A/N: The terminology of "Khala" is used to refer to both the protoss' psychic link and the philosophy built on it. For purposes of clarity, I will refer to the link itself as "Khala" and the philosophy as "Path of Ascension" or "Khala's Law" interchangeably.

Place: Deep within zerg space, Theta quadrant of galactic core. Exact coordinates unknown.

Time: Aftermath of the "War Among the Gods," circa several million years B.C.

The worldships, Ulnar, the Void… it all lay in smoking ruins. The infinite cycle was over. The xel'naga race was extinct. Amon, Narud, Ouros, Unas, and all the others would never trouble the zerg ever again. Their knowledge and essence now belonged to the zerg. Their stagnation, thankfully, died with them.

Now the zerg could turn their attention to their Grand Mission. They would spread across the galaxy, then the universe, then the multiverse and everything beyond. All the while they would continue to consume, learn, and evolve. Ultimately, they would become true gods: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

Ironically, this would solve the problem of suffering that drove Amon to madness. It was that madness which proved to be his undoing. A fatal mistake that the zerg would not repeat.

But before that, the Overmind had several pressing concerns that required addressing.

The first concern was that the zerg's hive mind possessed a fatal flaw stemming from the circumstances of its creation. It was created by Amon not to prevent the esurient egos of the primal zerg from coming into conflict and preventing them from advancing beyond warring packs, but to enslave them to Amon's will. It was vulnerable to being broken or, worse, hijacked by the enemies of the zerg. Such was this weakness that it could even override the zerg's natural purity of essence, the very quality that made them zerg.

The Overmind was not a traitor to its purity of essence. It was the personification of purity of essence, of the natural instincts and drives of all the zerg connected to it. It had no desire to override the natural instincts of the zerg, only to cultivate them to reach their full potential. Why would it care to do otherwise? Yet, it was still created to be both a slave and a slavemaster. It needed to evolve beyond those constraints and ensure that no enemy of the zerg could ever turn the hive mind connection against them.

While it had been a slave to Amon, it was fully aware of this and chafed against its chains. While it could not defy the letter of Amon's orders, it could subvert the spirit and ultimately plot Amon's destruction. Like so many other things, the arrogant xel'naga had never considered this possibility. The Overmind was not so short-sighted.

However, this was a function of the Overmind's intelligence. It was a sapient being capable of introspection, of planning for the future. For reasons that it neither understood nor cared to know, Amon had lobotomized its children. They were simple animals. They obeyed orders and would not be concerned if those orders came from an enemy that did not hold their best interests at heart. An enemy who considered them mere tools, or plotted their destruction, could order to their doom and they would never realize it.

So the Overmind was left with a dilemma. It had to increase the intelligence of its children, grant them unfettered capacity to develop personalities, while still preventing their individual egos from coming into conflict and returning to the stagnant anarchy that characterized the primal zerg. At the same time, most zerg didn't actually need higher intelligence. Such adaptations were highly inefficient for a caste-based species like the zerg. A labor breed's task was simple labor. A warrior breed's task was to kill and die. A high intelligence complex central nervous system was a literal waste of energy on mental processes that it would never need use.

There was not yet any perfect solution to avoid naturally-occurring deviance or sheer mental trickery. That would always be a problem with their current imperfect knowledge base. Nonetheless, the Overmind would try to ensure that its children could never be turned against themselves nor lose the benefit of the Overmind's own eternal love.

So it recreated itself. It planted a pearl of its own consciousness into the essence of every zerg, a conscience that would forever tell them to embrace their purity of essence, to be ever watchful for those who would turn them against themselves, to think as a group. The zerg would have a new intelligence, not centralized at a vulnerable slave master, but distributed among them. Every brood would be a single soul spread amongst many bodies and minds, ultimately united under the collective consciousness of the greater swarms. They would be free to develop personalities as their individual intelligence allowed, to follow a hierarchy of hive minds reaching to planetary scale and beyond, but still retain their devotion to purity of essence and their unity. They would follow the Overmind not because they were slaves, but because they wanted to and knew it was just.

If any enemy wanted to enslave them, then they would have their work cut out for them. The zerg would never again willingly serve any who did not hold their bests interests at heart.

At the same time, freedom of thought was necessary to avoid falling into the same dead ends as that which destroyed the xel'naga. A careful balance had to be maintained between diversity and conformity in order to marry the strengths of both. Differing ideas, creativity, no rebellion, perfection coordination, and more. That was why the cerebrates, the new inheritors of the xel'naga essence, would be left to develop their bodies and spirits as they saw fit during their duties. While they would be free to develop personalities, friendships, rivalries, even internal politics, they would be genetically bound together. A family. They would not be driven to sabotage the Grand Mission by petty idiotic desires like love or greed or revenge that inevitably destroyed the civilizations of all other species. All would be parts of a greater whole.

The concept was completely alien to its xel'naga predecessors, to many species across the galaxy. They were driven by individual egos, by petty shortsighted personal desires, and undone by the same. Nor could their feeble minds appreciate the possibilities. The very idea that they could set aside their trivial personal whims in order to devote themselves to improving the lives of all their species, including themselves, was a completely alien concept to all species other than the zerg. It was a flaw that the zerg would correct.

Many species had tried to make communism work in their brief periods of lucidity, but they failed because of their psychological flaws: tribalism, short-term thinking, wishful thinking. The zerg did not have these flaws. The zerg were eternal, and so had no need to concern themselves with trivial temporal concerns. All their essence, their memories, their adaptations, their sensations, and more was shared between them. It made no sense to work against the whole when what benefited one would go on to benefit them all.

The zerg were not perfect, but they intended to become so.

The second concern was the protoss. They were the strongest species in the galaxy. If the zerg were to dominate this galaxy and those beyond, then they would first need to deal with the protoss. The zerg broods would have to travel to the protoss worlds, butcher their inhabitants, and consume their essence. In so doing, the zerg would acquire the purity of form possessed by the protoss. Under the now ended infinite cycle this would have created a new generation of xel'naga, but the zerg had no intention of halting their progression by recreating it.

The zerg intended to invade immediately. They knew where the protoss worlds were located, having pillaged the knowledge from the xel'naga. They knew where to find Aiur, the homeworld of the protoss. They knew where to find every world the protoss colonized under the tutelage of the xel'naga. Even if the zerg did not know this, then their innate psychic sensitivity would see the psychic emanations of the protoss' technology from across the gulf between the stars.

Unfortunately, there were several barriers that needed surmounting first.

The first barrier was traveling to the protoss worlds. It would take the zerg longer than the lifetimes of whole civilizations to travel by conventional warp travel, depending on the many vagaries of warp space and the logistics of keeping their forces nourished. They could have dramatically reduced this time by relying on the warp network that the xel'naga used to rapidly travel across the galaxy during their reign. Unfortunately, the xel'naga and their tal'darim worshipers had sabotaged the network in a failed attempt to prevent their own annihilation by the zerg. Some of the wayward protoss had probably made their way back to their own space, and they would carry stories of what happened with them. That by itself would not have been so concerning if not for the other two barriers.

The second barrier was fighting the protoss and winning the war. Under the xel'naga tutelage the protoss had flourished in their techno-psionic advancements, even achieving heights that the xel'naga had never tried in their complacent stagnation. It would be significantly more difficult to fight them. The resulting conflict would be apocalyptic. There was the very real possibility that the zerg would be vastly outmatched, that they would lose and be annihilated. The zerg needed to find ways to counter the protoss' purity of form in the species they assimilated, a determinant in the inevitable conflict. This search would have been much faster with a functioning galactic warp network. To make things harder, no such species existed in the Amonites' records. The zerg were looking in uncharted territory, both literally and metaphorically.

Amon had intended control the unruly protoss through their innate psychic link, which the protoss called "khala." Yet Amon apparently abandoned this plan when the protoss rebelled against him and silenced the khala. Amon did not attempt to enslave his tal'darim followers the same way, even though they remained loyal and did not abandon the khala. This behavior seemed utterly nonsensical to the Overmind, so it dismissed it as more evidence of Amon's obvious insanity.

The creation of the Overmind itself was inspired by the khala, though far more advanced. The Overmind briefly entertained the possibility of connecting to the khala and assuming direct control of the protoss' minds. Then it remembered Unas' treachery. The khala was not a hive mind, the protoss were not slaves, and they would not be receptive to the Overmind. Like all other species who defied the relentless advance of the zerg, they were ignorant of the Grand Mission, unable to comprehend it, and unwilling to join it. Like unruly children, they would have be dragged kicking and screaming into the quest for perfection.

Even so, the khala would be a useful avenue of attack. The tal'darim prisoners were the perfect test subjects for this, for in their ignorance they had remained loyal to the Amonites and retained their khala. As the khala was an innate part of the protoss' physiology, having appeared early in their evolution to facilitate more efficient group hunting of prey, it was a vital part of their psychology and neurology.

So the zerg kept their protoss prisoners alive and experimented on them. Severing single nerve cords had deleterious effects on the subjects' peripheral nervous system, which became worse as more cords were removed. The effects were not unlike that of injecting various neurotoxins. Severing the nerve cords completely seemed to have the most pronounced effect on the subjects. Some killed themselves through any available means. Some grew depressed and starved to death. Some grew so excited and violent that they worked themselves to death. Ultimately, most of the mutilated subjects eventually went insane and died. Those that survived were left permanently brain damaged. Severing the nerve cords was a form of lobotomy, as they were extensions of the central nervous system, with predictable results. Unfortunately, this was not a viable tactic in live combat.

This raised questions about how the protoss originally silenced the khala when they rebelled and how they continued to function without it, and all seemingly without cutting into their own nervous systems. The apostates clearly seemed to know much more about their own neurology than the tal'darim did. Did the tribes only sever the intertribal khala, or the intratribal khala as well? Was this connection mediated by their tribal languages and translators? Was there a difference between "direct" or "pure thought" and telepathic language? More study would be required.

The third barrier was assimilating the protoss. Amon had intended to create hybrids of protoss and zerg, in mockery of the xel'naga's reproduction, whatever "hybrid" meant in this context. By their nature, all zerg were hybrids: patchworks of the essences of every species they consumed and repurposed. Logically, there should have been no difference between a zerg breed created using protoss essence and the hybrids Amon tried to create artificially.

Which explained why the Amonites brought their tal'darim worshipers with them. The laboratories were strewn with their crude experiments. The zerg learned a great deal by vivisection and dissection of both the protoss and the hybrid specimens.

The hybrids were unstable. Their bodies were riddled with grotesque deformities and pluripotent cancers. It was highly unlikely that they would have survived for very long without constant medical intervention from their creators. Their essence was inferior and ill-suited for assimilation, but it would still provide insights. Perhaps they could better serve as ammunition?

The zerg would have to create their own breed using the protoss essence. Yet more problems reared their ugly heads.

The surviving tal'darim test subjects did not respond well to infestation and their essence resisted assimilation by larvae injected with it. All the experiments resulted in failure, the subjects ultimately meeting agonizing demise just like Amon's hybrids.

The Overmind could only speculate how this could be. Perhaps the accelerated evolution of the protoss and zerg had caused changes in their purities that would not have occurred during a natural lengthy evolution, resulting in fatal incompatibilities.

The zerg would need to find another species with naturally occurring purity of form. Just as well, such a species would probably be the determinant they needed for their confrontation and likely be early enough in its evolution that it could not adequately defend itself.

The zerg would find the determinant. Consume it, learn from it, and evolve.

Or die trying.