Star Wars has officially revealed one of the very first wave of Sith, who lived 5,000 years before the Skywalker saga. We still know surprisingly little about the history of the Sith in canon. According to established lore, the Sith began as a dark side faction of the Jedi who split off from the main order some 5,000 years ago. They were banished to the Sith homeworld, seen in The Clone Wars when Yoda visited the planet Moraband.
In canon, this led to a schism among the Jedi known as the Hundred-Year Darkness. This was a horrific time for the Jedi, not least because the order wasn’t used to fighting against other lightsaber-users; this was when lightsaber forms were first established, and some were swiftly outlawed (or “forbidden”) because they were deemed too aggressive. But now, at last, we’ve met some of these first Sith in canon.
Madeleine Roux’s new novel, Legacy (available now from retailers like Amazon), is set at a very different part of the Star Wars timeline. In this book, General Leia Organa and her new student Rey head to the planet Tython, a world steeped in the Force (and actually the homeworld of the Jedi in Legends lore). There, they discover an ancient monument and the remains of a battle some 5,000 years ago. Even more excitingly, Rey stumbles on holocrons left behind by the Jedi, revealing what really happened on Tython.
Tython was known as a Jedi “Forge,” which Rey mistakenly assumes means it can be used to repair damaged lightsabers. In reality, it’s a place where Jedi come to confront their own inner darkness and reclaim the light. Five thousand years ago, a Sith apprentice known as Kalrian Diir, apprentice to Darth Maritosh, traveled to Tython longing for redemption. Darth Maritosh had apparently kidnapped her from her parents, erasing her old identity, and he’d taken her to the planet Korriban (the Legends name for Moraband). There, she had been branded with tattoos to first reduce her ability to use the Force – thus making her pliant – and then to amplify it.
Legacy deliberately subverts everything we know about the Jedi. Notice the parallels between the Jedi and the Sith here, both taking infants and dramatically reshaping their identities. The tattoos remind me of Darth Maul, and of the fact he too sometimes believed he had a previous name he couldn’t remember; it’s a fantastic hint that Palpatine used the same techniques as Darth Maritosh. The title “Darth” is significant, especially given these events took place 5,000 years ago; whoever this Sith Lord was, he may well have been one of the first to use the title.
Things didn’t go well on Tython. Kalrian Diir’s quest for redemption ended in tragedy, the dark side flowing out of control, and everyone there died in the resulting conflict. We can certainly see why this was known as the Hundred-Year Darkness; the Jedi had no idea how powerful the dark side really was, and struggled to comprehend the scale of the Sith threat. How many other Jedi temples, Force vergences, and the like were destroyed in similar circumstances?
Surprisingly, Legacy cements a subtle change Star Wars has made – reversing a George Lucas idea. The Sith homeworld was created by writers Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson, making its Expanded Universe debut in Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith 2: The Quest for the Sith. George Lucas liked the idea of the desolate planet, but he felt the name was too close to “Coruscant,” so came up with a different name: Moraband, derived from the word “moribund.” It appeared in The Clone Wars Season 6, when Yoda traveled there to confront the spirit of the ancient Sith Lord Darth Bane.
In 2019, George Mann’s Star Wars: Myths & Fables finally brought the two timelines together. In one (in-universe) dark legend, he wrote, “On the desolate planet Moraband, high on a weatherworn mountaintop, stands the statue of a robed Twi’lek. or a thousand years or more, since the ancient times when the world was known by the name Korriban…” According to Mann, then, Korriban was simply an old name for the planet that had fallen into disuse by the prequel era. Legacy confirms this, because the Jedi and Sith of 5,000 years ago openly use this name. Rey, raised as a scavenger on Jakku, has no idea – and has to be told the planet is now known as Moraband.
Korriban’s change in name was one of the more controversial Lucas decisions when he created The Clone Wars (because Star Wars fans focus on smaller details, in amidst Mandalorian retcons that are far more problematic). It’s more than a little amusing to see the post-Lucas Star Wars franchise pivot away from this retcon, restoring the name Korriban to full canon as simply an old name for the same planet. It seems all things really are possible with the Force.
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