Khrado Sakaros was the eldest son of the Sith Lord Tak Sakaros, and a powerful and dangerous Force user. Possessed of an incredible attunement to the Force, on par with such beings as Yoda and Palpatine, he was primed from birth to become the next Dark Lord of the Sith. Trained with ruthless efficiency by his father, he became strong enough to topple almost any other Force user before his untimely death in 21 ABY at the Battle of Dorian IV.
Biography[]
Early life and training[]
Born on the Sith flagship Sith Star at the Denarii Nova to Tak Sakaros and his wife, Khrado was obviously powerful from birth. Sensing his son's incredible power, Tak began training the boy almost as soon as he could walk. For the first two years of his life he received almost all of his parents' attention, which led to anger early in life when his brother Marquand was born in 6 BBY. Khrado was resentful of any imposition on the attention he felt his due, and though Tak was anxious that his sons form a cooperative force, he left the matter alone to encourage Khrado's power.
At the age of three, Khrado was given his first training lightsaber, which he took to with a passion. By the age of ten in 1 ABY, when his youngest brother Tariun was born, Khrado was already a better swordsman than some Jedi Knights had been, and far better than anyone his own age. His connection to the Force deepened exponentially the more he studied, and he constantly sought new challenges to make him even more powerful.
By the time he was fifteen Khrado had grown bored with the single lightsaber, dismissing it as overly common for a future Dark Lord. He briefly experiment with using two lightsabers, like his father did and his brother Tariun later would, but dismissed this idea as well, opting instead to master the difficult double-bladed lightsaber. Though in his impatience to become a master he burned and singed himself repeatedly, by the time he was twenty-two he had mastered the saberstaff as well.
A taste for blood[]
In 14 ABY, Tak proclaimed his son a Sith Lord and began dispatching him on training missions. In eerie similarity to Darth Maul, Khrado kept in the shadows of the galaxy, but tried his blades against Jedi Masters, Knights, and Apprentices, always without fail. Since the complicity of the Sith could never be proven in the deaths of these Jedi (as no one who fought Khrado survived to tell the story), Luke Skywalker was left to wonder what was happening to the agents of his new Jedi Order.
When Tak initiated conquest of several Rim systems, Khrado quickly became a frontline commander, exterminating legions of enemies like insects and inspiring terror in his foes and fanatic loyalty in his Massassi forces. Unfortunately, his fame in battle finally brought him to the knowledge of the Jedi, who were greatly concerned about the rise of so powerful a warrior. Undeterred by this compromised position and completely ignoring his father's unease with his star pupil being in the crosshairs of the Order, Khrado responded by adorning his personal speeder with the shells of the lightsabers he had collected from his dead enemies.
Fall[]
Hear me, Jedi! I am Sakaros, scion of the Sith, master of the dark side, and no Jedi coward will prevail against the Dark Lord of the Sith!
—Khrado Sakaros
By 21 ABY, Khrado was so powerful that his thirst for conquest and triumph could no longer be contained without threatening the growth of his power (or the safety of those around him), so Tak was persuaded to take his conquests into the Colonies. The first target for this new wave was Cato Neimoidia, which was actively petitioning for membership in the New Republic. Seeing a chance to confront the Sith openly, the Jedi convinced Ponc Gavrisom to agree to a fight.
Retreating to the nearby moon of Dorian IV to establish a better defense, the Sith forces prepared a defense against a much larger army. Incensed that his strategy proposals had been overruled, Khrado demanded that he at least be allowed to lead the vanguard, to which Tak reluctantly agreed. When the Republic forces landed, Khrado led the first wave of Massassi into them with such ferocity that they almost retreated. Killing several Jedi Apprentices and Knights straight out, Khrado was ultimately responsible for more than half the Jedi casualties in the fight.
It did not take long for the Jedi commanders to realize that killing Khrado was the key to breaking the morale of the Sith front lines and turning a potential defeat into a certain victory. Several Jedi ganged up on Khrado, attempt to overwhelm his defenses. Realizing the desperate nature of his position, the Sith Lord took up a fallen Knight's lightsaber in his right hand, wielding his double-bladed lightsaber one-handed in his left. Managing to kill several more astonished Jedi in this way before they finally recovered, Khrado ultimately fell as four blades cleaved through his weapons and his body. Scream echoing through the Force, Khrado Sakaros vanished in an explosion of blue energy. The Massassi general Kartok recovered the fragments of Khrado's lightsaber to give to a devastated Tak.
Legacy[]
I loved my brother. He was my brother. But he was a monster.
—Tariun Sakaros to Odala Van Meer
By 140 ABY, the New Jedi Order was using holos of Khrado as part of the Jedi Trials. Odala Van Meer faced and defeated a holo of Khrado as part of her failed Jedi Trials.
Tariun was bitter about his brother's death for decades, maintaining an idealistic view of Khrado. By the time he helped his sister Rin found the Golden Empire, however, Tariun had come to see the brutality and heartlessness that underlay his brother's power. He occasionally wondered how a fight between Rin and Khrado would have turned out.
Personality and traits[]
If a nightmare took physical form, it would look like that Sith.
—Jedi survivor of Dorian IV
Khrado stood nearly two meters tall, and was very muscular, due to the demands he placed on his body with his overpowering style of lightsaber combat. He wore his hair spiked, and his gray eyes were described as "vivid and threatening"; like his father's, they also turned red and yellow when he used the dark side. More than his brothers, Khrado kept some of the harsher features and dark red skin color of the Sith species, despite being half-human. He was fond of leaving battle tears or rips in his Sith robes, as he felt they added to his already-frightening appearance. Like most classical Sith, he was left-handed.
Also unlike his brothers, Khrado was cold, vicious, sadistic, and incredibly arrogant. He operated on the theory that all life existed to serve him in some way or other; if anything did not, or even worse opposed him, the Sith Lord was quick to put an end to it. It is unknown if he held genuine affection for anyone; if so, they were his father and his youngest brother. He openly supported his father when his mother was executed, and he had unhidden disdain for his brother Marquand, whom he viewed as weak and unskilled; Tariun observed some time after Dorian IV that Khrado only let Marquand live because killing him would put him in a duel with their father. Nevertheless, despite his feelings of superiority, he was a dutiful son to his father, though toward the end of his life he felt the positions of master and servant should be reversed.
Because of his narcissism and incredible power (and helped along by constant reassurances from his father), Khrado felt he was destined to become Dark Lord of the Sith from a very early age. This further contributed to his arrogance and detachment from other beings. Though he had no real care for the soldiers he commanded, Khrado was nonetheless revered by them because of his unrivaled bravery in combat; the Sith Lord was often found so far in front of the first wave that he was almost a separate line himself.
Like his father and his namesake, Khrado was afflicted with bloodlust; unlike them, though, he embraced it, transforming a disease into an ultra-powerful variant of Force Rage. When under bloodlust, though his judgment suffered, it tended not to matter, because he became so overwhelmingly powerful and destructive that nothing survived his attacks.
Though loathe to speak ill of his own dead son, Tak Sakaros on occasion used Khrado as a reference for what "appears" to be Sith mastery, and yet is not. Though powerful and deadly, a master of the Force and the lightsaber, Khrado had no patience, and it was this quality that cost him his life.
Powers and abilities[]
Khrado Sakaros was powerful to an almost unbelievable degree. He had a deep understanding of the Force and the dark side, and a vast well of power at his disposal. An expert at lightsaber combat, he was a master of both Djem So and Juyo. He also committed to mastering double-bladed lightsaber combat, and was proficient in the use of a single saber or one in each hand, though he despised the weak strikes inherent in the latter. Khrado was nearly as dangerous when unarmed, since he had been taught Sith martial arts and Echani fighting techniques by his father.
When using the Force, a fight against Khrado was almost a foregone conclusion. His incredible connection to the Force afforded him access to the most rare and dangerous of Force powers; though he later rejected it, he had initially proposed creating a Force Storm to consume the Republic fleet at the Battle of Dorian IV. He used Force lightning and Dun Moch constantly in combat, and was known to crush enemies' rib cages from afar. In addition, on several occasions Khrado was able to glimpse the future with far more clarity than his father or brothers.
By the age of twenty-two, Khrado could not only defeat his brothers in sparring without fail, he was also regularly defeating his father, many times the young Sith's senior and vastly more experienced with combat. Far from feeling threatened, Tak took this as a sign that Khrado was meant to become the next Dark Lord.
| The Sakaros Siblings | |
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