Tund (city)

"Welcome to the city of Tund on the planet Tund in orbit around the star Tund in the Tund system...” “Say 'Tund' again, I dare you.” “While you're here, you should check out the Rotunda..."

- A Tundan Sith welcomes a visitor from the Sith Empire

Tund, colloquially called Tund City by some Galactic Basic speakers to distinguish it from the planet, star, and system of the same name, was a city that served as the de facto capital of Tund. By the time of its planet's destruction in 5 BBY, the city of Tund had existed as a defined settlement for twenty-seven thousand, six hundred and ninety-five standard years and held the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in galactic history.

Description
The city of Tund was built upon the upper plateau highlands of the Murûnyâsh ("Great Wall" in Sith ), an expansive escarpment of sheer cliffs that ran west to east across the northern hemisphere of Tund for several thousand kilometers. This natural formation served to demarcate the subtropical forests and prairies of the northern hemisphere from the tropical jungles and rainforests further south towards the planetary equator. Courtesy of its proximity to several major drainage systems, the Murûnyâsh was home to both river islands situated on the upper plateau of the escarpment and kâtarhâktai ("waterfalls" ) formed from the plunging of Tund's rivers over the escarpment's edge.

The city of Tund was centered around one such highland river island, the Lissuttaya ("spear's blade" ). Named for its similiarities to an elongated triangular spearhead pointing due north when viewed from orbit, the Lissuttaya was composed of the densely forested land that began at the Yunwoyanjat river bifurcation and lay between the resultant matched distributaries of the Dzidardû river as they ran downriver towards the Murûnyâsh to form the Kâtarhâktaidzidardû waterfalls. It was in the clearing between the edge of this island's stretch of the escarpment and the treeline where the island's dense foliage ended, a kilometer downriver from the Yunwoyanjat, that the Kissai heretics who constituted the planet's first colonists set down their captured Rakata ship Pride of Lehon and made camp.

This site, given the name "Tsisraimorut" ("Sith Landing" ) by subsequent generations, eventually came to host a fortified pyramidal Sith Temple that served as both a hangar for the parked Pride of Lehon and a place of refuge protecting the Sith from the large, hard-shelled arthropods that roamed Tund's forests. While the nascent settlement of Tund was originally confined to the readily defensible Lissuttaya, the Tsisraimorut fortress gradually morphed into a sprawling library-temple called the Loithikataikras Tsisraimorutanjat ("Library-temple at Sith Landing" ) that progressively expanded to fill the entire river island, forcing the residents of the nascent city of Tund to relocate to the surrounding riverbanks.

Like the Lissuttaya in the days before its settlement, the land surrounding the river island on the opposing banks of the Dzidardû distributaries was densely forested. However, as the settlement expanded to fill the entire Lissuttaya, the forests to the east and west were cleared by means of fire-fallow cultivation to provide arable land for farming. This region, called the Sutta Kotsuskak for the resultant tree trunks' resemblance to broken spears, was home to a succession of farms and villages that eventually coalesced into neighborhoods of the greater city of Tund as the planet's Sith population grew. The Sutta Kotsuskak eventually played host to a dedicated standard-class spaceport situated to the north-west of the Lissuttaya, matched on the opposing side of the Dzidardû by a sprawling air base.

Invasion of Korriban
Sometime prior to 27,700 BBY, the Rakata discovered Korriban, the ancestral homeworld of the Force-sensitive Sith species. In an effort to secure the allegiance of the Sith, the Rakata plied and seduced the Sith King Adas with gifts of dark-sided knowledge and technology, teaching the Sith King to create his own holocron for the storage of his teachings. Though the Sith had long engaged in sortilege, civil war, and sentient sacrifice, they led spiritually serene lives, never once doubting or questioning the critical role conflict played in their kratocratic society. It was only with the introduction of the Rakatans' methodic malice that the Sith first fell to the dark side.

In 27,700 BBY, the Rakata attempted an invasion of Korriban after their concerted attempts to seduce Adas failed. Though repulsed by the dark side-fueled fury of Adas and his Sith, the Rakata successfully killed the Sith King during the conflict's final days, sending the Sith into disarray as Sith Overlords made war upon each other in their attempts to capitalize upon the power vacuum left in Adas's absence. During this period of strife and turmoil, a group of Sith of the Kissai priest caste began to publicly interpret the dark side's failure to save Adas from death as a sign from the Force to renounce the dark side and reject the teachings of the Rakata. Convinced by their interactions with the Forceful Rakata that all sentients were Force-sensitive, the Tundan Sith espoused a monist Unifying Force philosophy that rejected the traditional light side/dark side dualism of conventional philosophy and instead declared the Force to be a single, indivisible cosmic entity without sides or aspects, a conception they called "the Unity."

Discovery of Tund
Branded heretics and banished from Korriban, these exiles repurposed a captured Rakatan ship called the Pride of Lehon and set out from their homeworld into the unknown. Trusting in the Force to guide them to a suitable refuge, the Sith perambulated about until their vessel's Force-powered hyperdrive detected and honed in on Tund, a verdant Force nexus lost upon the north-east borders of the Open Sea in a region of space that would in subsequent millennia be known as the Centrality sector.

One of their new homeworld's most defining features was an expansive escarpment that ran east to west across the planet's northern hemisphere for thousands of kilometers. This feature, to which the Kissai in orbit gave the Sith language name "Murûnyâsh" for its resemblance to a wall, served to demarcate the planet's subtropical forests and prairies from its equatorial jungles and rainforests. Due to its proximity to a number of Tund's geomorphological river systems, the Murûnyâsh was home to a number of river islands situated upon the upper plateau highlands formed from land wedged between rivers plunging off the cliff's edge. One such river island, formed from the bifurcation of the Dzidardû river at the Yunwoyanjat promontory into a pair of matched distributaries that flowed downstream to the escarpment's edge in a symmetrical fashion, was given the name "Lissuttaya" by the orbiting Sith for its resemblance to an elongated triangular spearhead pointing due north.

Forests to villages
The Kissai judged the Lissuttaya river island a suitable prospective habitation for its readily defensible nature and proximity to resources, and set the Pride down in the clearing that existed between the termination of the island's treeline and the edge of the Murûnyâsh at the southern extremity of the island. This site, known as "Tsisraimorut" or "Sith Landing" in subsequent centuries, subsequently came to host a pyramidal Sith Temple constructed by the Kissai heretics' Grotthu slaves that served as both a hangar for the Pride of Lehon and a fortress protecting the Sith from Tund's predatory hard-shelled arthropods.

The Lissuttaya was eventually cleared of its forests by means of fire-fallow cultivation to provide arable land for farmland, though the subsequent expansion of the Sith Temple into a sprawling library-temple complex and fortress&mdash;the Loithikataikras Tsisraimorutanjat&mdash;necessitated that much of this farmland be rezoned for housing and temple construction. The resultant lack of farmland was addressed by the subsequent slash-and-burn of the forested land opposite the Lissuttaya on the western and eastern banks of the Dzidardû, a region to which was applied the name "Sutta Kotuskak" for its resultant tree stumps' resemblance to broken spears. The Sutta Kotuskak came to host a number of scattered farms that were connected by dirt roads to small villages situated on the banks of the Dzidardû river opposite the Lissuttaya.

For the next millennia, the Sith of the nascent settlement of Tund embraced a modified form of manorialism, in which the Kissai priests collectively constituted the lord of the manor and presided over the demesne that consisted of the settlement and its attendant farmland and outlying villages. The Sith-blooded Grotthu slaves and serfs worked the fields for the Kissai priests in residence on the Lissuttaya in exchange for protection from Tund's predatory wildlife. As the original Kissai heretics sought to avoid the succession-based chaos that followed Adas's death, their system of government and common law as codified in their custumal precluded the possiblity of any one Tsiskrâtor ("Sith King" ) ruling the settlement of Tund unilaterally as its lord of the manor.

Villages to town
In the millennia prior to the arrival of the Dark Jedi Exiles to Korriban in 6900 BBY, the main Sith civilization centered around the Sith Worlds of the Stygian Caldera rediscovered the pureblooded Sith colony on Tund. The planet was subsequently co-opted to serve as a penal colony to which Sith outcasts and exiles were banished for espousing philosophical heresies, increasing the size of Tund's pureblooded Sith population substantially over generations. As a result, the varied fishing villages nestled on the shores opposite the Yunwoyanjat bifurcation grew in size, linked to one another and the Lissuttaya by suspension bridges strung across the Dzidardû river. The centuries prior to the Exiles' arrival saw the gradual unification of these neighborhoods into a single conjoined entity that represented the only town-sized settlement on the planet.

The influx of pureblooded Sith conformant to a host of disparate epistemological and ontological philosophies universally judged heretical by the mainline Sith led to the gradual evolution of Tund's society. Though the original Kissai heretics' conception of the Force as a unified entity bereft of sides or aspects remained popular among the settlement's residents, a host of other traditions likewise took root in certain segments of the Sith population. The culture of the Tundan Sith likewise came to place heavy emphasis on tolerance and acceptance of differing worldviews, leading to a society defined by its embrace of philosophical diversity in the context of the marketplace of ideas.

Sith Empire
In 6900 BBY, a group of Dark Jedi, fresh from their defeat in the Battle of Corbos at the end of the Hundred-Year Darkness, were banished from the Galactic Republic by the Jedi Order and condemned to wander the uncharted depths of the Unknown Regions. It was during this protracted period of exile that the Dark Jedi stumbled upon the Sith civilization in the Stygian Caldera and claimed it for their own. Presenting themselves as gods to the primitive Sith and casting down their Sith King Hakagram Graush, the Exiles set themselves up as rulers of the nascent Sith Empire and employed their knowledge of Sith alchemy to mingle their mostly Human blood with that of their subjects, creating a hybrid race of Sith-Humans that came to constitute a majority in the Sith Worlds' population.

The Sith Empire embraced a strictly structured feudal system. The empire was ruled by a Jen'ari ("Dark Lord" ) constituting the most powerful Force user in the empire. The ten members of the Sith Council, each of whom ruled a dozen worlds apiece, served the Jen'ari as direct vassals, and were likewise served by their planets' respective Sith Lords. Lesser Sith Lords ruled smaller fiefs as vassals of their Sith Lords, and presided over the lesser castes of Kissai, Zuguruk, Massassi, and Grotthu.

Civil conflict
In the years that followed the Sith Empire's formation, a number of half-breed Sith-Human colonists from the greater Sith Empire arrived on Tund and joined the pureblooded population in residence on the planet. While some of these Sith were likewise outcasts and exiles banished from the Sith Worlds, some settled the planet of their own volition and brought with them the traditions, practices, and beliefs of the mainline Sith, foremost among which was the feudal system of government in use in the greater Sith Empire. Though those of these half-breeds numbered among the Sith ruling caste were quick to establish a Sith Lordship of Tund and claim the settlement and planet of Tund as its de jure fiefdom, its title claimants only possessed tangible de facto authority over Tund's half-breed minority. The pureblooded majority, most of whom were descended from exiles and outcasts, were negatively predisposed towards the traditions and practices of the mainstream Sith and flatly refused to acknowledge any external claim to their planet that implied even a tacit affiliation with the Sith Empire.

As a result of such irreconcilable differences, the half-breed minority and pureblooded majority of Tund often came into direct conflict as Sith Empire loyalists repeatedly tried to press their Sith Lords' respective claims to the planet. These half-breeds refused to abide in the settlement of Tund proper, choosing instead to isolate themselves in small villages located further upstream of the Yunwoyanjat on the banks of the Dzidardû river. Despite their loyalty to the Empire and frequent requests for intervention, these half-breeds received no assistance from the Dark Lords of the Sith in the Stygian Caldera, most of whom had no desire to soil their reputations by associating their respective administrations with a backwater world of heretics and outcasts.

Town to city
As a result of declining numbers and waning support for an Empire that refused to acknowledge their existence, the Sith loyalist cause eventually assented to peace talks with the pureblooded majority. The product of the resultant negotiation was a grudging compromise that saw the reorganization of Tund's government from a traditional manorialist to a parliamentary feudalist state. While the Kissai constituting the pureblooded leadership eventually consented to the installation of a presiding half-breed Sith Lord of Tund, they retained their political power by establishing their priesthood as the new government's parliament, the sole body authorized to draft new legislation, raise levies, and confirm new Sith Lords.

Furthermore, knowledgeable as they were of the devastating succession conflicts that followed Adas's death, the Kissai sought to prevent civil conflicts from erupting between those title claimants constituting the strongest Force users on the planet by abolishing the kratocractic "strongest survivor inherits the throne" process governing the election of Sith Lords in the Empire. Instead, the Kissai established a noble family of half-breeds belonging to the Sith ruling caste, the House of Tund, whose eldest scions would inherit the Sith Lordship in accordance with the laws of absolute primogeniture.

Though this compromise did not fully satisfy either faction, it did bring a gradual end to hostilities between the Tundan purebloods and half-breeds, ultimately leading to the inclusion of the latter's upstream villages into the city limits of the settlement of Tund. These suburbs were eventually circumscribed within the burgeoning city itself as Tund's population grew in the centuries that followed. Though the question of Tund's status as a member world of the Empire remained unanswered by both the Dark Lords of the Sith Empire and the Sith Lords of the House of Tund, the Loithikataikras Tsisraimorutanjat became a haunt of unconventionally minded Sith scholars drawn from the Sith Worlds and the greater Sith Empire. The library-temple eventually came to be viewed as a leading repository of Sith lore third only to the Veeshas Tuwan on Arkania and the Loithika Jin'aryiyak Adastayanjat on Ziost.

Behind the scenes
Ever respectful of precedent in canon, the author chose to lazily name the city in question "Tund" after discovering that the authors of the The Essential Atlas provided firsthand illustration of their prodigious creative intellect by imaginatively naming every celestial body in the Tund system "Tund." The description of the city was partially inspired by of Theed as it appeared in the author's childhood copy of Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Episode I, with a downtown district built atop an escarpment, neighborhoods strung across several rivers, a series of cliffside waterfalls, and a palace perched upon a promontory.