The Xel'naga were a most peculiar race.
They dwelled in the void, their very essence binding them there. They could not easily leave, only sending avatars across rifts into realspace to walk among mortals.
Yet paradoxically, their continuation relied on the beings of realspace.
Whenever a new universe was born, they sent their avatars within to sow the seeds of life. From among those countless species, they would choose two destined lineages: one of pure flesh, one of pure spirit.
At the appointed time, the Xel'naga would awaken. They would unite flesh and spirit, and the eldest of their kind would pour its essence into them, birthing new Xel'naga.
Until such successors were chosen, each Xel'naga possessed eternal life. Which meant, with every new ascension, an elder would perish.
This they called their mission—the Infinite Cycle.
But was this not endless toil, only to stand still?
Selene admitted herself a vulgar soul. Compared to the Xel'naga's billions of years birthing one heir, she was a parvenu who rose through violent conquest. Her vision was shallow; she could not sympathize with their creed.
She chose to see it instead as a way of replenishing bloodlines, keeping the race from stagnating.
And so, the Cycle went well enough. Until, whether from senility or blindness, one elder chose Amon—a traitor.
And thus the Xel'naga were undone.
Long ago, Amon had been a mere mortal of some newborn universe, a bright youth among his people.
By fortune, his civilization had attained both purity of essence and form, and so, in that Cycle, he was chosen and ascended as a proud new Xel'naga.
But in the course of his duty, regret took root.
For a Xel'naga's true body could not easily act within realspace. Their avatars slumbered in Ulnar's rift-temple, amassing strength. And so, across aeons of sleep, his homeworld and his people perished.
This was a fate every Xel'naga must endure. Wake too soon, and strength would fail.
Amon did. He awoke early. His despair at being unable to save his home consumed him. All he had known was lost forever. Across endless Cycles, he was reduced to a bystander to the universe's growth. His sorrow curdled into hate. He resolved to unmake it all.
For a time, he sought to feel the ecstasy of godhood. In his arrogance, while his kin slumbered, Amon descended upon Aiur, homeworld of the Protoss. He walked among them, gifting them technology, teaching them to shape psionics, posing as their god and teacher.
But the price of waking early grew.
His power waned. To sustain himself, he began drawing energy directly from the Protoss. Disappearances and deaths spread among them. At last, he discarded all pretense, openly draining their psionic essence.
The Protoss rebelled.
Amon departed Aiur, but his meddling left scars: the Protoss fell into their brutal Aeon of Strife.
Though it did not wound him in flesh, it twisted his already proud and sensitive soul further into corruption.
Weary of the Cycle, disgusted by his duty, Amon grew obsessed with ending it all. He would destroy flesh, destroy spirit, destroy the Xel'naga themselves.
He turned to Zerus, birthplace of the Zerg, and began his work. He gave them the psionic link, akin to the Khala. Through this, he created the Overmind. The altered Zerg, bound by psionic signal, obeyed its will eternally.
And to the Overmind, Amon gave a single supreme command—devour the Protoss.
Thus began the war of Zerg and Protoss.
On Zerus, only a small fraction of Zerg sensed Amon's designs and hid themselves away. These Zerg, free of the psionic link, became known as the "Primal Zerg." It was this very lineage of power Kerrigan later mastered as the Primal Queen of Blades.
At last, the psionic disturbances wrought by Amon's actions awakened some slumbering Xel'naga. They discovered his betrayal and descended upon Zerus to confront him.
Feigning negotiation, Amon instead launched a treacherous ambush. He commanded the Zerg to strike, ensnaring his kin and consuming their avatars.
Though armed with layered stratagems against his own kind, outnumbered, Amon's avatar in realspace was ultimately destroyed. Both he and the others were banished back into the void.
Fortresses fall fastest from within.
And betrayal from one's own cuts deepest.
Amon, being Xel'naga, knew their flaws and essence better than any. As a fallen one, he exploited them ruthlessly. His targeted alterations of the Zerg ensured that those Xel'naga consumed by the swarm would have their true void-bodies left weakened beyond measure.
Waiting patiently, he struck. Amon slew all of his kin within the void, save one: the eldest and mightiest, Oros. Exhausted and unwilling to perish together, he imprisoned Oros and stole his power.
Devouring the essence of his fallen kin, Amon lay in wait, gathering strength, trusting in the contingencies he had sown in realspace to restore his destroyed avatar, and one day return to annihilate the cosmos.
Until Selene arrived.
To Amon, this foreign "outer god," whose lust for destruction surpassed even his own, was a curiosity. He wanted to see how she would breach realspace. If she forced her way in and shattered the universe in doing so, he would rejoice.
As for his so-called responsibility as creator and shepherd of lesser races? He had long since cast it away.
But Selene did not act as he expected.
Bzzzzm—!
A brilliance blazed across the starless void.
"Every harvest demands its price. Everything in existence is weighed and measured. To gain, one must pay. How can you not grasp so simple a truth, Amon?"
A pale hand lifted a writhing hybrid creature. Its chitin bore streaks of violet and brown; its pallid skin was fissured like dead bark. It thrashed desperately.
The silver-haired, crimson-eyed woman smiled faintly. Snap.
It was crushed, annihilated at temperatures beyond a stellar core, reduced to ash at the atomic level—cleaner than any cleansing flame.
"I must say, Amon, your sense of aesthetics is atrocious."
The void where the Xel'naga had dwelled knew no stars, no worlds. Only tides of scarlet psionics, crimson lightning weaving across all, and drifting boulders, remnants of some ancient upheaval.
And yet not barren. Over aeons, the seeds once sown by the Xel'naga had borne fruit. But under Amon's "care," all life was twisted.
He despised it all.
Those seeds became nothing but experiments. Guided evolution gave way to perverse proliferation. The void hybrids—abominations of Protoss and Zerg—became its only denizens.
Selene raised her gaze toward the nightmare landscape before her.
"Spare me your pitiful sentiment."
A colossal shadow roared, its voice a twisted, maddened retort.
At their level, words were unnecessary. Will alone was enough to convey meaning.
Selene smirked coldly. She could feel Amon's lingering yearning for his homeworld, his buried grief. But it did nothing to lessen her contempt.
Promotion and power he welcomed, but duty he rejected—was that it?
At the very brink of ascension, at the Cycle's turning, Amon had promised. He had sworn to uphold his duty. Otherwise, the elder Xel'naga would never have entrusted him with their essence.
So why did only you, Amon, turn your back? Why accept eternal life, only to shatter the covenant that granted it?
Every Xel'naga had endured the same bargain. They accepted what you denied. Your excuses, to Selene, were nothing but pretexts.
The Xel'naga's extinction was a perfect lesson in Heaven's blindness: the noble slain, the vile triumphant.
"Amon, to me you are but an opportunist and a coward. Thank you. Your tale taught me one truth—trust must never be given lightly."
Her words roused a roar, heavy with rage, rolling through the void, as though all the heavens lent it weight.
"You would pose as savior of the Xel'naga? Laughable!"
WHOOOM—!
Beams of annihilating psionics tore forth, devastating in energy and frequency, every lance bearing the taste of cosmic doom. They streaked across impossible distances, warping law itself.
Selene stood tall, unmoved. "A savior? And why not?"
Call her fallen if he wished. But here, amid this wailing void, she blazed like a sunlit goddess—radiant, resplendent, beautiful, blinding.
Even her outline shone with aureate brilliance, glorious beyond words.
It was why she loved wielding the power of strong-force control. For who had ever said the sun was a symbol of evil?
Shall we, then, parade our visages before the cosmos? Broadcast a battle of gods live across the stars?
Selene eyed Amon's corpulent form—like some bloated fish drifting in the sea of void.
A swollen head like an octopus, bristling with tendrils, no neck, vague traces of humanity, multifaceted eyes, a body obese and gelatinous, slick with piscine traits…
Selene nodded to herself. Yes. Anyone who mistook her for the evil god, and not this thing, was a lunatic. The sort of lunatic to be sentenced to lifelong mining duty—or a firing squad.
Then the psionic beams winked out. Like pencil lines across a draft, however vivid, however fierce—one sweep of the eraser, and they were gone. Along with the "army" Amon had so meticulously prepared.
A pitch-black rift tore into being, enveloping the hybrids. In an instant, both they and the space they occupied ceased to exist.
The void fell silent. As though nothing had ever been.
An emptiness more dreadful than death.
"I know you. Your stench. You are no warrior of light, no savior. You are a hypocrite… a butcher. A fallen one more twisted than I."
"As are you."
So said every foe she had ever crushed: tyrant, destroyer, monster. Their curses wore grooves in her ears.
Every colony with powers beyond the mundane—whether by her hand or her legions'—laid their hatred at her feet. It was why her aura, restrained or not, stank of annihilation to those strong enough to perceive it.
Selene bore the burden lightly. Debts of blood meant nothing to one already drowning in them.
Even as she split her mind—reading the Terran Empire's databases, handling governance through her avatar—she lifted a finger. Hiss.
Threads aligned. Your mission ends here.
Bound to the void, your will endures so long as it does? Then I will shatter the void itself.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK—!
A storm of thunderous force erupted. Across the black veil of the void, as though a colossal scythe had fallen, a rift split open. It yawned wide, expanding, collapsing, as blood and screams poured forth unending.
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