Zagara: the broodmother who rebuilt worlds

Zagara was the first of the zerg broodmothers and, in time, the Overqueen of the entire Swarm. Created on Char by Sarah Kerrigan, she served as Kerrigan's second-in-command through the campaign against the Terran Dominion and the war against Amon before inheriting supreme command of the zerg. A tough, merciless, and ambitious creature who believed wholly in the old ways of the Swarm, Zagara changed deeply after the End War, turning the zerg toward peace and the rebuilding of ruined worlds. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm; StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft: Evolution)

Creation and the contest for Char#

Zagara was created on Char by Sarah Kerrigan, the first broodmother the Queen of Blades made, mutated from a queen before the Second Great War. She came to see Char as the forge of zerg evolution. After Kerrigan was made human again and taken by Raynor's Raiders, Zagara struck out on her own, establishing her brood in the Acid Marsh and seeking to reunite the leaderless Swarm under herself. She rallied the feral zerg of Char and held out against General Horace Warfield's forces, but a lack of tactical experience kept her from victory. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

When Kerrigan returned to Char, Zagara challenged her authority, judging the now human-looking Kerrigan unworthy to lead. She was unprepared for Kerrigan to command more zerg than she could, and her colony was destroyed; pleading that she had only done as she was told, to be strongest and lead by force of will, she was spared and forgiven. Kerrigan then sought her counsel on driving Warfield from the Dauntless Plateau. Frustrated by Zagara's inability to grasp larger strategy, Kerrigan sent her to Abathur to have the size and complexity of her brain increased. The treatments were unpleasant but effective, raising her intelligence enough to understand Kerrigan's lessons, and enough to recognize that she was not yet ready to rule the Swarm. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

Rebuilding the Swarm#

Through the campaigns that followed, Zagara served as Kerrigan's lieutenant and a steady voice for the old ways. On the icy moon of Kaldir she boasted that her brood alone could topple Arcturus Mengsk, dismissing terrans as weak, and was confounded when Kerrigan showed mercy and restrained her sadistic urges, learning that to a leader everything and everyone was a tool to be used for the right task. On Zerus she was unimpressed by the homeworld of the zerg and defended Kerrigan from primal attack as the Queen entered a chrysalis to be reborn as the Primal Queen of Blades. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

At Skygeirr Platform she sensed the closed mind of the infested Alexei Stukov and suspected outside help behind the station's advanced defenses, help that proved to be the shapeshifter Emil Narud. After Kerrigan slew Narud but was gravely wounded, Zagara and Izsha watched over her recovery, and Zagara told her she would lead the Swarm until Kerrigan healed; asked why she did not simply take it, she answered, with her sharpened mind, that she was still not ready. She continued at Kerrigan's side through the rescue of Jim Raynor and into the assault on Korhal, marshaling the broodmothers, breaching Augustgrad, and holding the center against the Dominion's Psi Destroyer until Arcturus Mengsk was killed. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

Inheriting the Swarm#

In the End War against Amon, Zagara commanded zerg forces among Kerrigan's allies, and in the final invasion of the Void she joined Jim Raynor and Artanis in defending Kerrigan as she absorbed the essence of the xel'naga Ouros to ascend. With the defense secured and Kerrigan made xel'naga, Kerrigan gave Zagara permanent command of the Zerg Swarm, telling her to remember the lessons she had been taught. After the war Zagara stood as supreme ruler of the Swarm and laid forceful claim to Char and its surrounding systems. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft: Evolution)

The Overqueen and the turn to peace#

Kerrigan left Zagara two gifts: the freedom for the Swarm to choose a destiny beyond mindless slaughter, and the location of a sentient race whose form could house xel'naga essence. Zagara salvaged what xel'naga essence she could from Ulnar and set Abathur to combining it with the compatible species, creating the adostra, dormant creatures able to seed worlds with rapid new life. Styling herself Overqueen, she tested the adostra on Gystt, a planet the Protoss Empire had purified in the Great War, and regrew the dead world into a jungle. (StarCraft: Evolution)

The revitalization drew the Daelaam under Artanis, who arrived prepared to purge the world. Zagara had hoped for this, and sent the creature Mukav to ask Valerian Mengsk for aid; the two fleets met, and Zagara explained that her purposes were genuine and offered to share the adostra's power to heal the ailing reconstruction efforts of both races. The talks were repeatedly broken by attacks from an unknown breed, the chitha, which destroyed nests of adostra, and an infuriated Zagara took an aggressive stance even as Abathur denied any knowledge of the creatures. The conflict became the One-Day War. When a survey team traced the chitha to Abathur, hidden aboard her leviathan, Zagara confronted him; he named her creation of the adostra an abomination and a betrayal of the Swarm, and in the fight that followed his forces were defeated and Mukav killed. Enraged, Zagara tore the evolution master limb from limb but left him alive, carrying his broken body with her because the Swarm still needed him. With the war over she turned again toward peace talks with the Dominion and Daelaam, though she soon sensed the renegade broodmother Niadra and knew that her presence would threaten the fragile peace. (StarCraft: Evolution; StarCraft II: Shadow Wars)

Nature and change#

Zagara was tough, merciless, tenacious, and ambitious, as vicious and resilient as any creature in the Swarm and possessed of great cunning. She was convinced of the inferiority of other intelligent species, a contempt only hardened by the years she spent uniting the feral broods of Char, and she believed in the old ways of the Swarm above all. She held protoss-zerg hybrids to be abominations, disliked the cold emptiness of space, and scorned Dehaka and the primal zerg for standing apart from the Swarm. Yet after being named Overqueen and given the choice of a different path, her character shifted markedly; she came to desire a lasting peace and to remake the image of the zerg by helping rebuild what their wars had destroyed, showing patience and courtesy in negotiation. The change made her no less fierce, as her rage over the destroyed adostra and her violent reckoning with Abathur made plain. (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm; StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void; StarCraft: Evolution)