Sarana (/sɑː'rɑː.nɑː/ sah-RAH-nah) was a female Dathomirian shadow killer of the Talzin Nightsister clan who was affiliated with the Black Sun, Republic Intelligence, and the Zann Consortium during the eras of the Galactic Republic, Galactic Empire, and New Republic.
Illegitimate daughter of a Dathomirian Nightsister and a Jedi Knight, Sarana participated in the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War 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 Silri's plans to unleash a carbonite-frozen Jedi Civil War-era Sith army on the galaxy prevented a large-scale crisis from occurring in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, thus likely saving countless lives from Silri's planned campaign of conquest.[3]
Biography
Early life
Sarana was born around the year 41 BBY on Dathomir, the outcome of an illicit affair between a Dathomirian Nightsister of the Talzin coven and a visiting Human Jedi Knight sent to monitor the activities of the Dathomiri clans. Though the Nightsisters were generally wary of outsiders,[2] this Jedi achieved some semblance of respect among his lover's coven. During one of the protracted conflicts that characterized Nightsister culture,[4] this Jedi self-sacrificially gave his life to protect the Talzin Nightsister ranks from a surprise attack perpetrated by the burgeoning Zalem coven.[4] Though Sarana was thus never able to meet her father, she grew up hearing stories of his sacrifice and eventually came to possess his green Consular lightsaber 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 Selection process held to elevate Nightsisters to full member status upon coming of age. Due in large part to her prodigious talent in casting ichor cloaks to mask her presence,[5] she was assigned to the shadow killer specialization, a rank in the Nightsister hierarchy held by those with proven skill in espionage and assassination.[5]
Separatist Crisis
Travels abroad
In keeping with Mother Talzin's plans to make the Nightsister clan into a major player of the galactic criminal underworld,[5][6] Sarana was one of many newly minted warriors, hunters, and shadow killers promptly shipped offworld to serve the interests of wealthy clients in the underworld.[5] 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 Separatist Crisis, Sarana found employment in the service of the Black Sun on Coruscant. 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 local authorities 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 Vigos 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 Clone Wars, 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 Jedi Temple during her time on Coruscant. Though initially awe-struck by the imposing structure and wary of its potent Force nexus, 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 Great Jedi Purge.
Clone Wars
Career with Republic Intelligence
With the start of the Clone Wars in 22 BBY,[7] Sarana found employment with Republic Intelligence and conducted many espionage and sabotage missions against the Hyper-Communications Cartel (HCC), a faction of the nascent Confederacy of Independent Systems tasked with overseeing the development and protection of Separatist military communication networks.[8][9] Over the course of the war, the HCC took on an additional role as the primary intelligence agency 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 20 BBY extermination of her clan at the hands of Count Dooku and General Grievous.[7][10] After burying her fallen mother and sisters, Sarana departed Dathomir in despair to aimlessly wander the Outer Rim, eventually falling in with a group of unaligned Trandoshan hunters. By saving the life of one of their own from a hunting accident, Sarana was respected for actions deemed worthy of a Trandoshan and named a ghrakhowsk.[11] 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 Wild Space during the waning days of the war, eventually following its members back to Trandosha where she remained in isolation for the better part of a decade.
Imperial Period
Career as Dark Side Adept
The Trandoshans were among the first alien species to ally themselves with the nascent Galactic Empire in the aftermath of the Declaration of a New Order, partly out of a desire to legally enslave the Wookiees of nearby Kashyyyk.[12] 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 attentions of the Empire for nearly a decade, Sarana's Force-sensitivity and Dathomiri heritage were soon discovered by perambulating members of the Inquisitorius tasked with hunting down Force users across the galaxy. As the Emperor had charged the Imperial Security Bureau with recruiting Nightsister shadow hunters for their unmatched talents in infiltration and assassination,[5] she was impressed into the service of the Empire as a Dark Side Adept.
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 Galactic Civil War conducting espionage missions on behalf of the ISB and Imperial Intelligence, coerced into unwilling service through the forced implantation of a tracing implant. She remained in service to the Empire until the rise of the Zann Consortium following the Battle of Yavin. Sent to gather intelligence on the burgeoning crime syndicate, she was rescued from her life of servitude by Consortium lieutenant and fellow Dathomirian Nightsister Silri.[3] With Silri's assistance, Sarana deactivated her implant via a deactivator wand and joined her sister in the Consortium alongside many other disgruntled Nightsisters possessed of the same hatred for the Empire.[3]
Her skills in espionage served Tyber Zann's interests well, leading him to task her with assisting his Defiler infiltrators on their missions in the field. During this time, Sarana worked closely with Zann's chief lieutenant Urai Fen, a fellow Force user with similar abilities in Force-mediated invisibility camouflage.[3] Though they were by no means friends on account of Fen's private feud with Silri,[3] their professional relationship was amiable and tempered by a distinct master-apprentice dynamic. Sarana benefited greatly from his centuries of experience,[3] 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 frozen Jedi Civil War-era Sith army she intended to unleash upon the galaxy,[3] Sarana decided to intervene. Confronting Silri even as she prepared to defrost the Sith Master from carbon-freezing, 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 warrior against shadow killer and lightwhip against slaver blade, 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 ichor mist, 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 Deralia, 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 Nightsister fortress before returning to the service of the Consortium.
Skills and abilities
Linguistic abilities
Sarana was a native speaker of Galactic Basic Standard due to its wide usage among the Dathomiri clans, though she spoke it with the unique abbreviated cadence of the Nightsisters even after spending many years abroad.[10] In addition to Basic, she was also fluent in Huttese courtesy of her extended stay in the Coruscant underworld and her tenure in service to the Black Sun, 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 Trandosha, she was able to cultivate an ear for the distinctive Trandoshan language known as Dosh. 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.
Personality and traits
Force alignment
As a Nightsister from birth, Sarana was significantly more aligned with the dark side of the Force than many of her fellow Witches of Dathomir.[5][2] 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 shadow killer. However, perhaps in part due to the Jedi heritage of her biological father, Sarana was curious about and open to the study of many light sided beliefs. She took an interest in studying the Jedi path during the Clone Wars, and following the reestablishment of the New Jedi Order 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 Human on account of her human Jedi father, Sarana displayed a number of distinctly human qualities that set her apart from her fellow Dathomirian Nightsisters. While many Dathomirian females were hairless on account of their Zabrak heritage and generally possessed heights around two standard meters,[2][5] 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.[2]
Sarana inexplicably stopped aging naturally around 19 BBY while still hunting with her Trandoshan allies in the Outer Rim. 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.[13] Even at a century old in 59 ABY, 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 Trandoshan religion. A monotheistic faith involving the worship of the Scorekeeper goddess,[14] this religion treated ritual hunts and sacred killings with special significance, as practitioners believed the Scorekeeper awarded Jagannath points and determined individuals' standing in the afterlife depending on the types of prey successfully overcome in hunts.[14][15] 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.
Equipment
Weapons
Like many members of the Nightsister shadow killers,[5] Sarana preferred the use of easily concealed knives like the Nightsister dagger over the traditional energy bow. Her time among the Trandoshans following the end of the Clone Wars exposed her to the traditional Trandoshan slaver blades,[16] a matched pair of long-bladed knives used in the Thrar'kor martial art with which Trandoshans engaged in ritualistic combat.[17] 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 Arakyd Industries ACP array shotgun.[16]
Sarana also carried on her person her father's green-bladed Jedi Consular lightsaber, 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 New Jedi Order during the era of the New Republic.
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.[6] In combat scenarios, however, she augmented her robes with a set of flexible fiber armor 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.[5]
Behind the scenes
Sarana was created by the author after a Fall 2018 playthrough of Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption raised questions about what specifically happened to Silri's army of frozen Jedi Civil War-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.
Sarana was voted "Best Neutral-alignment Force User" in the Fourteenth Star Wars Fanon Wiki Awards.