Sarana

Sarana was a    of the    who was affiliated with the, , and the  during the eras of the , , and.

Illegitimate daughter of a Dathomirian Nightsister and a, Sarana participated in the and  as a member of several major governmental organizations and criminal syndicates of consequence. Though the details of her actions never came to light, her decision to intervene in fellow Nightsister plans to unleash a   on the galaxy in large part prevented a large-scale crisis from occurring in the aftermath of the, thus likely saving countless lives from Silri's planned campaign of conquest.

Early life
Sarana was born around the year on, the outcome of an illicit affair between a   of the  and a visiting   sent to monitor the activities of the Dathomiri clans. Though the Nightsisters were generally wary of outsiders, this Jedi achieved some semblance of respect among his lover's coven for self-sacrificially giving his life to protect their ranks from a surprise attack perpetrated by the burgeoning in one of the protracted conflicts that characterized Nightsister culture. Though Sarana was thus never able to meet her father, she grew up with stories of his sacrifice and eventually came to possess his green  as a gift from her mother upon coming of age.

Raised among the Nightsisters of the Talzin coven, Sarana readily distinguished herself from her peers through the speed at which she took to stalking predators in the wilds of Dathomir. Aided by her strong connection to the Force, Sarana was known to spend weeks in the Dathomiri jungles in pursuit of dangerous quarry she deemed worthy prey. Emerging as one of the most promising sisters of her generation, she successfully passed the process held to elevate Nightsisters to full member status upon coming of age. Due in large part to her prodigious talent in casting to mask her presence, she was assigned to the  specialization, a rank in the Nightsister hierarchy held by those with proven skill in espionage and assassination.

Travels abroad
In keeping with Mother Talzin's plans to make the Nightsister clan into a major player of the galactic criminal underworld, Sarana was one of many newly minted, , and shadow killers promptly shipped offworld to serve the interests of wealthy clients in the underworld. Though talented and resourceful enough to defend herself from attackers, Sarana had spent her entire life in the desolate and uninhabited jungles of Dathomir. As little more than a naive teenager bereft of real-world experience, she was largely unprepared for the hustle and bustle of life in the densely-populated parts of the galaxy.

Career with Black Sun
During the, Sarana found employment in the service of the on. Though brutally effective in locating and putting down renegade Black Sun fugitives, her inexperience in hunting in the densely-populated urban environment of Coruscant had the effect of producing too many witnesses to her activities, leading to a multiplicity of questions asked by the that invariably pointed to her employers. As such, her reputation for sloppiness in the field effectively killed her burgeoning career as an assassin, though some s recognized the prudence of shifting her into an espionage, infiltration, and intelligence gathering role instead. In many respects, she thrived much more readily in this adjusted capacity. Prior to the outbreak of the, she boasted an uncharacteristically high mission success rate given her age and dearth of experience.

Visits to the Jedi
As her father's Jedi heritage had been a point of interest for her as a child, Sarana made an effort to visit the during her time on Coruscant. Though initially awe-struck by the imposing structure and wary of its potent, she eventually made contact with representatives of the Order and expressed her desire to know more about the conventional understandings of the Force. However, in light of the ongoing Separatist Crisis and the concurrent decline of the Order, the Jedi were suspicious of her intentions and were unwilling to honor her request to study at the Temple, claiming that she was both too old to receive training and too deeply immersed in the dark side-tainted mysticism of the Nightsisters to be receptive to light-sided teachings. Though disappointed, Sarana's tenacity prevented her from giving up. During the Clone Wars, she made every effort to unofficially apprentice herself to any Jedi willing to teach her, continuing in this fashion all the way up to the.

Career with Republic Intelligence
With the start of the Clone Wars in, Sarana found employment with and conducted many espionage and sabotage missions against the  (HCC), a faction of the nascent  tasked with overseeing the development and protection of Separatist military communication networks. Over the course of the war, the HCC took on an additional role as the primary of the CIS, responsible for the collection and collation of data related to Republic troop movements and resupply routes. As such, Sarana's role in Republic Intelligence was expanded to include the spread of misinformation to the Separatist agency.

Tenture on Trandosha
Sarana abandoned the war and returned home following the  of her clan at the hands of  and. After burying her fallen mother and sisters, Sarana departed Dathomir in despair to aimlessly wander the, eventually falling in with a group of unaligned hunters. By saving the life of one of their own from a hunting accident, Sarana was named a  and given respect for actions deemed worthy of a Trandoshan. Possessed of the same love of the hunt as they, she integrated herself into their number through her skill in tracking and stalking worthy prey. She accompanied this group on ever more ambitious hunts that spanned the breadth of during the waning days of the war, eventually following its members back to  where she remained in isolation for the better part of a decade.

Career as Dark Side Adept
The Trandoshans were among the first alien species to ally themselves with the nascent in the aftermath of the, partly out of a desire to legally enslave the s of nearby. Though Sarana spent much of the decade on Trandosha, she eventually began accompanying hunting parties further afield on Imperial-sanctioned bounty hunts. Though she had managed to avoid attracting the attention of the Empire's assorted Force-sensitive groups for nearly a decade, Sarana's Force-sensitivity and Dathomiri heritage were soon discovered by perambulating members of the tasked with hunting down Force users across the galaxy. As the Emperor had charged the with recruiting Nightsister shadow hunters for their unmatched talents in infiltration and assassination, she was impressed into the service of the Empire as a.

Career in the Zann Consortium
Tasked with gathering intelligence on potentially subversive elements within the New Order, Sarana spent several years prior to and during the conducting espionage missions on behalf of the ISB and, coerced into unwilling service through the forced implantation of a. She remained in service to the Empire until the rise of the following the. Sent to gather intelligence on the burgeoning crime syndicate, she was rescued from her life of servitude by Consortium lieutenant and fellow Dathomirian Nightsister. With Silri's assistance, Sarana deactivated her implant via a and joined her sister in the Consortium alongside many other disgruntled Nightsisters possessed of the same hatred for the Empire.

Her skills in espionage served interests well, leading him to task her with assisting his  infiltrators on their missions in the field. During this time, Sarana worked closely with Zann's chief lieutenant, a fellow Force user with similar abilities in Force-mediated invisibility camouflage. Though they were by no means friends on account of Fen's private feud with Silri, their professional relationship was amiable and tempered by a distinct master-apprentice dynamic. Sarana benefited greatly from his centuries of experience, expanding upon her already prodigious skills in espionage under Fen's supervision and watchful eye.

Duel of the Nightsisters
Though she remained publicly loyal to Silri in the Nightsister's ongoing feud with Fen and Zann, Sarana was privately troubled by her sister's increasingly erratic behavior in the last days of the Galactic Civil War. With Silri's betrayal of the Consortium and subsequent discovery of a she intended to unleash upon the galaxy, Sarana decided to intervene. Confronting Silri even as she prepared to defrost the from, Sarana attempted to sway her sister away from a bloody campaign of conquest. However, Silri was already deep in the throes of the dark side and saw her sister's intervention as a betrayal of trust.

The subsequent duel between the Nightsisters spanned the endless rows of carbonite-encased soldiers, forcing each Dathomirian to draw upon the full extent of her powers to hold off the other. Pitting against  and  against, the duel was an illustration of each Force user's preferred combat specialty. Fueled by the dark side, Silri relied upon her size, brute strength, and refined combat prowess to overpower the much smaller Sarana. Unable to match her sister's intensity, Sarana defaulted to her shadow killer instincts. Cloaked in an, Sarana hunted Silri from the shadows, striking suddenly and without warning before retreating to the darkness of the carbonite storage racks. In the end, this tactic proved too much for Silri, who had since fallen too deep into the clutches of her dark side-induced rage to make reasonable tactical decisions. After several hours of intense conflict, Silri fell on Sarana's blade and died in her arms.

Keeping secrets
Worried what a resurrected Sith army on the loose might do to the fragile balance of power in the galaxy, Sarana destroyed the Sith holocron that had led Silri to the Sith and sealed the vault shut with the Force. She alone retained the knowledge of the army's location, a secret she entrusted to no one for the rest of her life. Upon returning to the Consortium, Zann and Fen pressed her for answers about the holocron's contents and whereabouts, but to no avail. Though she revealed Silri's deception and displayed her fallen sister's body as proof of their duel, she denied knowledge of the holocron and stated that the duel had occurred on, leading Zann and Fen on a wild bantha chase for clues to the holocron's location. Sarana subsequently transported her fallen sister's body to Dathomir and interred her at the before returning to the service of the Consortium.

Linguistic abilities
Sarana was a native speaker of due to its wide usage among the, though she spoke it with the unique abbreviated cadence of the  even after spending many years abroad. In addition to Basic, she was also fluent in courtesy of her extended stay in the  and her tenure in service to the, an organization whose member base was in large part drawn from Huttese-speaking spies, bounty hunters, and assassins.

Additionally, during her period of isolation on, she was able to cultivate an ear for the distinctive language known as. Though she could not replicate the language's unique blend of hisses, grunts, and whistles with much success, she could understand native speakers well enough to grasp their intended meanings and was fluent in the language's written form. As most Trandoshans could understand Basic or Huttese to some degree, she rarely encountered problems conversing with members of the species.

Force alignment
As a from birth, Sarana was significantly more aligned with the  than many of her fellow. In the days of her youth, this manifested itself in a general apathy towards conventional morality as understood by most beings, leading her to take life with little remorse and few inhibitions during her time as a. However, perhaps in part due to the heritage of her biological father, Sarana was curious about and open to the study of many  beliefs. She took an interest in studying the Jedi path during the Clone Wars, and following the reestablishment of the formally apprenticed herself to the study of the light side. She credited her decision to confront fellow Nightsister Silri in an effort to potentially save the lives of millions as the moment at which she first truly embraced the light side.

Physical appearance
Due to being 3/4 on account of her human Jedi father, Sarana displayed a number of distinctly human qualities that set her apart from her fellow. While many Dathomirian females were hairless on account of their heritage and generally possessed heights around two,  Sarana sported brown hair and stood nearly half a meter shorter than her sisters. However, courtesy of her Dathomirian mother, she possessed the silver eyes, pale skin, and symmetrical facial skin patterns of her species.

Sarana inexplicably stopped aging naturally around while still hunting with her Trandoshan allies in the. Though she publicly attributed this to the clear air of Trandosha, those close to her believed that she had stumbled upon an ancient Sith artifact that had the documented ability to prevent aging-mediated decay and extend the user's youth indefinitely. Even at a century old in, Sarana was still biologically an agile young adult, much to the bemusement and envy of her surviving peers among the Dathomiri.

Religion
An outspoken Doshaphile, Sarana was a private convert to the. A monotheistic faith involving the worship of the goddess, this religion treated ritual hunts and sacred killings with special significance, as practitioners believed the Scorekeeper awarded s and determined individuals' standing in the afterlife depending on the types of prey successfully overcome in hunts. Though the depths of her belief and dedication to the religion's tenets were unknown, Sarana was known to have openly invoked the Scorekeeper's blessing and favor prior to commencing hunts, and often dedicated successful missions to the goddess.

Weapons
Like many members of the, Sarana preferred the use of easily concealed knives like the  over the traditional. Her time among the s following the end of the exposed her to the traditional Trandoshan, a matched pair of long-bladed knives used in the  martial art with which Trandoshans engaged in ritualistic combat. Sarana crafted herself a pair of these weapons at some point, carrying them in a scabbard holster on her back. Additionally, though she rarely entered into outright combat, she possessed a Trandoshan-designed.

Sarana also carried on her person her father's green-bladed, a gift from her mother upon passing Selection and the only keepsake Sarana had of his. Though she rarely used it due to her inexperience in wielding such weapons, she was rarely parted from it and eventually pursued instruction in its use from masters of the during the era of the.

Armor
Like many of her sisters, Sarana generally defaulted to a standard set of red form-fitting Nightsister wraps and a matching hooded cowl while on Dathomir. In combat scenarios, however, she augmented her robes with a set of flexible that allowed her a full range of motion and complete use of her Force abilities without compromising bodily protection. When conducting espionage missions, she abode by shadow killer conventions and dressed in nondescript black robes that concealed her form.

Behind the scenes
Sarana was created by the author after a Fall 2018 playthrough of  raised questions about what specifically happened to Silri's army of frozen -era Sith soldiers. As a fellow Nightsister would logically be the only other member of the Consortium Silri could conceivably trust with the secret location of the army, the author decided to make Sarana a Dathomirian Nightsister with a unique light-sided predisposition and enough scruples to consider stopping Silri's plans for domination.