The Zerg alone were not ready for the operation Kerrigan demanded of us. I sent messages to the Protoss and the Terrans as well, explaining the situation and requesting assistance. Valerian replied sulkily, saying that between our previous military conflicts, the assaults of the corrupted Golden Armada and Amon's other forces, and the loss of much of his workforce to voluntary infestation, his forces were too weak to aid us. His answer was unsurprising, as between the propaganda I had forced Dominion media to show praising us for saving the Terrans from Amon, our embassy on Korhal, and the repeated assurances of infested friends and loved ones who by now had come to enjoy their new lot in life, a significant percentage of Terrans had presented themselves to us for infestation. My cause was taking off. And Valerian had the unenviable job of trying to stem the bleeding of the Terran population without provoking either us Zerg or other factions of Terrans into another war. Still, we had Stukov's flagship and a ton of infested weaponry, along with infested volunteers with military experience to operate them, which was probably better than Terran help, all things considered.

And of course, Artanis responded to my call with honor, as I knew he would. He took the Spear of Adun and an army of volunteers, including most of those who had been corrupted by Amon and so had not had the chance to fight for the Protoss in the previous war, and warped to Ulnar to meet us.

Now I sat at the head of the Leviathan, mentally rehearsing my speech, Kerrigan at my side. She had wanted to make the Protoss wait for us in a childish display of power, but I saw no reason for that. Instead, I opened a channel to the Spear of Adun as soon as it arrived. I was met by the faces of Artanis and the female Protoss from that final battle. I had by this time learned that the female Protoss was named Selendis and had been Artanis' chief executor before being corrupted by Amon. Artanis' eyes were warm, but Selendis' suspicious.

Artanis spoke up immediately. "Friends, you requested our assistance against Amon? How can it be that he yet lives?"

"Trusting you deceivers is not an act I am accustomed to, " Selendis commented. "This better not be a trap. "

"Such little faith for a templar," Kerrigan smirked.

"I'm sure Artanis told you all about how the Zerg have proved themselves honorable allies now, Selendis." I answered calmly. "Without us, you wouldn't be here to be suspicious, so let's skip to the part where you realize the gravity of the situation and agree to help. "

Selendis scowled, but inclined her head to bid me to continue.

"Now, we threw Amon back into the Void at the end of that last battle, " I began my story. "But apparently that doesn't mean he was defeated. His hateful spirit festers within the Void, growing in strength by the day, planning to return once more. Maybe not in a Terran's lifetime, but eventually. I plan to secure eternity for my people, and that means we have to defeat him once and for all, in the Void, now when he's at his weakest. "

"And how do you know this?" Selendis asked, in a tone more accusatory than curious.

"I still hear his whispers, " Kerrigan answered. "And something else… a voice that is like his, but is not his. A voice tormented and desperate, but benevolent. It begs me to come, to destroy the fallen one. I intend to heed the call. But I want your help."

"That voice could be the great enemy's trickery, " Selendis warned. "Entering the void could be a trap."

I smiled at Selendis' paranoia. I guess it made sense that someone who had fallen into Amon's trap once and had her free will stripped away as a result would be wary of traps in the future, but one thing I'd learned in that last war was that Amon wasn't really capable of subtlety. He just liked to boast and throw armies at us, not unlike that Primal Zerg we fought on Zerus. Bragg, was it? Quite the descriptive name, would work just as well for Amon. Maybe instead of Selendis' "The Great Enemy" we should start calling Amon "The Great Braggart."

Anyway, while I got lost in my thoughts, Kerrigan replied. "I know how to tell the difference between psionic voices, Protoss, " she said, annoyed. "This voice is not Amon's, and Amon's voice is weak. The time to strike is now."

Selendis, not satisfied, looked to Artanis. Artanis closed his eyes and moved his chest like he was taking a deep breath. "Zeratul foresaw this day would come," Artanis announced cryptically, opening his eyes. "You have our blades."

I nodded. "Thank you, Artanis. I'll have my brood in Ulnar activate the portal. Stand by to follow us into the Void."

Part of me still didn't believe that there could really be a place called the "Void" that a portal could take us to, or if there were, that it could be anything more than deep space. But I trusted Kerrigan, and I'd seen enough impossible things already that a special dark realm where physics acted wonkily didn't seem so unbelievable. And indeed, the first thing I noticed when my Leviathan exited the portal proved that we were not in simple deep space: a flood of ambient void energy prickled against the skin of every zerg unit not within the protective flesh of overlords, the Leviathan, or Stukov's Alexander. The ambient energy proved generally only lightly damaging, slowly disintegrating exposed exoskeletons like some kind of acid. But occasionally some kind of massive energy shadow would spike itself through my spacefaring minions, penetrating and wounding them. My queens and Abathur's symbiotes had their hands full, so to speak, trying to keep our fliers mended and healthy.

When the Protoss fleet followed us, I worried that without healing abilities they would suffer far worse, but then I remembered they were shielded. As long as they could keep their shields from draining away, they would be fine.

Our forces pushed forward, following Kerrigan's directions concerning the location of the benevolent voice. We soon found a massive island of rock drifting in the void.

"There!" Kerrigan cried upon spotting it. "I can sense it. We have to reach it! "

"Gonna be tough," I commented, noting the incredible number of void rifts, shards, thrashers, and other entities manifested on the stony platform. "Can we use our capital ships and nuke it?" I asked Abathur. We had only taken the one with us, as I figured we would not be doing much evolving or infesting in the Void, but we might need his advice. From his color scheme, he might even have been the original Abathur.

"Negative," he answered. "Similar difficulty as with host entity on Aiur. Void energy deflects kinetic and luminal energy. Void shards concentrating energy, must destroy, dissipate energy. Then may attack."

I nodded. "Doing this the hard way then. Launch our forces there," I said, pointing at the southeast tip of the island, which had sparser enemies. "We''ll take over this platform inch by inch. "

I conferred with Artanis, who invaded the southwest corner, and then got to work overseeing my army.

"The shadows will slowly consume our warriors," Artanis warned. "We must reach the Void shards and destroy them. Strike true! "

Zealots and stalkers, zerglings and roaches, our forces slowly swarmed over the south of the island, destroying the many void entities we encountered, and losing many good warriors and minions in the process. Soon, the first set of void shards fell, and any remaining void rifts or other entities no longer protected by the dissipating void energy were swiftly nuked from orbit by the Spear of Adun, the Alexander, and the Leviathan.

Suddenly, in the aftermath of the Void shards' explosion, a voice shouted psionically loud enough that even I could hear it. "Yes," it said in a deep and haunted, yet somehow reassuring voice. "Go forth. Purge the corruption. "

"That voice!" Artanis exclaimed, wide-eyed. "It is my former mentor, Tassadar! "

"That's the benevolent voice I told you about!" Kerrigan declared. "But it sounds different from the Tassadar I remember…"

I paused. It did sound much loftier than the voice of the Tassadar we had fought on Char so long ago. But it was close enough I could see how Artanis drew the connection. "We'll have to worry about that later," I said as a wave of void entities approached the beachhead we had established. "Fight them off and destroy those void rifts."

It took us time, resources, and more than a few lives, but we finally had bases up and running and the area cleared of enemies. We quickly destroyed the next set of void shards, and when we did, the voice called out again.

"I called to you in dire need," it declared in a voice full of newfound hope. "Now you have come to this realm! Here, I am a prisoner," it continued, its voice turning darker, more pleading. "You must free me from his grasp!"

Kerrigan shouted back in a general psionic broadcast. "Whose grasp?"

The voice that answered was not the voice any of us were expecting. "Ah, the Queen of Blades…" Narud said menacingly. "What a pleasant surprise."

"Duran!" I shouted telepathically. "But we killed you!"

At almost the same time, Kerrigan declared, "Narud. I thought you were dead."

"Mmm," Narud smirked. "Without form, we, the Xel'naga, return to the Void," he explained mockingly. "Here, I live on, but you will not be so fortunate." He chuckled. "I'd worried that by the time I returned, you'd be long dead, and I'd never get to have my revenge. How nice of you to deliver yourselves to my doorstep. Like sheep to the slaughter."

I scoffed. "This battle isn't going to end any better for you than the last one," I declared.

"I'm going to go down there and deal with him personally! " Kerrigan announced.

"No, Kerrigan," I said, shaking my head. "Out there, you won't have any protection against the concentrated Void energy. You're too valuable to risk."

Kerrigan opened her mouth to protest, but a new voice cut her off. "No, if anyone is finally putting that son of a bitch down for good, it's me, " Stukov declared firmly. "You will not dissuade me. And you need not worry: I have been working on a healing pathogen. I'll keep myself and our forces healthy. " He looked at me psionically, daring me to refuse him. I could have, of course, as the overmind control signal was not ignorable by any member of the Swarm who had not undergone primal infestation. But I would not deny Stukov his revenge and closure, not after he had been unable to participate in our first killing of Narud.

I nodded, and Stukov, satisfied, guided the Alexander down towards our base.

Narud sent wave after wave of void entities against us, many accompanied by the massive void thrashers we had fought on Shakuras. With all the ambient void energy empowering them and damaging us, the battles were certainly challenges. But by now we were veterans at fighting void entities, and we kept pushing back their assaults and counterattacking, slowly gaining ground and destroying void shards.

There was a lot of psionic chatter this battle as Stukov, Artanis and I coordinated, Narud taunted, and that other mysterious voice encouraged and pleaded. Most of it wasn't important. In one of Narud's more interesting taunts, he tried to convince Artanis that the Zerg could not be trusted and were the "enemy of all life."

Artanis wasn't convinced. "No, that would be you and your master, foul creature."

Then Stukov shouted, "Bring this bastard down!" and the focus returned to the fight.

Finally, after what felt like many grueling hours of combat, we had taken almost the whole island and brought down the last of the Void shards. As we marched on Narud's location, we saw him, finally wearing his true face: an enormous slender tentacled thing covered in thin gray skin pockmarked by glowing red spots.

He continued fighting our forces with an air of desperation, shooting lasers of null energy from his tentacle arms as he had once done at Skygeirr. But with his minions all cut into so many dissipated void particles, our armies quickly overwhelmed and wounded the Xel'Naga.

Then Stukov stood tall before the defeated monster.

"Hello Duran," he said in a dark and threatening tone. "Do you remember what you did to me?"

"Stukov." Narud acknowledged him in a tone of angry resignation, his head bowed in defeat. "You've come to gloat, haven't you?"

"No," Stukov answered, sneering up at his foe. "I've come to say goodnight, you son of a bitch." Then Stukov shot the monster in the face with an infested pistol. Narud screamed in pain and his weakened body tore itself apart, the pieces evaporating into mere chaotic void energies.

Though I hadn't been present for Duran's betrayal of Stukov, I gathered from the "ironic echo" tone Stukov had used with that line, and the thoroughly satisfied look on Stukov's face now, that Duran had said something similar to him during that event. But now Narud was finally dead. He had received his comeuppance, and Stukov his revenge. Good.

We had little time to celebrate our victory. When Narud finally died we all felt the rush of energy releasing. Suddenly, the benevolent whispers transformed into a loud roar. "Come to me," it said with authority in Tassadar's voice.

We felt a psionic pull leading us to another part of the Void, not far from our rocky island. We quickly set about finishing off any remaining enemies on our island, firmly establishing a foothold in this dark realm, before returning to our ships and venturing into the mysterious Void once more, seeking the source of the mysterious yet benevolent voice that had called us to action.