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The planet is called Thule. Thousands of years ago, it was a hidden Sith stronghold. Ulic fought there during the war. That's where the Dark Reaper is buried.
—Anakin Skywalker prior to the Battle of Thule
Thule ( pronounced /θuːl/)—a Basicization of the High Galactic Thūlē derived from the original Old Tionese Θούλη—was a frigid and semi-arid Force nexus steeped in the dark side of the Force that lay upon the western flanks of the Stygian Caldera in the Sith Marches of the Esstran sector. As a hidden Sith fortress world for most of its recorded history, Thule consistently served as a redoubt and resource world for the various iterations of the Sith Empire and Sith Order over a protracted period of millennia.
Though discovered by the Rakata of the Infinite Empire during their invasion of Korriban, Thule was first surveyed and settled by Tionese Humans during their Expansionist Period, serving as one of the marcher worlds along the northern border of Xim the Despot's empire. Sometime after the conclusion of the Xim Wars and prior to the Hundred-Year Darkness, members of the Sith species hailing from the nearby Stygian Caldera invaded Thule during their period of outward expansion, eventually subjugating the planet and enslaving the surviving Humans. These Tionese eventually interbred with their Sith masters' Tapani Human slaves, descendants of nobles belonging to the disbanded House Nidantha, which gave rise to the Thulese Human ethnolinguistic group that came to dominate the planet's population.
A fortified stronghold of the early Sith Empire, Thule eventually came to host the Châtsûshnwûrkut Tsiskyantâtottoi Shikkarjontû, a Sith assassins guild sworn in service to the presiding Dark Lord, and a Sith stealth regiment, both drawn to the world for its power in the dark side and its remote location. The planet's isolation allowed it to survive the Sith Empire's fall in the Great Hyperspace War, and its special forces units were subsequently joined by refugees fleeing the Republic counterinvasion of the Sith Worlds at the war's end. The world became a hidden stronghold of both Exar Kun's and Revan's Sith Empires, and its residents swore themselves in service to the Sith Order in its disparate incarnations over the subsequent millennia.
Thule was unique in that its population was aware of the Sith's continued existence following the conclusion of the New Sith Wars, in which the last vestiges of the Sith were widely assumed to have been rendered extinct. Pledged in service to the surviving Banite Sith of the Order of the Sith Lords, Thule's elite soldiers frequently participated in the schemes of various Sith masters and apprentices during the Great Peace of the Republic and into the Imperial Period. Thule's status as a hidden resource world for the Sith Order's use alone, confirmed with Emperor Palpatine's deletion of Thule from both the histories and star-charts, ultimately allowed it to survive the Galactic Empire's fragmentation and persist in isolation through the conflicts and crises that followed the Battle of Endor.
Thule served the Grand Contingency, Palpatine's plan to preserve the Banite Sith order's powerbase in the event of the Empire's fall or the need for the Sith to revert to a policy of secrecy, as the location at which the Sith cultural heritage would be stored in the event of the Contingency's execution. Following the Battle of Endor, Grand Executor Andrai Ziratai, Governor-General of Thule and a Palpatine loyalist charged with the Contingency's execution, put the Grand Contingency into effect, though he and his fellow Thulese were left directionless after Palpatine's final death on Onderon following a number of resurrections, the extinction of the Banite Sith, and the absence of any worthy claimants to the Dark Lordship of the Sith.
Ignoring the promptings of his constitutents to seize the Dark Lordship for himself, the unambitious Ziratai continued the search for a worthy claimant to the Dark Lord's throne for many decades, dismissing self-proclaimed claimants like Lumiya and Darth Caedus as unsuitable. Thule and the greater Thurra system were heavily fortified during this time to protect the ever-growing repository of lore, as the Contingency's agents continued to retrieve and store Sith artifacts, scrolls, amulets, and even entire carbonite-encased armies on Thule. The planet remained hidden through the Yuuzhan Vong Wars and Abeloth crisis, ever watchful for a dark sider worthy of Thule's allegiance and collated Sith lore.
Description
Uranology
Thule was the innermost of the two planets[3] that together made up the Thurra system,[2] a remote star system situated upon the western flanks of the Stygian Caldera nebula in the Sith Marches region of the Outer Rim's Esstran sector.[1] Thule shared its star Thurra, an unspectacular yellow G-type main sequence star, with the gas giant Enenpa, and was itself orbited by Sivvi, a captured asteroid[2] from Enenpa's trojan field which served as Thule's sole natural satellite.[3] Thule rotated on its axis every thirty-eight standard hours and orbited Thurra every four hundred and fifty-nine standard days on average.[2]
Geology
Despite possessing a diameter of 27,539 kilometers,[2] nearly three times that of most habitable terrestrial worlds found elsewhere in the galaxy, Thule exhibited standard surface gravity[2] on account of a low mass and low density generated by the unique chemical composition of its planetary core and mantle. Unlike many worlds, Thule's small core was metal-poor and lacked many of the denser elements commonly evidenced in the cores of more standard terrestrial worlds, such as gold, cobalt, platinum, and tungsten, while the silicate rock of its mantle was particularly soft and porous.
Geography
On its planetary surface, Thule was a frigid and arid terrestrial world[3] possessed of a breathable Type I atmosphere.[2] Apart from a few arable regions that hosted the bulk of the planet's cities and extensive droid-managed farms,[4] Thule's surface was barren and covered with a thick carpet of charred gray rock and fine sand.[2] Its landscape was primarily characterized by blackened hills, rich savannas,[3] rocky plains, and wind-hollowed canyons punctuated at length by tall, natural spires of black stone. Despite heavy cloud cover that birthed both frequent windstorms[2] and protracted bouts of colored lightning,[3] Thule typically experienced fewer than fifty days of rain per year.[2]
Biota
Though Thule was believed to have once been a verdant world home to a variety of indigenous lifeforms during its earliest history,[3] most of this endemic flora and fauna was ultimately rendered extinct by the subsequent colonization efforts of the planet's inhabitants[2] and by the ferocity of its weather patterns.[3] Only a handful of unique species that had managed to successfully evolve and adapt to Thule's harsh envirnoment managed to persist unmolested on the planet's surface without the aid of sentient cultivation. Among these was a unique species of bioluminescent moss that fed on the planet's charred rock content and lit Thule's stony outcroppings[3] and spires[2] with an eerie green light.[3][5] This moss was endemic to the region surrounding the city of Kesiak, though Thule's windstorms frequently carried spores further afield.
Thule was also home to several unique tree and grass species that were likewise adapted for survival on Thule. Ximfoil, so named for an ancient Tionese conqueror who greatly expanded upon his father's empire over the course of a short reign, was a species of tall tussock grass notable for its ability to run rampant over unsown farms and usurp arable land intended for agriculture. Ximfoil was a hardy species, and managed to spread despite Thule's generally inhospitable conditions. Though generally considered a weed, the leaves of Ximfoil were found to produce a smell pleasant to many humanoid species when crushed, leading to their use as tea leaves.[7]
The witherwood tree, so named for the sickly appearance of its bark and leaves mediated by means of Thule's inhospitable conditions and pervasive dark side taint,[2][3] was a species of deciduous tree native to Thule that was heavily cultivated by the planet's residents as Thule's sole source of natural wood. Like Ximfoil, witherwood trees were surprisingly hardy. Their deeply inset root systems allowed them both to weather Thule's intense windstorms and tap into the ground water reservoirs that constituted Thule's primary sources of water. Witherwood trees were planted wherever space could be found on Thule's limited supply of arable land, though wood goods remained a luxury on Thule despite the establishment of tree plantations.[7]
History
Pre-Republic era
The planet Thule was first discovered around 27,700 BBY[15] by the Rakata of Lehon, a dark-sided species of Force-sensitives[16][17] from the Unknown Regions whose Infinite Empire was among the galaxy's earliest pan-galactic civilizations.[16][18] On account of its status as a verdant world with a rich ecosystem[3] and a potent Force nexus,[2] Thule was readily targeted by the Force-powered hyperdrives of the Rakata,[19] and the planet briefly served as the Rakata's de facto headquarters in the Esstran sector during their attempts to vassalize or subjugate the Sith species native to nearby Korriban.[17][20][21][22]
When the Rakata Predor Soa[23] failed to convince Sith King Adas to pledge fealty to the Infinite Empire in exchange for Forceful artifacts and arcane knowledge,[17] Thule likewise came to serve as a staging area and forward command center for massing Rakata invasion forces bound for Korriban. However, the Rakata were defeated by the Sith in the ill-fated invasion of Korriban,[15][16][17][24] and upon learning that the Sith had cobbled together a fleet of hyperdrive-equipped Rakata ships commandeered from the battlefields of Korriban,[24][25] the Rakata cut their losses and withdrew from both Thule and the greater Esstran sector, though their dark side taint persisted and took root on the planet in subsequent millennia.[2]
Though the Sith used their repurposed Rakata vessels to slowly spread out across the Sith Worlds of the Stygian Caldera,[24] abandoning their ancestral homeworld of Korriban[20][21] for Ziost,[17][24] they made no concerted effort to expand the borders of their nascent Sith Empire outward beyond the walls of the nebula. Thule sat uninhabited for the better part of three millennia after the hasty departure of the Rakata.[7] However, sometime between 25,127 BBY and 25,096 BBY during the Tionese Expansionist Period,[11] Thule was rediscovered by the armed forces of Xim the Despot following their successful conquests of Korriban and Stenos.[11]
The planet, given the name "Θούλη" in the Old Tionese language,[7] marked the northernmost extent of Xim's empire at its height, and was soon thereafter surveyed and settled by Tionese Humans whose marcher lords were charged with keeping watch over the Radama Void.[11] With the empire's eventual fall and fragmentation following the end of the Xim Wars,[11] the Tionese persisted on Thule in isolation, gradually devolving into a society of primitive farmers. Without the technology or resources to build spacefaring vessels, these Humans, the original members of the ethnolinguistic group that would come to be known as the Thulese,[7] remained trapped on their homeworld for millennia, forgotten by the galactic community at large,[7] though Thule's rich ecosystem[3] sustained them for millennia in isolation.
Subterra Period
The end of the Tapani Unification War in 7328 BBY saw the formation of the Tapani Empire and the expulsion of the defeated Rogue Houses from the Tapani sector.[26] For their part, the nobles of the exiled House Nidantha perambulated at random through the Outer Rim for a time, eventually meandering into the Stygian Caldera from the outlying Esstran sector.[10][27] Though these Tapani were promptly enslaved by the Sith,[28][29] the ease with which they had penetrated the seemingly "impenetrable" shroud of the Caldera worried the Sith establishment. The Empire's Sith Kings eventually authorized a number of expansions of the Empire into the empty space surrounding the Stygian Caldera,[10] forming a border region subsequently known as the Sith Marches that would serve to secure the Empire's borders and core holdings.[7]

Downtown Hurom as seen from the Tower of Hurom
The Sith discovered Thule during this time, enslaving its surviving Thulese Tionese residents[7] and fortifying it as a fortress world capable of resisting planetary assault or invasion.[10] During this time, many of the Sith's Tapani slaves were imported to Thule to assist in the construction of the planet's various defenses. In addition to giving the planet the name "Thūlē"—a rendering of the planet's Old Tionese name in the Tapani's native High Galactic tongue[7]—the members of House Nidantha subsequently interbred with their Tionese fellows to form the unique ethnolinguistic cultural group of Sith-speaking Tionese-Tapani Humans that constituted the modern Thulese people.[7]
The Sith Empire's military occupation and planet-wide fortification efforts gradually reduced Thule's fertility, rendering the once-verdant planet to a wasteland of charred barren rock. Over time, the widespread deforestation and ecosystem exploitation necessary to make space for the planet's defensive emplacements eventually resulted in the ruin of the planet's biosphere. Dry sand choked riverbeds where clear waters once flowed, and fierce windstorms lit by Force lightning whipped across fields that had in bygone millennia hosted forests and farms.[7]
On account of Thule's increasingly inhospitable conditions, the majority of the population of Thule came to cluster and coalesce around a number of large cities[8] located where the soil was the least dry and the land partially arable.[2] The largest of these, Kâsiyâk and Hyûram—known in later millennia as Kesiak[5] and Hurom[8]—found themselves drawn into ever more frequent conflict for natural resources as their populations boomed in the years following the Sith Empire's conquest of the planet.[7] Neither acknowledged the other's claim to be Thule's capital, and tensions eventually escalated to protracted bouts of warfare, a series of armed conflicts collectively known as the Thule Wars.[7] Kâsiyâk managed a Pyrrhic victory and the recognition of the Empire's reigning Sith King as Thule's formal capital at the Wars' conclusion, though Hyûram ended the war with fewer casualties and more territory than it had held previously.[7]
Manderon Period
In 6900 BBY,[30][31][32] a group of mostly Human Dark Jedi known as the Exiles, survivors of the Hundred-Year Darkness, were banished from the Galactic Republic by the victorious Jedi Order.[33] These Dark Jedi eventually arrived on Korriban after a protracted wander across the Outer Rim,[34] using their mastery of the Force to cow the Sith into submission.[20][35] The Exiles subsequently reorganized their subjects' government into a restructured Sith Empire with themselves as presiding Dark Lords of the Sith,[20] and set about formulating plans for an invasion of the Republic.[10] In her titular chronicle, Jin'jidai Sorzus Syn wrote that Thūlē—Basicized as "Thule" with the Exiles' introduction of Galactic Basic Standard to the Empire—and fellow Sith Marches fortress world Malachor V[1] "will serve as the perfect positions from which to launch our reconquest of the Republic."[10]
Though the Exiles' plans never came to fruition, Thule enjoyed a privileged position in the reformed Empire through the Manderon Period. It notably came to host the Châtsûshnwûrkut Tsiskyantâtottoi Shikkarjontû, a Sith assassins guild sworn in service to the presiding Dark Lord,[7] and a Sith stealth regiment of the Empire's armed forces,[2] both drawn to the world for its power in the dark side and its remote location.[2] The Sith Arts Academy, a elite Sith academy,[6] was likewise established in the vicinity of an ancient library-temple near Hurom and grew to become one of the foremost institutions of higher learning for Sith specializing in the clandestine subtleties of espionage and assassination.[7]
During the Great Hyperspace War of 5000 BBY[36] that saw Naga Sadow's Sith Empire unsuccessfully invade the Galactic Republic,[37][38][39] Thule was the site at which the Sith superweapon known as the Dark Reaper[12] was constructed and stored during its period of assembly. One of the hangars in Thule's expansive armory complex, located some forty kilometers outside the city of Hurom, was used to house the superweapon prior to its intended usage against the forces of the Republic Military. The weapon did not see usage during the war due to the speed with which the Sith Empire was repulsed by the Republic, and it remained hidden in its hangar for the better part of a millennium thereafter.[4]
Old Sith Wars
Following the Sith Empire's defeat in the Great Hyperspace War[37] and its subsequent collapse due to the loss of its leadership and widespread internal strife,[39][40] a number of Sith Lords,[41] refugees,[8] and Empire loyalists fled to Thule.[8] These abandoned the Stygian Caldera in an effort to escape the civil conflict,[38] disease,[38] and famine[38] that characterized the war-torn Sith Worlds during the post–Great Hyperspace War counterinvasion, a joint Jedi–Republic counterinvasion of the Sith Empire aimed at eliminating any vestigial threat the Sith posed to the safety of the Republic.[38] Confident that the Empire's defeat at the hands of the Republic would be temporary, these Sith joined themselves to the Thulese and remained in seclusion on Thule for centuries, training in preparation to serve as a vanguard force for a resurgent Sith Empire[8] and bolstering their ranks with Sith loyalists drawn from the other refuge worlds of Ambria,[1] Tund,[25] and Vjun.[1]

Downtown Kesiak
During the height of the Great Sith War a millennium later,[41] Thule served as a stronghold and forward base of operations for Sith warriors belonging to Exar Kun's Brotherhood of the Sith and associated Sith Empire.[41] During the Dark Reaper campaign of the Krath Holy Crusade,[13] Thule was invaded and conquered in the Battle of Thule by a task force of Jedi Knights led to the planet by redeemed Jedi and former Sith Lord Ulic Qel-Droma.[5] Invading the Sith fortress city of Kesiak, this force discovered, dismantled, and entombed the Dark Reaper superweapon beneath the planet's surface[3][12] in the vicinity of Kesiak's Sith Temple,[5] where it remained hidden in the darkness and lost to subsequent generations of Sith for nearly four millennia.
Kesiak suffered significant damage during the Battle of Thule. Though its Sith Temple remained intact,[5] the city center and much of the suburban sprawl lying upon the outlying arid plains were largely destroyed in the fighting. Though Kesiak was slowly rebuilt in the following centuries, the planetary government, nobility, and Sith priesthood relocated from Kesiak to the more defensible Hurom during this era. Kesiak retained its status as de jure capital of Thule until its final destruction during the Clone Wars four millennia later, but Hurom remained the de facto capital and the central hub of government on Thule thereafter.[7]
The Great Sith War saw the dark side taint that had taken root in the days of the initial Rakata encampment and grown during the various Sith Empires' occupations become deeply infused into the planetary Force nexus, saturating and soaking the crust of the planet in the dark side.[3] Though Thule's biosphere and ecosystem had suffered greatly since the arrival of the Sith, the presence of the dark side on the planet's surface had not grown so pervasive as to preclude the possibility of life surviving and thriving on the planet's surface. However, during the Great Sith War, the dark side's power on Thule waxed fully,[3] such that starship-bound Force-sensitives traveling through the Thurra system could sense the weight of Thule's presence in the Force from as far away as Enenpa.[6] By this time, most of Thule's natural lifeforms had been rendered extinct, and those few that survived were twisted and mutated so as to feed off the dark side energies.
New Sith Wars
Though their numbers sank significantly over the millennia until the planet's population numbered fewer than a million residents in total, the Thulese persisted on Thule through the passage of the ages, maintaining ties to other vestigial groups of Sith loyalists elsewhere in the galaxy and continuing to pledge themselves to the service of the Sith Order and the Sith Empire in their varied iterations and incarnations.[8] During the latter days of the New Sith Wars, Thule came to serve as a staging ground of the New Sith Empire, and members of species as diverse as the Arkanians, Anzati, Umbarans, and Ubese bolstered the planet's faltering population. Of these, the latter eventually took up long-term residence on the planet as a dedicated Ubese diaspora,[8] a coalition of tribes that called themselves the Yatarook Thoolak.[7]
During the Light and Darkness War of the New Sith Wars, around the time of the Ruusan campaign, agents of Skere Kaan's Brotherhood of Darkness found their way into the Unknown Regions and encountered the Chiss Ascendancy,[9] a regional hegemon. Like the reconstituted Sith Empire millennia prior,[42] the New Sith Empire was able to secure an alliance with the Ascendancy. A legion of Chiss accompanied Kaan's agents back to the New Sith Empire and massed on Thule in preparation for deployment to Ruusan.[9] However, Kaan's death and the perceived destruction of all remaining Sith on Ruusan left the Chiss stranded on Thule. Though some of these left the planet to settle elsewhere in the eastern galaxy,[9] some remained on Thule and further bolstered the planet's population, adopting the Cheunh endonym Ch'tratuntah'thul meaning "those who went to Thule."[7]
Great Peace of the Republic
The Thulese were left directionless with the perceived destruction of the Sith during the Ruusan campaign, which saw the remaining Sith Lords of Kaan's Brotherhood of Darkness eliminated by a thought bomb[43] in a final climatic battle with Hoth's Jedi Lords.[44][45] When Darth Bane, the sole dark-sided survivor of the New Sith Wars, reorganized the Sith in accordance with his Rule of Two into a furtive institution possessing no more than two members at any one time, the residents of Thule readily pledged themselves in service to the Order of the Sith Lords, believing this new incarnation of the Sith Order would give them purpose again.[8] Thule's elite special forces operators frequently participated in the schemes of Sith masters and apprentices during the Great Peace of the Republic, playing their part in bringing the Grand Plan to fruition.[8]
As the Dark Lords of the Banite Sith began relying ever more consistently on Thule's population to provide servants and soldiers during the Golden Age of the Old Republic, the planet's presiding Governor-General and Sith priesthood recognized the need to establish a specialized paramilitary force of elite soldiers dedicated to serving the Banite Sith on a exclusive basis.[7] Inspired by the Antarian Rangers, a Republic-aligned paramilitary formed in 620 BBY to serve the members of the Jedi Order as an auxiliary,[46] the leadership of Thule established the Thulese Rangers, a dark-sided analogue of the Antarian Rangers whose members—both Forceless and Force-sensitive alike—would serve the interests of the Sith exclusively as required.[7]
Inhabitants
Overview
Unlike most Outer Rim worlds, Thule consistently boasted a uncommonly large Human population over the course of its history. Those residents not of direct Human ancestry were often members of near-Human species like the Arkanians, Umbarans, Chiss, and Ubese, and a multiplicity of uncatalogued near-Human offshoot subspecies unknown to most contemporary xenobiologists likewise maintained a presence on Thule during the Old Republic period.[8] Though Galactic Basic Standard saw frequent use, the ancient Sith language was commonly spoken by the Thulese nobility and a large portion of the Thulese common folk,[2] a vestige of the legacy established by the Humanoid Sith species who ruled Thule for millennia.[10]

The flag of Thule, circa 24 BBY
Thule's culture was decidedly martial in nature, with professional soldiers, mercenaries, and militia constituting the bulk of the planet's population. The open carrying of blasters, vibroblades, and power armor on the streets of the planet's major cities was a common sight, and military uniforms of every type and variety were considered "normal" everyday dress. Though residential areas housing families and noncombat personnel could be found in Thule's cities, no citizens were permitted to be civilians. All residents, even those not directly involved with the military, were expected to contribute to the defense of the planet during wartime, and even shopkeepers were familiar with the use of weaponry ranging from blaster rifles to static defense points. In the major city of Hurom, all able-bodied adults were required to own blasters and participate in bimonthly training sessions aimed at keeping their skills honed, regardless of their affiliation with respect to the military.[4]
In accordance with its overtly militaristic society, Thule was governed by a variety of dark-sided military juntas and dictatorships over the course of its history. By the time of the Clone Wars, the planet was ruled by a strict military hierarchy led by a Governor-General of Thule, a single ranking general served by a wide military staff. The Governor-General, as a vassal of the presiding Dark Lord of the Sith and representative of the Sith on Thule, was expected to remain in constant consultation with the Sith priests in residence at the planet's Sith Temple located in Hurom.[8] As such, the planetary government was likewise nominally housed in Hurom, though its leadership was often just as likely to rule the planet offworld as on.[4]
Thulese
The Thulese Human ethnolinguistic group made up eighty-five percent of the Human population on Thule,[7] which itself constituted ninety-one percent of the entire population.[2] This race of Humans, formed from interbreeding during the era of the pre-Exile Sith Empire between the original Tionese Human residents of Thule and the Tapani of House Nidantha, was characterized by its members' distinctive ashen complexions, pallid appearance, and gaunt features, traits introduced over generations on account of the Thulese people's protracted residence on a shadowy world cloaked in near-constant darkness.[7] Many Thulese were likewise Force-sensitive or Force-attuned on account of Thule's status as a Force nexus deeply immersed in the dark side.[2]
The Thulese, as a people who took particular interest in the traditions of their ancestors, embraced a loose system of nobility based on that of the Tapani. The lords of the major families traditionally held the traditional Tapani title of "Lord of the Expanse" rather than "Sith Lord" or "Lord of Thule" so as to not imply claims to the Dark Lord's fiefworld of Thule.
Ch'tratuntah'thul
During the Light and Darkness War, the final conflict of the collective New Sith Wars, Thule, which at the time served the New Sith Empire as a staging area, came to host a legion of Chiss brought from the Unknown Regions' Chiss Ascendancy by Skere Kaan's Sith agents to fight the Jedi in the Ruusan campaign.[9] However, with the perceived extinction of the Sith at Ruusan at the end of the war, the Chiss found themselves stranded on Thule. While some left the planet and spread out across the eastern galaxy, some remained on Thule, adopting the Cheunh endonym "Ch'tratuntah'thul" meaning "those who went to Thule." These remained on Thule during the Great Peace of the Republic and came to constitute the largest non-Human minority on the planet by the time of the Clone Wars.[7]
Yatarook Thoolak
During the New Sith Wars period, the population of Thule dropped dramatically, until the entire planetary population was roughly a million in total.[8] During this time, a number of Ubese mercenaries in the employ of the New Sith Empire began basing their operations on Thule. Over time, their numbers swelled as other Ubese, sharing the Thulese people's ancestral hatred for the Jedi and the Republic, settled Thule and bolstered its population. This diaspora, known to its members by the Ubese endonym "Yatarook Thoolak," remained on Thule during the Great Peace of the Republic, constituting the second-largest non-Human population on the planet by the time of the Clone Wars.[7]
Locations
Hurom
By the time of the Clone Wars, the capital city of Hurom was the largest of Thule's settlements with a population of twenty million and housed the many of the oldest and most significant structures on the planet.[4] In accordance with Thule's overtly martial culture, Hurom's construction, layout, and architecture were all singularly designed to repel external assault and siege. Its straight, wide streets and large open plazas were populated with anti-personnel laser cannons capable of repulsing ground forces, while anti-aircraft cannons laid out across the city in a grid provided comprehensive cover from aerial assaults. Many of Hurom's buildings extended deep underground, connected to each other via subterranean tunnels and shelters.[8] The city center itself was built upon a large outcropping of rock set in the middle of a mountain caldera that could only be accessed from a number of narrow mountain passes.
Kesiak
In contrast to its chief rival Hurom, the former capital of Kesiak was a sprawling city set upon an expansive arid plain. During the Dark Reaper campaign of the Krath Holy Crusade and Great Sith War, Kesiak was a Sith stronghold of the Brotherhood of the Sith.[5] Following the invasion of Thule by a Jedi task force during the Battle of Thule,[5] the city's Sith Temple served as the burial place of the Dark Reaper, a Sith superweapon dismantled by the Jedi and entombed on Thule during the Battle of Thule.[12] The weapon was eventually rediscovered and reassembled by Count Dooku during the Dark Reaper Crisis of the Clone Wars, though both the weapon and the city under which it had hidden for nearly four millennia were destroyed during the subsequent Republic invasion of Thule at the height of the Crisis.[5]
Armory
One of Thule's more noteworthy structures was an expansive armory complex that lay some forty kilometers outside the capital city of Hurom. This complex contained facilities ranging from weapons caches housing racks of blaster rifles and pistols of every model to archives in which plans for Sith superweapons and vehicles were catalogued. One particularly fortified facility near the center of the complex was used exclusively to store crystals, power packs, and other components employed in lightsaber construction, and one of the complex's hangers was the location at which the ancient Dark Reaper superweapon of the old Sith Empire was assembled during the Great Hyperspace War for intended use against the Galactic Republic.[4]
Hurom's Sith Temple
Like many Sith-dominated worlds, Thule was home to a number of Sith Temples. Its capital of Hurom hosted an imposing Sith Temple of its own that served as the meeting place for government officials and the planet's order of dark-sided Sith priests. Situated in the heart of downtown Hurom, the Temple dominated the cityscape for miles and covered over a full block of the city center.[4] It was from here that Sith prophets belonging to Thule's priesthood first received their visions of millions of soldiers descending upon Thule to restore the Sith to power a century prior to the rise of the Galactic Empire.[8]
Kesiak's Sith Temple
The former capital of Kesiak likewise hosted its own Sith Temple around the time of the Clone Wars and the Dark Reaper Crisis. It was here that the forces of the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Techno Union, under orders from Count Dooku, attempted to restore and reactivate the Dark Reaper, an ancient Sith superweapon built at Thule's armory and stored in Kesiak. During the Battle of Thule, Anakin Skywalker managed to fight his way through to the Kesiak Sith Temple precinct and destroy the Dark Reaper using a TX-130 Saber-class fighter tank.[5]
Sith Arts Academy
During the Manderon Period and era of the old Sith Empire, Thule established and hosted a Sith Arts Academy built around an ancient library-temple that was dedicated to the training of Force-sensitives in the dark side of the Force. By the time of the Golden Age of the Sith, this academy was considered a foremost institution of higher learning for Sith specializing in the clandestine subtleties of stealth and assassination.[7] Around the time of the Battle of Naboo, the institution's headmistress was a fallen Jedi Guardian by the name of Drevveka Hoctu whose methods of instruction included protracted survivalist exercises and deprivation training in Thule's barren back country for the purposes of establishing her students' reliance on the dark side of the Force for sustenance.[6]
Tower of Hurom
The main mountain pass into the caldera in which sat downtown Hurom was guarded by an expansive castle and tower complex known as the Tower of Hurom. Built during the Thule Wars to defend the city from attacks by Kesiak, the Tower of Hurom was subsequently repurposed to serve as the public headquarters of the Châtsûshnwûrkut Tsiskyantâtottoi Shikkarjontû in the years following their relocation from the Temple of Typhojem on Korriban, though the members of the furtive group did not reside at the complex in reality. It subsequently passed into the hands of the Thulese Rangers during the Great Peace of the Republic.[7]
Behind the scenes
The author created this article as a superset of existing Expanded Universe canon material pertaining to Thule, such that if the fanon content were to be removed, the remaining content would constitute the published canon version of Thule. No alterations were made to existing Thule canon; the only fanon injected into the subject matter was a number of expansions to canon subjects for the purposes of both fleshing out the world's history and making sense of confusing or contradictory elements of canon.
One such matter that has generated some confusion is the question of which major city constitutes Thule's capital. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars game, one of Thule's first appearance in media, Mace Windu referenced Kesiak as the planet's capital. However, the detailed planetary entry on Thule published in Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds made no mention of Kesiak at all in its account of the planet's history and notable locations, referencing Hurom as the planet's sole capital. The author reconciled these contradictory accounts by making Kesiak the planetary capital around the time of the Great Sith War's Battle of Thule, the last time the Jedi encountered Thule prior to the Clone Wars. Assuming the Jedi consulted whatever records they had of Thule prior to the Dark Reaper Crisis, they might have assumed Kesiak was still the planetary capital, unaware that Hurom had usurped that status millennia prior.
The use of a Nordic cross flag in the design of the fanon flag of Thule was done as a nod to real-world Thule, a mythical northern island the ancient Greeks and Romans believed existed somewhere in the north Atlantic. Medieval cartographers variously equated Thule with Iceland, Orkney, and Norway, locations whose respective states all make use of variations of the standard Nordic cross flag design. Likewise, as further tribute to real-world Thule, the original Ancient Greek name for the location, Θούλη, and the Latin phono-sematic neologism, Thūlē, were included as the Old Tionese and High Galactic names for the planet, respectively, a choice that happily fit with established canon regarding the planet's inhabitants and the nature of the languages they spoke in-universe.
Appearances
- Bane of the Sith (First mentioned)
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars game (First appearance)
Allegendly on Star Wars Fanon, the Star Wars Wiki of fan invention
Sources
- Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
- Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds
- Star Wars: Complete Locations
- The New Essential Chronology
Unduli, Luminara in the Databank (content now obsolete)
- Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
- The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
- The Essential Atlas
Xim Week: The Despotica (Part II: The Pirate Prince) on Hyperspace (content removed from StarWars.com and unavailable)
- The Unknown Regions
- Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
- Star Wars: Force and Destiny Core Rulebook