Karos

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"Dzwol wohadzuskaqyâsikûjontûkut yun, jenwai jen&mdash;dzwol Qyâsik wokun. Chwitatul hyalûshsaaraikut tashdzwolutyun."

- extract from the writings of Karos summarizing the central tenet of Dzwolutwokun

Karos &mdash;sometimes referenced using a as Karos Kânisûtanjat (meaning "Karos from " in the  ) and variously known by such s, s,  and s as Tsistaral (meaning "Sith Protector"  ), Dwomûshhoyakut (meaning "summoner of the dead" ), and Woqoritwai (meaning "Deathless One" )&mdash;was a  -  of the  active during the. A noted of  and  of the  on, Karos was best remembered for assembling the Tsistaralkut  during the  and sacrificially giving his life to buy time for a  to escape the Republic's.

Karos was widely regarded as one of the foremost scholars of and most prolific academics of the post- period. He was best known for his articulation and codification of the Dzwolutwokun, a offshoot that stated that  and  alignment were characteristics of Force users rather than the Force itself. He was also notable for the Qotaral, a divisive work of that was critical of the   that characterized prevailing Tsisajak (""  ) and instead sought to propose a  alternative form of government for the Sith Empire. Though his writings won him few friends in the reigning establishment, he maintained a cult following in certain academic circles, a group which subsequently became known as the "Order of Karos."

Though his early Force-based academic work focused exclusively on the traditional Kissai study of, his subsequent work was significantly wider-ranging in scope, encompassing the study of arcane rituals of both the and  of the Force and fields as diverse as , , and. In addition to his own body of work, which constituted a library's worth of tomes and treatises, he coauthored a significant number of seminal academic texts in collaboration with theorists from other Forceful traditions. For his talents as a and philosopher, he eventually merited a posting as the overseeing  of the, a  on  widely acknowledged as the largest repository of Sith lore and  in the Empire.

Apart from his prodigious academic career, Karos was perhaps best remembered for his participation in the as a member of  and for his actions during the subsequent, a counter-invasion of the Sith Worlds aimed at the systematic extermination of the Sith species. In an effort to assist in the evacuation of Sith refugees from the Stygian Caldera, Karos organized a  called the Tsistaralkut. The self-sacrificial actions of Karos and the Tsistaralkut managed to buy time for many Sith to flee to worlds like, , , , and , in effect giving rise to notable Sith organizations and states like the and.

Karos met his end following the departure of the from Korriban in,  remaining behind with the Tsistaralkut remnant on the planet surface to buy time for the fleet to escape the Republic. Though he was finally cut down by the Jedi after several days of hard fighting in the, he continued to manifest as a powerful for millennia, protecting the Sith-blooded remnant on Korriban  by means of the  incantation and legions of. He occasionally applied his mastery of and  to the creation of, shuttling his consciousness through a series of temporary vessels whenever the mood to wander  and study with other Forceful traditions took hold.

Heritage
A contemporary of and, the -  known as Karos was born in the city of  on  sometime after the death of  and prior to the  between  and  in. Despite being a member of the  with traces of  ancestry, Karos was primarily of  blood. He was mainly descended from the refugees of  who had wandered into the  in the aftermath of the  and subsequently interbred with their Sith masters over centuries. Additionally, like many of his Sith-blooded contemporaries, Karos was a descendant of those Human   who had chosen to mate with the Sith in the years following the formation of the  in. Karos himself could claim particular descent from the   and his alleged.

As a result of this high percentage Human ancestry, Karos manifested predominantly Human physical features. Though he exhibited the Sith species' trademark florid complexion, high cheekbones,  and superficial eye stalks of the Kissai caste,  Karos possessed five-fingered hands, a distinctly Human nose, and a pair of emerald eyes that betrayed his Human ancestry. Like most members of the Sith species, he also possessed a strong and a natural affinity for the,   though his high Human blood ensured that he was at minimal risk of manifesting many of the dark-sided ailments that traditionally affected the Sith, such as bloodlust.

Early studies
Karos was raised by the Kissai priesthood of the Temple of Typhojem, a located in downtown Kaniset and a notable pilgrimage site for perambulating s drawn from the across the. As a member of the Kissai priest caste born on the homeworld of the Sith species, Karos was immersed in that caste's traditional study of   from an early age. Possessed of an above-average connection to coupled with an inexorable thirst for knowledge, Karos spent much of his youth in concerted study of arcane Force rituals at the Temple, entering into the priesthood upon coming of age. He readily distinguished himself from his peers through his aptitude for such advanced rituals as and  that allowed him to summon the s of undead s and bind them to his will.

Not content to remain in isolation for long among the priests of, Karos eventually traversed the red wastes of Korriban to take up residence in a multiplicity of s scattered across the planet. His travels took him from his hometown of Kaniset to the distant Korribanian cities of and  and saw him wander locations as remote as the  and the  in his search for obscure knowledge and philosophical enlightenment. Never content to remain in one place for too long, he eschewed participation in the power games of his peers in favor of apprenticeship to masters of many Sith traditions and the acquisition of s of great power.

In time, his eyes turned upwards from the dusty trails of Korriban to the stars. Despite its hallowed status as the birthplace of the Sith and the mausoleum of the , Korriban had long since been replaced by as the capital world of the Empire and haunt of the most powerful Sith Lords. While Ziost boasted a sizable population of Force scholars of many different traditions and schools of thought, Korriban was home to a significantly smaller population, and it was not long before Karos began pondering the possibility of studying abroad in the greater Sith Empire.

Study in the Stygian Caldera
Eventually, Karos's desire to learn more about the mysteries of the Force compelled him to depart his homeworld to tour the greater Sith Empire and study at the feet of noted scholars and academics of the Force. His wanderings took him across the breadth of the Empire and saw him apprentice himself to s of a hundred different factions and levels of influence. Karos's prodigious talent as a Sith sorcerer, lack of personal ambition, and indifference to the power games of the Sith readily ingratiated him into the ranks and good graces of many high-ranking Sith Lords of the Empire, granting him easy access to many highly-placed and influential individuals in the Imperial hierarchy. Though never a power player in his own right, Karos saw frequent employment as a and right-hand man to members of the Sith nobility, leveraging his unbiased counsel and potent Force abilities in exchange for the knowledge and instruction in arcane Force techniques.

Apprenticeship to Vitiate
Though his travels took him across Sith space, Karos remained the longest in the court of, the recently appointed of  and an academic widely respected for his prodigious Force ability. Early in his reign as Nathema's presiding Sith Lord, the young Vitiate welcomed the multitude of Sith learners who flocked to study at his feet, teaching them to harness the power of the dark side in the pursuit of difficult rituals of Sith magic. Karos sought particular instruction in the power, a difficult ritual in which Vitiate specialized that permitted the  of multiple proxy vessels as a means of achieving functional. This knowledge came in handy for Karos in the years that followed, ultimately permitting him to take full advantage of such rituals as  in the creation and control of vast armies of reanimated s.

Study of the Sith lightsaber
In addition to his pursuit of Force-based academic scholarship, Karos also pursued a number of more tangible Force-mediated fields of study during his time abroad, including swordsmanship, conventional military strategy, and espionage. To this end, he frequently apprenticed himself to noted warriors and weapon specialists of the main Sith traditions. Foremost among these was the Sith academic, a warrior-scholar who awoke in Karos an interest in the. Though the Tapani slaves of the Sith Lords had long since improved upon and perfected the design initially brought to the Sith Worlds by the , use of the modern  was still uncommon due to prevailing preference for the. Those few Sith who carried lightsabers were generally treated warily and assumed to be masters of arcane swordsmanship techniques unknown to most conventional duelists.

The only known Dark Lord to forgo use of the Sith sword in favor of the lightsaber was the ancient Jen'ari, a duelist of unparalleled ability unmatched by the greatest s and s of later millennia. Inspired by tales of Hord's expert swordsmanship, Karos took to studying the Dark Lord's preserved teachings on the subject of in detail, eventually crafting a personal Sith lightsaber of his own design and construction under Komok-Da's expert eye. Karos named this weapon Nwulkaar&mdash;a Basicization of the compound word nwûlkaar meaning "peacekeeper"  &mdash;after discovering that displaying the weapon publicly warded off potential enemies due to widespread wariness for lightsaber wielders.

During the, Karos pursued additional instruction in lightsaber combat from fallen. Though development of the of conventional lightsaber combat was still in its infancy, many protosaber-wielding  were trained in the basics of, a widespread dueling paradigm that came to be known as Form I in later centuries. At Karos's request, Rrogon instructed the Sith in the specifics of the form. Though simple and inelegant in comparison to the more evolved forms that followed it, Shii-Cho was nonetheless a brutally efficient approach to lightsaber combat. Karos found that its distinct fluidity and unpredictability complemented the raw power embraced by the Tulak Hord form. The simultaneous embrace of both techniques allowed the user to gracefully execute powerful, unpredictable attacks while remaining fully in control of the duel's momentum.

Tenure on Thule
Over time, Karos's desire for greater knowledge led him to venture outside the traditional boundaries of the Empire to more distant, far-flung Sith colonies lying outside the shroud of the. Karos spent a significant amount of time on the outlying Sith world of, a dark-sided lying immediately outside the vicinity of the Stygian Caldera to the galactic west. This perpetually overcast planet was the haunt of a number of furtive groups during the Golden Age of the Sith and served as the principle training grounds for Sith special forces culled from across the Empire. Over the period of a decade, Karos pursued instruction in the clandestine arts of espionage, sabotage, and assassination, aided and abetted by his burgeoning knowledge of abilities as diverse as, , and.

Time on Tund
Karos eventually departed Thule for worlds farther afield, most notably. One of the furthest worlds from the beating heart of the Empire, Tund was a verdant Force nexus lost on the north-eastern borders of the  in the. Though initially settled by outcast who had interpreted the death of   in the  as a sign to reject the dark side, Tund had eventually come to serve as the penal colony of the Empire in the millennia since the latter's founding in. Its residents were heretical thinkers and theorists of many traditions, from proponents of  as applied to the  to  who refused to embrace the dark-sided mores of prevailing Sith culture. Karos mingled among members of these varied factions for many years, studying unconventional theories of the Force and penning dissertations on arcane Force rituals practiced by the Tundans that eventually came to constitute a sizable portion of his Qâzoikut Qyâsikanjat.

Research fellowship
Sometime after leaving Tund, Karos journeyed to the distant worlds of and, Sith colonies located in close proximity to the. Though Ambria was sparsely populated, Arkania was famously home to the, a city-sized library-temple containing a vast repository of Sith teachings, writings, and artifacts gathered over a span of millennia. Accepting a at the institution, Karos remained in residence among countless other Sith sorcerers for many decades, often ending up lost in ceaseless study within the labyrinthine structure for months at a time before finally emerging from its depths. It was within the Veeshas Tuwan's walls that Karos came to master a great many difficult rituals of, including ', ', and .

Arkania proved to be an ideal adopted homeworld for Karos&mdash;far removed from the tedious power games of the prevailing Sith establishment, the world was mostly populated by similarly minded academics and scholars with whom Karos frequently entered into deep philosophical discourse and concerted study of Force rituals. He remained in residence at the Veeshas Tuwan for the remainder of his life, only departing Arkania to convene with heretical thinkers and academic colleagues on Tund, revisit his hometown of Kaniset on Korriban, or represent the interests of the Veeshas Tuwan abroad on trips to the Stygian Caldera.

Drafting the Dzwolutwokun
In the quiet solitude of the Veeshas Tuwan's and s, Karos had much time to reflect back upon all he had seen in his extensive perambulations across the Empire. Particularly inspired by his tenure among the free-thinking population of Tund, his musings on Force-based philosophy took increasingly more concrete form as he began analyzing perceived flaws with prevailing conceptions of the Force as codified in conventional Tsisajak ("" ). Unlike most Sith, Karos forsook the traditional conception of Qyâsik ("" ) as a binary entity of cleanly demarcated  and, a view commonly taught by the  and inadvertently disseminated to the Sith people by the  at the founding of the Sith Empire. Instead, inspired the  teachings of the  that he had encountered among the Sith outcasts of Tund, Karos outlined a monist theory of the Force that came to be known by the  compound word Dzwolutwokun, meaning "the act of existing as one."

Unlike some proponents of the Unifying Force paradigm, however, Karos did not go so far as to outright deny the existence of the light and dark sides. Instead, he claimed that the Force alignment spectrum was a characteristic of Force users rather than the Force itself. Applying the analogy of the to this theory, Karos likened the Force to a lightsaber's  used to amplify the output and unique properties of the weapon's  in the production of a blade. In a similar fashion, the Force was a means by which the fundamental character and moral fabric of its wielders was augmented, amplified, and revealed. Those of a traditional "light-sided" bent were empowered by the Force to aid and heal others at the expense of the self, while "dark-siders" were granted easy access to powers permitting self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.

Nascent necromancer
Karos's personal study of, a niche field of in which he came to specialize, began in the sanctum of the Veeshas Tuwan with a casual perusal of   , an account of the   earliest days on Korriban. Nestled among discussions of ancient Sith artifacts and observations regarding the unique cultural mores of the Sith people, Syn included copies of Sith language incantations related to such obscure spells as Dwomutsiqsa, Sutta Chwituskak, and Qâzoi Kyantuska. Among these, Karos found a copy of the  incantation. This obscure and complex spell was capable of reanimating corpses into hoyakut, a word meaning "the dead" made in reference to the hordes of mindless s that protected Sith sacred sites like the  and the Valley of the Dark Lords.

In the process of exploring the applications, uses, and limits of this incantation, Karos inadvertently discovered a means of controlling significantly larger armies of Korriban zombies than traditionally possible. Through the application of the Transfer Essence power taught to him years prior by Lord Vitiate, Karos found that he could split his consciousness and imbue his Force essence into the reanimated corpses raised by his initial invocation, recasting Tsaiwinokka Hoyakut from within these hosts in a compounding fashion. Using this method, Karos was able to oversee and control vast legions of self-reanimating Korriban zombies, a feat which earned him both the dwomûshhoyakut meaning "summoner of the dead" and the respect of the Veeshas Tuwan faculty and student body.

Climb to curator
Despite his divisive and often controversial philosophical writings, Karos was nonetheless respected for his prodigious skill in Sith sorcery and the length and sheer productivity of his residency at the Veeshas Tuwan. As one of the longest serving and most productive members of the library-temple's research base, he was widely considered the top prospect for the position of chief archivist and of the library-temple, charged with maintaining and expanding upon the repository's vast collection of artifacts and tomes. With the death of the previous curator during the latter period of the Golden Age of the Sith, Karos ascended to the post, holding this station until the destruction of the library-temple by the in. Under his supervision, the library-temple's collection of Sith artifacts and writings reached its greatest extent, serviced by an expanded staff of perambulating who scoured the Empire in search of ancient artifacts for preservation and display in the archives.

Rise of Sadow
Born and raised in the eveningtime of the Sith Empire, Karos lived in an era characterized by decadence, stagnation, and the looming fear of discovery by the and the. During trips abroad as representative of the Veeshas Tuwan, Karos had become intimately familiar with the rising tide of imperialism and expansionism that had taken hold in the more liberal corners of the Sith establishment during the latter part of the Golden Age. Personified in the figure of, Sith Lord of the sacred world of and a rising star among the more liberal Human-blooded Sith, this political movement had become increasingly dissatisfied with the isolationist rule of the Jen'ari , whose  they disparaged as an era of complacency, stagnation, and excess.

During the last years of Ragnos's reign as Dark Lord, Naga Sadow, buoyed up by his burgeoning powerbase, became increasingly vocal in his criticisms of the Sith status quo and his interest in expanding the Empire's borders through conquest and war. The conservative establishment, led by their own star in the person of, were fearful of losing the throne to the liberal expansionists, a group whose imperialist ambitions they viewed as dangerously overreaching and whose mixed-species and mixed-culture memberbase they viewed as an abomination. The last years of Ragnos's reign as Dark Lord were marked by public contention between the followers of Sadow and Kressh, with conflict raging from the inner chambers of the down to the streets of Ziost.

Quoth the Qotaral
It was during this period of contention and upheaval that Karos's own thoughts on began to take on more concrete form. Like Sadow, Karos believed that the Sith Empire in its present form was ill-prepared to combat the looming specter of discovery and invasion by the Jedi and the Republic. In particular, he considered the shroud of isolation in which the Empire had wrapped itself since its founding to be the root cause of its own internal decay. Faced with no immediate threats to its regional hegemony and entrenched in solitude far from the greater, the Sith Empire had turned inward over the span of centuries and begun devouring itself. In the absence of external threats against which to rally together in opposition, the Empire's governing Sith Lords had instead turned on each other, engaging in petty squabbles for meager scraps of power that fractured the Empire into a multitude of disparate factions and parties.

Though he agreed to some extent with Sadow's plan to reunite the Empire under the banner of renewed conquest,  Karos believed this would amount to little more than a temporary solution to a longstanding problem. In his estimation, the Sith Empire's entire system of government was fundamentally flawed. Karos outlined a renewed political ideology based on and  in his seminal work of political philosophy, the Qotaral or "Way of the Protector." In Karos's ideal Empire, both the weak and the strong played different but equally important roles in the drama of state&mdash;the duty of the weak was to serve the strong, while the duty of the strong was to protect the weak. Contrary to the  codified in the  that characterized prevailing Sith culture, the Qotaral instead taught that the collective good of the state was of greater importance than the good of the individual. , the ancient who sacrificed his life during the   to ensure that his people could live free of  oppression,  was cited as being the ideal  or "perfect ruler" of the Qotaral ' s Sith state, a member of the strong who gave his life to protect the weak in the interest of preserving the state.

Remaining aloof
In the months following its initial publication, the Qotaral achieved bestseller status with alacrity for its divisive content and controversial politics. Reactions to its contents varied across the board. While many Sith Lords of the prevailing conservative establishment considered its tenets tantamount to heresy and recommended that Karos be stripped of his curator status and exiled to Tund, certain more liberally minded political factions readily employed its criticisms as useful political capital, further proof that the Empire had reached the point of stagnation under traditionalists like  and required a renewal of sorts.

Though many took the Qotaral ' s harsh criticisms of Sith cultural convention for tacit support of the liberal cause, Karos did not express public support for Sadow or Kressh. Though he sympathized with Sadow's belief that renewed external conquest would help to rally the disparate Sith factions under one banner and bring an end to the Empire's period of internal decay, Karos did not approve of Sadow's self-serving, selfish interest in making war for the purposes of claiming rulership of the Empire for himself. Furthermore, Karos privately expressed disapproval for Sadow's mixed-culture powerbase, believing that only Sith-blooded individuals could truly grasp Sith culture and belief. Though this brought him largely into line with Kressh's traditionalist beliefs, Karos believed Kressh would merely continue to perpetuate the isolationist policies that had given rise to the Empire's stagnation in the first place and thus elected not to offer support for the conservative cause. However, Karos personally admired Kressh for publicly expressing his interest in putting the good of the Sith Empire above his own ambitions and desires.

Funeral of Marka Ragnos
The death of Jen'ari Marka Ragnos in after a century of  throughout the Empire brought the clash between the followers of Sadow and Kressh to the forefront of Sith politics. As expected, Ludo Kressh laid claim to the Dark Lord's throne as Ragnos's natural successor, promising a continuation of the policies that had defined the preceding Golden Age. As acting Dark Lord, Kressh led the down from Dreshdae to  in the, followed by the members of the , dignitaries from distant worlds, and a trailing group of Kissai priests, Massassi, commoners, and Grotthu slaves. Representing Arkania and the Veeshas Tuwan, Karos was among the twenty-three Sith who headed the procession to the tomb, but was not included among the twenty anointed Sith Lords who oversaw the religious internment ceremony due to being an unanointed Kissai priest.

Karos witnessed the fashionably late arrival of Naga Sadow and the Sith Lord's public claim to the Sith throne. Several years of growing tension between Sadow's and Kressh's respective factions finally came to a head with the subsequent duel between Sadow and Kressh upon the steps of Ragnos's mausoleum, pitting the heads of each faction against each other in a test of strength and Force ability. With both Lords unable to best each other, the duel was only ended by the sudden appearance of the of Ragnos himself, who spoke to the Sith of the glory of the Empire and urged both claimants to not succumb to division and civil war before fading away. Inspired by Ragnos's warning, Kressh extended the hand of peace to Sadow in an effort to put the good of the Empire above his own ambition, but was rebuffed in his attempt at finding a compromise. Further conflict, however, was averted by the sudden arrival of the , a  crewed by the siblings  and  that landed adjacent to the funeral progression in the Valley of the Dark Lords.

Sadow's shenanigans
Though the Daragons claimed they had stumbled in the Stygian Caldera by accident in search of new societies with which to trade, the majority of the Sith Council remained unconvinced of the innocence of their intentions. Those loyal to Kressh in particular were fearful of the possibility that the siblings were in fact Republic spies, portents of an incoming invasion. Though the Sith Council voted that the Daragons be killed immediately, Sadow opposed this motion, considering them the key to a new Sith era of conquest. In a cunningly conceived "Republic rescue mission," Sadow and his followers sprung the Daragons from their Ziost prison cell on the eve of their execution, killing the Sith Councilor with Republic blasters found aboard the Starbreaker 12 and spiriting the Humans away to safety on Khar Shian. With the alleged invasion theory all but confirmed by this turn of events, Sadow easily convinced the panicked Sith Council of the need for a preemptive strike against the Republic. Despite Kressh's protests and refusal to pledge to the cause, the Sith Empire mobilized for war under the direction of its new Dark Lord, Naga Sadow.

Karos, like most of the greater Sith populace, was unaware of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that undergird the Council's decision to go to war. Though he had no reason to doubt the veracity of Sadow's claims of incoming Republic invasion, Karos disagreed with the need for a preemptive strike. The territory outside the Empire's sphere of influence was largely unknown to the isolationist Sith, and no one since the time of the Exiles knew the extent of the Republic's influence, military capabilities, or location. Instead, like Kressh, Karos believed the Empire needed to stand its ground on its home turf rather than sally forth into the unknown. As such, returning to Arkania and the Veeshas Tuwan, Karos tacitly ignored Sadow's orders to mobilize for war. Instead, he placed the library-temple on high alert, doubling its garrison and moving its display cases of priceless Sith artifacts to safer chambers deeper in the complex.

Behind the scenes
The character of Karos was in large part inspired by Firedance's Sith philosopher Karros and the varied members of Sakaros' namesake family of Sith Purebloods. The author exploited the convenient orthographic similarities between "Karros" and "Sakaros" in the development of the character's name, considering it a fitting tribute to both fanon continuities and their respective authors.

The character, originally provided the name "Dzunyâsh" in reference to the Wookieepedia  of linguist, was initially developed as an experiment in the writing of a believable, EU lore-consistent immortal Force user similar to the members of the. However, the concept gradually developed outward into more abstract philosophical waters after the author concurrently encountered unconventional Force-using factions like the and the  in EU lore and fanon characters like those included above.

Additional sources of inspiration for Karos's personality came from the characters of the from the ' franchise,  from the ' (as well as  portrayal of the character in the film ), and the film portrayal of the King of the Dead from. The character's self-sacrificial death to buy time for the to escape the  during the  was inspired by the events of the  and the  of .

Notes and references
