EPTThanks for reading - hope you enjoy it!
Prologue
Adrift in space and time and mind, Kerrigan floated.
She was vast, now: teeming, potent, poised. She bathed in the sight and scent and touch of her greater self, her mind diffused to the limit of coherence among the endless whorls of her legions.
She knew she could lose herself this way, the way she knew how far a limb could safely bend. Her memories would persist, and the once-human figure that blazed at the heart of this maelstrom of thought would live on, but that which defined her as Kerrigan would be gone. It had taken the Zerg to teach her what self truly was. Bodies changed. Memories were mutable. All any living thing could truly call its own was purpose. Surrender that and you surrender everything.
Her dissipating identity curdled. The torrential immediacy of the swarm abated, filtered and structured and abstracted through the silent masses of overlords clotting the Leviathan’s belly. No. Not yet. She floated higher now, a distinct will commanding a body of infinite bristling parts, and looked through its eyes at the world she had come to destroy.
Korhal hummed below her: concrete reflected in steel beneath a sky of ash. It was so human: a billion prisons to hold warmth and light, rather than adapt to the cold and dark. And now more tiny prisons were rising on columns of smoke, spitting shards that prickled and stung. It was time.
She embraced the Leviathan’s birth-joy, the apex of its labours. To bear the swarm between the stars in safety, feed it and keep it, and then disgorge it strong, healthy and eager upon a new world - the gigantic creature could know no greater ecstasy. She screamed with it, her voice lost in its all-enveloping, bone-shattering roar of triumph, as wave after wave of descent pods spewed from its sides and spiraled towards the earth.
She felt them burst on impact, their rudimentary lives complete. She felt Zerglings, like rivers joining to become a flood, racing and leaping and splashing from every surface, an indivisible tidal wave of ferocity. Nydus seeds sprouted, riddling the earth with their tendrils, absorbing, consuming, growing faster than a man could run. She felt the bright arrows of Hydra as they unfolded, their supremely streamlined intellect all speed, acuity and focus - and rising above them all like the clenched fists of God thundered the Ultralisks.
The Terrans were not powerless. Bullets hacked into flesh; shells blew bodies apart. The swarm knew ruin and death. But what was pain or fear when a billion minds rushed to share that burden? What mattered death when it put the jaws of those who ran beside around the enemy’s throat?
A lone Terran craft - a Viking, Kerrigan thought - its missiles expended uselessly upon the Leviathan’s comet-scarred carapace, dove to ground ahead of the charge in a final, desperate act of defiance. It had barely spun up its guns when an Ultralisk swatted it aside.
Even while the Viking’s mangled occupant still choked and struggled, a vision from the leading pack pricked her attention. A hasty stand had been mustered at the far side of a vast open plaza: rows of tanks and marines huddled in the shadow of a statue, an effigy of the very man who had brought her wrath down upon them. The scale of it dragged a laugh from her throat - was this how he saw himself? She allowed her body to be borne from the Leviathan and taken down into the city convulsing below. For some sights, only one pair of eyes would do.
Volley after volley of tank and rifle fire scythed through her ranks as she descended. She caressed each vital spark as it flickered and dimmed, reassuring, comforting, and drove the rest onward. It was not wasteful - there was no such thing as waste to the Zerg. All who died, Zerg or Terran, would live again as part of the swarm.
The Terran ranks faltered, fissured, dissolved. The farcical statue of Mengsk resisted a moment longer before it, too was driven under. Kerrigan dropped to earth, almost entirely within herself now, allowing her brood to fight over the scraps as it pleased, and as she did so the bruised sky to the west broke open. A Terran battlecruiser, engines burning and hull infested to overflowing, plunged with majestic finality into the city skyline. For a heartbeat, all turned to blinding light.
The first invasive rush was over, the battle won. Climbing easily over the dust-choked rubble of the fallen statue, Kerrigan surveyed her triumph. The plaza was a smoking ruin littered with corpses. More Terran bodies choked the streets beyond. Their flesh would be welcomed into the swarm to fight their friends and families. There was no vindictiveness in the thought, only irony.
They’re all so proud of their identity, she thought. Above all, that's why they hate and fear the Zerg. And what is the first thing they do when they are made afraid? They surrender their purpose to a man like Mengsk.
In amongst the dead she saw one marine with his gun jammed into the ruptured belly of the zergling that had decapitated him. If she concentrated she could recall the moment.
They are already the same, she thought. The only difference is that the Zerg knows it.
Somewhere in the city ahead of her, Mengsk waited, perhaps even still thinking he would prevail. She looked down at the toppled statue’s face. Perhaps she would offer him his life, if he could carry it away on his own back. That would be fitting. Perhaps...
The sense of the swarm was fading, slipping through her grasp. The edges of her vision blurred. Only Mengsk’s stern, proud features remained clear to the last.
Kerrigan awoke.
