Mara Jade was never herself a member of the Sith, but she was the direct servant of someone who was: the Emperor himself. The Emperor had a number of Force-users at his disposal to vanquish his foes and strengthen his rule – Darth Vader, the Dark Side Prophets, and the Imperial Inquisitors (a Force-using branch of Imperial Intelligence). However, the Prophets had a will and agenda of their own, the Inquisitors were a bureaucratic organization that did not answer directly to him (even if it ultimately answered to him as all Imperial groups did), and Darth Vader was a very public and occasionally unreliable figure. The Emperor needed secret agents who worked for him and him alone – so he created the Emperor’s Hands. The Emperor manipulated his Hands as much as he did anyone else, and each Hand almost invariably thought of him or herself as the Emperor’s only Hand. One of the Emperor’s Hands was a young woman named Mara Jade, whom the Emperor found and took under his wing, so to speak, when she was quite young. She became a cutpurse, cat burglar, spy, and assassin, and carried out missions exclusively on his behalf. After Darth Vader had failed to convert or destroy Luke Skywalker at Bespin, Mara Jade was given the task of finding and killing the would-be Jedi Knight. She came close while posing as a dancer at Jabba’s palace, but failed because Jabba did not let her go on the sail barge. The Emperor’s last command – “You Will Kill Luke Skywalker” – would haunt her in the years after his death. She crossed paths with Luke five years later, by then working for the smuggler Talon Karrde. She ended up helping Luke in a number of occasions as he and the New Republic struggled against the Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn, and she fulfilled her final duty to the Emperor in a backhanded way by killing a clone of Luke Skywalker who had been crafted by the Dark Jedi clone Joruus C’Baoth from Luke’s hand, taken as a prize by Vader and put away in one of the Emperor’s storehouses. Over the next few years, Luke and Mara would fall in love, get married, and have several more adventures and crises together. It is safe to say that eventually Mara put her history as an elite servant of the Emperor well behind her.

From the time of Darth Bane on, the Dark Lords of the Sith (numbering only two) took on assumed names, both to establish their new identities as Sith Lords and to conceal their public identities if they had them. Palpatine, the Republic Senator from Naboo who became Supreme Chancellor and subsequently would impose the iron-fisted tyranny of the Empire on the Galaxy, maintained the Sith name of Darth Sidious. Sidious was a master puppeteer, manipulating people and orchestrating events under the noses of the Senate and the Jedi, hiding in plain sight throughout. Sidious, having killed his master, first trained himself an apprentice – the fearsome Darth Maul – and then he set his plans in motion. His goals were first to gather political power and influence unto himself, then weaken, cripple and ultimately destroy the Jedi, and finally, at long last, to establish Sith dominion over the Galaxy. Darth Maul’s death at Naboo brought the Sith back to the Jedi’s attention, but Sidious finally brought them fully into the open, as it were, when he revealed his true nature to Anakin Skywalker, gambling that he could prey upon the young but powerful Jedi’s doubts, fears, and insecurities to turn him to the dark side of the Force. As it had so many times before, his gamble paid off.

If Darth Sidious was the venomous, cruel malice that bent its unyielding will and considerable intellect to the puzzle of destroying the Jedi once and for all, then Darth Maul was the burning lightsabre blade that would carry out that task when the time came. Maul was taken by Sidious from his homeworld at a very young age and raised from the start to be a remorseless killer and hardened warrior. He was treated with implacable cruelty through the whole process, and his final test consisted of being abandoned on an isolated planet in the outer reaches of the Galaxy to survive for a month while being hunted by assassin droids. When it seemed Maul was about to succumb, Sidious returned and challenged him to a duel, telling him that he had trained a second apprentice in secret in the event of Maul’s failure. Maul drew renewed strength from the dark side of the Force, and empowered by fury and hatred he struck at his would-be master. Sidious barely deflected the young warrior’s attacks, and Maul fell at his feet, ready to accept his death. But Sidious laughed and told him that he had in fact passed his test – by wanting, even trying to kill his master – and could now take on the title of Dark Lord of the Sith. It was then that he became Darth Maul. For several years afterward, he carried out Sidious’ dirty work, slaying would-be foes and removing obstacles to his master’s plans, all the while waiting for the day when his talents could be unleashed upon the Jedi Order. He got his chance when he was assigned to track down the Queen of Naboo after her escape from the Trade Federation forces that had conquered that Mid-Rim world. He was but a hair’s breadth away from preventing her party – including two Jedi – from departing from Tatooine where they had put down for repairs, but they escaped in the end. Maul was dispatched to Naboo, where he met the Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi, and did battle with them. Maul slew Qui-Gon, but somehow Obi-Wan managed to prevail, and he in turn slew Darth Maul.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Naboo, the Sith Lord Darth Sidious was in need of a new Sith apprentice after the death of Darth Maul. However, he simply did not have the time to train a brand-new apprentice from scratch as he had done with Maul, and his ultimate target, Anakin Skywalker, was not ready yet for conversion to the dark side of the Force. So, he turned to former Jedi Master and current political firebrand Count Dooku of Seronna. Dooku, like many fallen Jedi before him, had the three delusions that (1) to fully harness their Force-using potential, Jedi needed to study both the dark and light sides of the Force, (2) that the dark side of the Force could be controlled or somehow tamed, and (3) that he was the being to do it. In his early ex-Jedi years, Dooku tiptoed precariously on the balance, but after encountering and joining forces with Darth Sidious he tipped over completely to the dark side of the Force, became Sidious’ apprentice, and took the name of Darth Tyranus, Dark Lord of the Sith. Where Maul had been a vicious predator with no particular aptitude for diplomacy or covert manipulation, Tyranus was a man much in the mould of his new master, and Sidious was able to make use of him to further his long-range plans in all sorts of elaborate ways. Tyranus was responsible for finding the perfect template for the army of clone troopers that his former Jedi colleague Sifo-Dyas ordered from Kamino on behalf of the Supreme Chancellor, and Tyranus eventually slew Sifo-Dyas to cover up the order. He deleted all mention of Kamino from the Jedi Archives. In his public persona as Dooku he rallied a number of organizations and systems to rebel against the Republic, forming the Confederacy of Independent Systems and building a droid army to wage war against its Republic foe. Tyranus had the bounty hunter Jango Fett make a number of attempts on the life of Padmé Amidala, by then Senator of Naboo. When the Jedi sent a large force of Jedi Knights to Geonosis to rescue Obi-Wan Kenobi, Tyranus set his droid army against them, and feigned surprise and shock when the clone army he had helped arrange for arrived, under Yoda’s command, to do battle with the Confederacy, launching the Clone Wars. Tyranus was responsible for holding the Confederacy together and seeing to the training and cyborg modification of famed warrior General Grievous. His last mission was to launch a daring attack on Coruscant itself to seize Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (his master Sidious) captive, which would allow Palpatine to adopt even more executive power and consolidate his grip on the Galaxy. General Grievous commanded the fleet, while Tyranus set a trap for the Jedi who would be bound to attempt a rescue – Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. However, Skywalker had improved considerably since Geonosis, and he bested Tyranus. The way of the Sith is treachery, as Palpatine proved when he bade Skywalker kill Tyranus, furthering the young man’s walk towards the dark side of the Force.

is quite possible that since the death of Darth Maul and the Battle of Naboo, Darth Sidious had set his sights on making Anakin Skywalker his apprentice. Indeed, he practically told the boy so when he met him in his public persona as Supreme Chancellor. Skywalker was not ready for some time, though, so Sidious made do with Tyranus, all the while backing Skywalker unconditionally and encouraging him to strain against the limitations imposed upon him by the Jedi Order. Palpatine eventually began letting slip some of his Sith knowledge to Skywalker, and finally came out into the open before the young Jedi. He had known that Skywalker was concerned about visions he had of his wife dying in childbirth, and he told him that only with the dark side of the Force could he hope to save her. His careful cultivating paid off when he was on the verge of being destroyed by Jedi Master Mace Windu. Anakin intervened, crippling Windu by slicing off his weapon hand. Palpatine killed Windu, and Skywalker submitted himself fully to his new master, who named him Darth Vader. Darth Vader served the Emperor well from then on, first destroying the Jedi temple and slaughtering everyone in it, then killing the leaders of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. He suffered a setback when Obi-Wan Kenobi defeated him in battle and left him for dead – catching fire did not help either. Sidious came and rescued his pupil, but in a way crippled him as well by placing him in his new armour and life-support unit, for Darth Vader’s unbridled potential was lost. However, he was strong enough to continue tracking down and slaying Jedi who had escaped the initial purge, and he enforced the Emperor’s will in other ways, such as supporting (while also keeping an eye on) Governor Tarkin as the latter supervised the Death Star Project. After the Battle of Yavin, Vader was given his own personal fleet command and given the mission of finding and destroying the Rebel Alliance’s primary headquarters, a task which coincided neatly with his own desire to find the pilot whose shot had destroyed the first Death Star – Luke Skywalker, his son. After finding and almost destroying the Rebel HQ at Hoth, Vader engineered a trap for Skywalker, and confronted him with the truth of his parentage at Bespin. Luke refused to join Vader, and somehow escaped from his clutches, but the encounter changed the two men. Luke eventually became convinced that Vader could be redeemed, and Vader’s loyalties began to waver. Luke would prove to be right, for when the Rebels made a desperate attack to destroy the second Death Star, Vader turned on his master, the Emperor, at the cost of his own life, and destroyed the tyrant, ending at a stroke the Sith dominance of the Galaxy and the power that held the Empire together.

Marka Ragnos’ body was still warm when the two most powerful Sith Lords were fighting each other over the privilege of succeeding him as Dark Lord of the Sith. One of the contenders was Ludo Kressh, who was conservative and careful, and wanted to follow in Ragnos’ footsteps in consolidating and strengthening the Sith Empire before engaging in further expansion so that it would be able to fight the Republic if the need arose. Initially, he was the favourite to ascend to rulership of the Sith Empire, but the unexpected arrival of a pair of sibling explorers from the Republic threw his plans into disarray. To keep word of the Sith from getting back to the Republic, Kressh wanted the explorers killed, but his rival Naga Sadow outmanoeuvred him by faking a rescue and convincing the assembly of Sith Lords to elect him as Dark Lord and mount an invasion of the Republic. Kressh attempted to rebel against Sadow before the invasion could begin, but it ended in ignominy and he was forced to fake his death to survive. After Sadow’s expedition had left, he garnered support and forces from the Sith Lords who had stayed behind, declared himself Dark Lord of the Sith, and attacked Sadow’s battle fleet as it returned after having been defeated and turned back. However, Sadow once again outmanoeuvred his long-time rival and finally destroyed him once and for all.

About five thousand, five hundred years before the Battle of Yavin, Marka Ragnos was the Dark Lord of the Sith – supreme ruler of the Sith Empire. He managed to stay in power for nearly two centuries, owing to his battle prowess, his outstanding command of the dark side of the Force, and his ability to pit his opponents against one another. He was one of the few Sith Lords who at the time was aware of the full history of his people, and he was careful not to expand the borders of the empire too far lest the Sith come into contact with the Old Republic and the Jedi Order that defended it. His rule was so successful that it came to be known as The Golden Age of the Sith, and he was one of a very select company of Sith Lords who died of natural causes in their old age. After his death and internment on Korriban – by this time a mausoleum planet rather than a home world – his dark side spirit would on occasion advise powerful Sith Lords or dark side Force-users or lure Jedi over to the dark side of the Force.

Marka Ragnos’ body was still warm when the two most powerful Sith Lords were fighting each other over the privilege of succeeding him as Dark Lord of the Sith. One of the contenders was Naga Sadow, an expansionist firebrand who wanted the Sith Empire to aggressively seize as much territory as it could. He was confident that the Sith had the power in both conventional and Force-use terms to take on the Republic and the Jedi. His position was not favoured by the other Sith Lords, but when a pair of explorers happened upon the grave-world of Korriban – ancestral home world of the Sith – Naga Sadow recognized the knock of opportunity. He secretly freed the explorers and sent one of them back to the Republic, then claimed that they had been rescued by the Republic. A Jedi-led invasion was imminent, he claimed, and the only defence was to strike first. The Sith rallied to him, and named him Dark Lord, over his rival Ludo Kressh. Sadow consolidated his forces, beat back a paltry attempt at overthrowing him by Kressh, and launched an invasion of the Republic. He was eventually defeated at great cost, and returned to the Sith Empire to find Kressh – whom he had thought dead – in charge and ready to strike. Nevertheless, Sadow was the better tactician, and he triumphed. His victory was hollow, for he was banished from the Sith Empire. He and a tiny band of followers set out to carve out a new empire for themselves and colonized the fourth moon of the gas giant Yavin, where they would remain for the rest of their days.

Azrakel is not, strictly speaking, a member of the Sith Order in any of its incarnations, but were it not for the Sith he would not have come to be, at least not as a fearsome dark side warrior. He was exposed to massive amounts of dark side energy by the Emperor as an experiment in the ability of various life-forms to cope with such exposure before they were broken, and then left to die when the Emperor became occupied with other tasks. One of the Emperor’s other servants took Azrakel, now a blank slate, and fashioned him into a powerful weapon, to use much as the Emperor had once made use of Darth Maul. Azrakel eventually broke with his master and became a mercenary, but he remains in essence little more than an extension of the dark side of the Force itself, a personification of raw anger and hatred. He is merciless and violent, and in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor fixes his sights on slaying the New Republic’s hero and the first of the new Jedi: Luke Skywalker.

Xanatos was not a Sith, nor is it likely that he ever learned of the existence of that ancient order of dark side Force-users. He was nothing more, but certainly nothing less, then a talented and powerful Jedi fallen to the dark side of the Force. However, the timing of his fall was indicative of the decline of the Jedi Order and its ability to keep pace with events and more generally with the unravelling of the Old Republic in the years before its demise. He was trained as a Jedi and taken up as a Padawan learner of none other than Qui-Gon Jinn, but he was ambitious and aggressive, and although he passed all the conventional trials to become a Jedi Knight, the Jedi Master Yoda insisted on one more test: Xanatos went to his old homeworld to investigate a brewing civil war. He and Qui-Gon discovered that Xanatos’ father was behind the plot, and the true nature of the test was revealed: Xanatos had to choose between his father and the Jedi. As for Xanatos’ father, he engaged Qui-Gon in battle and was not surprisingly slain. Xanatos, too late, chose his father, and swore revenge on Qui-Gon and all Jedi. Qui-Gon spared his life, perhaps to give him a chance at redemption. Several years later, when Qui-Gon was considering taking up Obi-Wan as his new Padawan, Xanatos emerged from hiding and executed a number of gambits in a single-minded effort to destroy the Jedi Order. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan foiled him each time, and in a final confrontation, Xanatos taunted Qui-Gon one last time before letting himself drop into a pool of acid – presumably killing himself rather than surrendering.

While in his own lifetime Freedon Nadd did little to advance the cause of the Sith, his legacy, helped along by his lingering dark side spirit, was nothing less than the revival of the Sith Order and eventually, a second great war between the Jedi and the Sith. One of the keys to the unfolding of this legacy was the fallen Jedi Ulic Qel-Droma. Ulic was a supremely talented Jedi who was dispatched to Onderon to settle a dispute between the city of Iziz, then ruled by King Ommin and Queen Amanoa, and the beast-riders of Onderon. Originally on the side of Iziz (Amanoa having been the one who called the Jedi in to deal with matters), Ulic and his companions discovered that the King and Queen were dark side Force-users, and they switched allegiances, first defeating Amanoa and putting her daughter on the throne and then subduing an uprising led by Ommin and his remaining loyalists. During this time, Ulic encountered the dark side spirit of Freedon Nadd, who told him he would become a great Sith Lord. Ulic doubted his word. But this first brush with Freedon Nadd’s servants was a foretaste of what was to come, for a later mission involved investigating a new tyranny that had arisen in the Empress Teta system. It transpired that a dark side cult had taken over, led by siblings Satal and Aleema Keto, who first repelled a Jedi attack, and then launched a counterstrike that cost the life of Ulic’s master. Ulic infiltrated the cult in an attempt to bring it down from within, and this led to his downfall: Satal poisoned him with a curious toxin that was weakened only by the power of the dark side, and Aleema seduced him. Ulic completed his transition to evil by killing Satal and taking his place at Aleema’s side – with the additional benefit of being her lover and not merely her brother. Then Exar Kun arrived, and he and Ulic battled one another for a time. At this stage, a host of Sith spirits, including the legendary Marka Ragnos, appeared before the two and declared them to be the new Dark Lords of the Sith: Exar Kun would be the master, and Ulic would be the apprentice. They led a fresh campaign against the Old Republic and the Jedi, and convinced Aleema to kill herself while unleashing a terrible explosion that destroyed a Jedi training centre and storehouse of lore on Ossus. But while looting the Jedi stores, Ulic was confronted by, and slew, his brother, and was overcome both with grief and the light side power of the Jedi, who cut him off completely from the Force. He surrendered and led the Jedi to Exar Kun’s secret base on Yavin IV. He lived the rest of his days a hermit and outcast.

While in his own lifetime Freedon Nadd did little to advance the cause of the Sith, his legacy, helped along by his lingering dark side spirit, was nothing less than the revival of the Sith Order and eventually, a second great war between the Jedi and the Sith. One of the keys to the unfolding of this legacy was the fallen Jedi Exar Kun. Exar Kun was intensely ambitious, and much like the renegade Jedi who had become the Sith in the first place, he was convinced that by leaving out the study and manipulation of the dark side, the Jedi were hampering themselves and keeping back from reaching their full potential. Eventually, he abandoned his master and travelled to the tomb of Freedon Nadd on Dxun. He encountered Freedon Nadd’s spirit, which led him first to the Sith tomb-world of Korriban and then to Yavin IV, the site of Naga Sadow’s last refuge. Exar Kun took to the dark side much faster than Freedon Nadd expected, and when he arrived at Yavin IV, he took control of the feral Massassi warriors there, mastered the powers of the various dark side devices that Sadow had left behind, and used them to destroy Freedon Nadd’s spirit. He tracked down a couple whom he knew were potential rivals for mastery of the dark side – Aleema Seto and Ulic Qel-Droma. Exar Kun and Ulic fought one another for some time, until a host of Sith spirits, including the legendary Marka Ragnos, appeared before the two and declared them to be the new Dark Lords of the Sith: Exar Kun would be the master, and Ulic would be the apprentice. They led a fresh campaign against the Old Republic and the Jedi, and convinced Aleema to kill herself while unleashing a terrible explosion that destroyed a Jedi training centre and storehouse of lore on Ossus. Exar Kun looted a number of Jedi treasures from Ossus, and returned to Yavin IV to plan his next move, but Ulic’s surrender ruined his plans for good. A massive Republic fleet with a host of Jedi arrived to destroy him and cleanse the moon of dark side influences, but Exar Kun beat them to the punch by destroying his Massassi in a ritual that transformed him into a dark side spirit. He hid in the Yavin ruins for thousands of years, to be reawakened sometime after the Battle of Endor by Luke Skywalker when the latter founded a school for training Jedi there.

<i>“Only two there are: a master, and an apprentice.”</i>

By a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin, it seemed that the Sith had finally been extinguished for ever. The first renegade Jedi, the Sith species, and their descendants were long-gone, and indeed, by this time the word Sith was used exclusively to mean the order of dark side Force-users descended from that combination of ancient rogue Jedi and Force-sensitive alien. A number of Sith revivals had been put down, the most recent one in a climactic battle on the world of Ruusan where the Sith deployed a suicide weapon that destroyed everyone who took part in the battle. It seemed to the Jedi, therefore, that the Sith were gone and they need only be watchful among their own ranks to prevent young Jedi from resurrecting the ways of the Sith by turning to the dark side of the Force. But they were wrong. There was a single Sith Lord who survived, Darth Bane, and he fled to the demon moon of Dxun to recuperate. There he built up his power, consulted a Sith holocron, and even communed with dark side spirits in order to refashion Sith philosophy and technique in order to begin anew the struggle to destroy the Jedi and establish Sith rule over the Galaxy. Bane came to understand that the multiplicity of Sith Lords in the past had failed precisely because, being evil by choice (and therefore selfish, greedy, ambitious, and power-hungry), they could never co-operate effectively compared to the Jedi. They also never had the support of the largest and most powerful political entity of the Galaxy – the Republic – when they challenged the Jedi. Therefore, he instituted the Rule of Two: there could only ever be two Sith in the Galaxy; a master, and an apprentice. When the apprentice felt the time was right, he would attempt to kill the master and take his place. Whomever prevailed would have to seek out a new apprentice. It is not known if the Sith strictly adhered to this rule through the entire thousand years between Darth Bane and Darth Sidious, but they must not have broken it too often or too severely, for the Sith successfully remained in hiding for all of that time. Their ultimate goal was the same as always: the destruction of the Jedi, but now they would attempt to turn the rest of the Galaxy against them as well. It would be a full thousand years before this plan finally came to fruition.