Karos/Tund

__NOWYSIWYG__

"Dzwol wo hadzuskak Qyâsikottoi yun, koshwai kosh&mdash;dzwol Qyâsik wokun. Chwitokka hyalûshsaaraikut tashdzwolutyun."

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

Karos (/'kɑː.roʊs/ KAH-rohs) was a male Sith-Human hybrid of the House of Tund who served as the presiding Sith Lord of Tund during the Golden Age of the Sith and subsequently manifested as a Force ghost for millennia thereafter.

Karos was widely regarded as one of the foremost philosophers of the Force and most prolific scholars of the post–Hundred-Year Darkness period. He was best known for the Dzwolutwokun philosophy, a monist Unifying Force offshoot that stated that light and dark side alignment were characteristics of Force users rather than the Force itself. He was also notable for the Qotaral, a divisive work of political philosophy that was critical of the kratocratic individualism that characterized prevailing Tsisajak ("Sith doctrine" ) and instead proposed a collectivist form of government for the old Sith Empire.

Apart from his academic career, Karos was immortalized among the vestigial Sith diasporas of Ambria, Dromund Kaas, Korriban, Thule, Tund, and Vjun for his actions during the Republic counterinvasion of the Sith Empire that followed the Great Hyperspace War. Fearing that the invaders intended to systematically exterminate the Sith species, Karos assembled the Tsistaralkut, a paramilitary resistance movement that rescued and resettled Sith refugees on outlying colonies far from the conflict, disease, and famine that characterized the war-torn Sith Worlds.

Despite a string of successful evacuations, Karos and the Tsistaralkut met their end during the third battle of Korriban, self-sacrificially giving their lives to help acting Dark Lord Shar Dakhan drive Republic forces out of the Horuset system. Though his disembodied Force ghost primarily resided within the confines of his tomb, he occasionally applied his mastery of essence transfer to the possession of host bodies, shuttling his consciousness through a series of unwitting temporary vessels whenever the mood to wander the galaxy and study with other Forceful traditions took hold.

The Sith-Human hybrid known as Karos was born into the noble House of Tund as the eldest son and heir of the presiding Sith Lord of Tund. Though the exact date of his birth was the subject of speculation by later historians, Karos was known to have been born sometime after the death of Dark Lord Tulak Hord and prior to the ascension of Dark Lord Marka Ragnos to the rulership of the Sith Empire as its presiding Jen'ari ("Dark Lord"  ). Like his contemporaries Ludo Kressh and Naga Sadow, Karos was old enough in 5100 BBY to recall firsthand the details of both Ragnos's brief and brutal campaign of conquest over the Sith Empire and the final duel between Ragnos and Simus that decided the victor of the war of succession and heralded the dawn of the Golden Age of the Sith.

Though not part of the Kissai caste, Karos was genetically a member of the Sith subspecies of the same name, related by blood to both the original residents of Tund and the priests that served the ruling caste of Sith Lords. As such, he exhibited his species's strong Force sensitivity and natural affinity for the dark side,  in addition to a number of Kissai-specific physical characteristics and collectivist personality traits for which the Sith Lords had selectively bred the caste for centuries. Despite his partial Kissai blood, he was considered a noble of the Sith ruling caste on account of his membership in the House of Tund and his proven relation to those Human Dark Jedi Exiles who had chosen to mate with the Sith in the years following the formation of the Sith Empire in 6900 BBY. Karos's membership in the House of Tund enabled him to claim patrilineal descent from the Human Jen'jidai Baron Remulus Dreypa and his Kissai lover. However, his Human blood was likewise derived from the Tapani refugees of House Nidantha who had wandered into the Empire in the aftermath of the Unification War and subsequently interbred with the Sith.

Karos's homeworld of Tund was a verdant Force nexus lost on the northeastern borders of the Open Sea, a vast expanse of empty space situated in what would come to be known in subsequent millennia as the Centrality sector. Though isolated far from the Sith species's ancestral homeworld of Korriban,  Tund had hosted a Sith diaspora since the aftermath of the Infinite Empire's failed invasion of Korriban  in 27,700 BBY. Tund's original settlers were heretical Kissai priests who had been exiled from Korriban for interpreting the death of Sith King Adas during the Rakata invasion as a sign to reject the dark side. The descendants of these heretics were joined in subsequent millennia by other outcasts and dissidents banished from the Sith Worlds for heresy. Despite its established status as a Sith penal colony, Tund was settled by a number of half-breed Sith-Human colonists hailing from the Sith Worlds following the formation of the old Sith Empire in 6900 BBY.

Given the diverse nature of its population and its distance from the Sith Worlds, Tund's official status as a member world of the Sith Empire was the subject of some debate. As Sith-Humans of such noble families as the House of Tund maintained ties to the Empire, the half-breed minority generally considered Tund one of the Empire's outlying colony worlds along with Arkania, Ambria, Thule,  and Vjun. As such, in keeping with the Empire's feudal system of government, Tund was nominally governed by a Sith Lord who ruled the planetary fiefdom as a vassal of the presiding Dark Lord. In reality, however, the Sith Lords of Tund only possessed tangible authority over the Sith-Human minority. The pureblooded majority, descendants of the original heretics and outcasts, generally viewed Tund as an independent state and contested the legitimacy of Sith Empire rule, leading to some contention between half-breeds and purebloods during the Manderon Period.

As the heir to the House of Tund and eldest son of the presiding Sith Lord of Tund, Karos was immersed in the study of Qyâsik ("the Force" ) from a young age. Possessed of an above-average Force sensitivity coupled with an inexorable thirst for knowledge and desire to understand the Force at its most essential level, he eschewed participation in the power games of his Sith-Human peers in favor of apprenticeship to masters of many different traditions and beliefs. Unlike many of his fellow Sith-Humans, Karos took a particular interest in studying the varied heretical systems of thought observed and developed by the original Tundan Kissai and their descendants, ranging from various Light Sith offshoots to Rakata-inspired Unifying Force monist philosophies. Karos spent much of his youth traversing the jungles of Tund to take up residence at a multiplicity of pureblood Tundan library-temples in his search for obscure knowledge and philosophical enlightenment.

Trained by Kissai priests of both the heretical and mainline Sith traditions, Karos was deeply familiar with that caste's traditional disciplines of dark side Sith magic and Sith alchemy. Pursing a specialization in the former as a Sith sorcerer, Karos developed a proficiency in many of the most fundamental rituals of Sith magic, including Dwomutsiqsa, a ritual used to summon Smoke Demon spirits; Sutta Chwituskak, an early incarnation of the Force lightning power; Odojinya, a binding technique used to subdue opponents; and Tsaiwinokka Hoyakut, a ritual of Sith necromancy used to reanimate corpses into undead warriors. However, his greatest skill lay in his burgeoning affinity for powers related to mental manipulation, ranging from conventional mind tricks to more advanced Qâzoi Kyantuska incantations used to bind and enslave multiple minds at will.

Though home to theorists of a thousand different denominations and systems of thought, Tund was inhabited by a comparatively small population of mainline Sith. The vast majority of the Sith population, including its brightest minds and most potent Force users, resided in the Stygian Caldera on the Empire's capital world of Ziost,  ancestral homeworld of Korriban,   and the other one hundred and twenty planets that constituted the Sith Worlds. Despite the wealth of knowledge he had acquired from his time among the pureblood Tundans, it was not long before Karos turned his eyes upwards from the rivers and jungle trails of his homeworld to the stars and began pondering the possibility of studying abroad in the greater Sith Empire among scholars of many different traditions and schools of thought.

Eventually, Karos's desire to study at the feet of noted scholars and academics of the Force compelled him to depart his homeworld and join the perambulating multitudes of ruling caste Sith acolytes and warriors wandering across the Empire in pursuit of Sith Lordship. Karos's travels took him across the breadth of the Stygian Caldera and saw him apprentice himself as a Shadow Hand to Sith Lords 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 not a power player in his own right, Karos saw frequent employment as a consigliere and right-hand man to other members of the Sith nobility, leveraging his unbiased counsel and potent Force abilities in exchange for the knowledge and instruction in arcane Force techniques.

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 Komok-Da, a warrior-scholar who awoke in Karos an interest in the Sith lightsaber. Though the Tapani slaves of the Sith Lords had long since improved upon and perfected the protosaber design initially brought to the Sith Worlds by the Dark Jedi Exiles, use of the modern Sith lightsaber was still uncommon due to prevailing preference for the Force-imbued Sith sword.

The only known Dark Lord to favor the lightsaber was Tulak Hord, a duelist of unparalleled ability unmatched by the greatest Sith Warriors and Jedi Weapon Masters 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 lightsaber combat in detail. In later decades, Karos pursued additional instruction in lightsaber combat from fallen Jedi and Naga Sadow supporter Saes Rrogon. Though development of the Seven Forms of conventional lightsaber combat was still in its infancy, many protosaber-wielding Jedi were trained in the basics of Shii-Cho, 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 distinctive fluidity 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.

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. Additional sources of inspiration for Karos's personality came from the characters of Petyr Baelish from A Song of Ice and Fire, Apocalypse!Michael from Supernatural, Odysseus from the Iliad (as well as Sean Bean's portrayal of the character in the film Troy), and the film portrayal of the King of the Dead from Tolkien's legendarium. The character's self-sacrificial death during the post–Great Hyperspace War counterinvasion was inspired by the events of the Battle of Thermopylae and the post-credits mission of Halo: Reach titled "Lone Wolf."

The character, originally provided the Sith name "Dzunyâsh" in reference to the Wookieepedia username of linguist Ben Grossblatt, was initially developed as an experiment in the writing of a believable, EU canon-consistent immortal Force user similar to the members of the Emperor's Hand. Dzunyâsh was initially supposed to achieve immortality by means of the Curse of Graush, surviving the Great Hyperspace War in a Sith oubliette and persisting for millennia on vestigial Sith worlds like Tund and Thule. However, the idea of a Sith self-sacrificially giving his life for the Sith species during the post–Great Hyperspace War counterinvasion and subsequently achieving spiritual transcendence as a light-sided Force ghost proved to be the more compelling concept in the author's mind. This concept gradually developed outward into philosophical waters after the author concurrently encountered unconventional Force-using factions like the Followers of Palawa, Sorcerer of Tund, and the Jal Shey in EU canon and fanon characters like the aforementioned Karros by Firedance.


 * Wiki wide-crop.png Karros on Star Wars Fanon, the Star Wars Wiki of fan invention
 * Wiki wide-crop.png Sakaros family on Star Wars Fanon, the Star Wars Wiki of fan invention