's death assumed the throne with a stated intention to rule free of the atrocities of the previous reign. His belief in liberty, inherited from his mother, set him in lasting contrast to the man he succeeded. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm; StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft: I, Mengsk)

A childhood in exile#

Valerian was born to Arcturus Mengsk, then a Confederate marine, and Juliana Pasteur, following their union on Tyrador IX. Juliana kept the pregnancy secret and raised her son alone on Umoja, teaching him for seven years what a great man his father was. He became a budding archaeologist, digging up "fossils" in the family garden, before Juliana finally allowed her father to contact Mengsk. (StarCraft: I, Mengsk)

The first meeting went poorly. Arcturus considered the boy weak, threw out his books, and tried to mold him in his own image, much as Angus had once done to Arcturus. When the Confederacy killed Arcturus's parents and sister, he ordered Valerian and Juliana into hiding, and for the next eleven years they moved from world to world under threat of Confederate assassins. In exile Juliana imparted her conviction that freedom and liberty were basic human rights, while Arcturus hired his old fencing instructor, Master Miyamoto, to train Valerian in combat and academics. Miyamoto declared Valerian his finest sword-fighting pupil. (StarCraft: I, Mengsk)

Heir apparent and the Moebius Foundation#

After the establishment of the Terran Dominion, Arcturus made his first official visit to Umoja to acknowledge Valerian as his heir, a visit nearly cut short when Confederate Resistance Forces under Captain Angelina Emillian attacked. Valerian fought at his father's side, shooting Emillian after Miyamoto sacrificed himself. Following the death of Juliana from cancer, father and son came to a measure of respect, and Valerian was brought to Korhal to be raised as the secret heir. (StarCraft: I, Mengsk; StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn)

Though groomed for the throne, Valerian carved out his own space. He chose the ghost Devon Starke as a gift, cultivated contacts among mercenaries and crime bosses, and invested heavily in a scientific foundation to study alien cultures, the Moebius Foundation, headed by Doctor Emil Narud. His passion for archaeology drew him into the hunt for xel'naga artifacts and the maverick scholar Jacob Ramsey, whose mind held a protoss preserver's knowledge. The pursuit set Valerian against his father's interests, as Arcturus sought to seize Ramsey's mind for himself, and taught Valerian to work around the emperor while pretending to obey. (StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn; StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Shadow Hunters; StarCraft: The Dark Templar Saga: Twilight; StarCraft II: Flashpoint)

The gambit for Kerrigan#

Learning of a prophecy that Sarah Kerrigan would play a vital role in a coming conflict, and of a device that might deinfest her, Valerian revealed himself to Jim Raynor as the secret owner of the Moebius Foundation. With Raynor holding a revolver to his head, Valerian offered the rebel his greatest desire: a chance to make Kerrigan human again. He claimed that reforming the worst mass murderer in history would prove him a worthy successor, and provided Raynor with battlecruisers and the location of the final Keystone component. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft II: Flashpoint)

Taking half the Dominion fleet to Char, Valerian was confronted by his father, who praised the plan but believed his son was in over his head and insisted Kerrigan could not be saved. The assault began disastrously but succeeded, and Kerrigan was deinfested. When Arcturus arrived with the battle-ready half of the fleet and demanded Kerrigan and Raynor be handed over for execution, Valerian refused, revealing his knowledge of the prophecy. The two halves of the Dominion fleet turned on each other. Through Raynor and Matt Horner's maneuvering and a feigned suicide ramming of his father's flagship, Valerian's ships escaped, and he sheltered the rebels and Kerrigan at a secret Umojan base. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)

Assuming the throne#

After his father's death and the departure of the zerg, Valerian assumed the throne. He immediately set about rebuilding the Dominion and enacting reforms, abolishing forced military conscription and slave labor, dissolving the resocialization program, and reforming the Ghost Program. He worked alongside Raynor and fought through the End War, repelling the Moebius Corps from Korhal, recovering the Keystone with the protoss Artanis, and dispatching Dominion forces under Raynor and Horner to aid Kerrigan against Amon. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft Field Manual)

With Amon defeated, Valerian and Horner guided the Dominion toward peace and prosperity, holding cooperative talks with the protoss and declaring in 2508 that open elections would be held. Yet his own past complicated the peace: he had kept secret his Moebius Foundation's hybrid breeding program, and when the Umojan Protectorate uncovered files linking him to it, he tasked Nova Terra with retrieving them, only to release the documents publicly afterward, declaring that the Dominion would no longer be founded on lies. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft: Evolution; Nova: The Keep)

Reign and its tensions#

Valerian proved a fair and just ruler, granting his people freedoms such as freedom of the press, but that same openness allowed his enemies to question him with impunity. The Defenders of Man Insurgency, led by his father's old ally General Carolina Davis, sought his downfall by luring feral zerg to Dominion worlds with psi-emitters and blaming his regime. Valerian orchestrated Davis's exposure and arrest through Nova, though Nova ultimately killed Davis against his direct order, and he chose to let the agent go. (StarCraft II: Nova Covert Ops)

By 2511 the Dominion faced famine and drought, and Valerian sought Umojan support while contending with new approaches from the Zerg Swarm under Overqueen Zagara. During the One-Day War on Gystt, Valerian risked diplomacy with both the zerg and the protoss, exposing Abathur's plot to provoke war and securing a foundation for peace. When a later skirmish on Adena threatened that peace and drove the protoss from negotiations, Valerian was left to wonder, amid a suspiciously convenient report, whether the peace he had won was real, his reign defined throughout by the constant effort to be a better and fairer ruler than his father. (StarCraft: Evolution; StarCraft II: Shadow Wars)