Lost Tribe of the Sith: Precipice
Set during the Great Hyperspace War, this is the story of the Sith warship Omen and her crew, led by the intrepid Captain Yaru Korsin. The anthology edition of this series has a map of its setting, the continent of Keshtah, at the beginning. How cute, it thinks it’s a real fantasy novel!
In preparation for the invasion of the planet Kirrek, Dark Lord of the Sith Naga Sadow dispatched the Omen and her sister ship, the Harbinger, to mine Force-augmenting Lignan crystals on the planet Phaegon III. After retrieving the crystals, the twin ships were attacked by Jedi starfighters and collided with each other while escaping into hyperspace. We won’t see the Harbinger again for quite some time, but the Omen was knocked off course by the collision, and this is where our story picks up.
With its trajectory altered, the damaged Omen is yanked out of hyperspace by a gravity shadow and caught in the gravity well of an unknown planet. As it plummets to its doom, we are introduced to its crew: Captain Yaru Korsin and his half-brother, mineralogical officer Devore Korsin, both humans; Devore’s “woman,” Seelah, and their infant son, Jariad; gunnery officer Gloyd, a Houk; engineer Lohjoy, a Ho’Din (who dies immediately); navigator Boyle Marcom, another human; and quartermaster Ravilan, a Sith. Notice anything odd about these demographics?
In The Golden Age of the Sith and The Fall of the Sith Empire, every Sith we saw was actually a member of the Sith alien species. Then suddenly in this story, ostensibly in the same setting, there’s an entire warship crewed almost exclusively by humans, with a few non-Sith aliens thrown in for flavor. The text refers to Ravilan as a “Red Sith,” presumably to make it clear that he’s actually a Sith alien and not a member of another species just calling himself a Sith. The Sith Empire was isolated in an undiscovered region of space until like a week ago; where did all these other species come from?
To confuse the setting even further, all of these human Sith carry lightsabers. None of the Sith in the preceding stories used lightsabers, not even the Sith Lord bourgeoisie. They all carried enchanted Sith swords imbued with the dark side. Did someone think magic swords were too goofy for twenty-first-century readers? Yaru Korsin also mentions that the Harbinger’s captain is a fallen Jedi. When did this guy find the time to turn to the dark side, seek out the Sith before they’d even revealed themselves to the Republic, convince them to let him join them, and then get promoted to captain of a warship? The Great Hyperspace War lasted like a day if the comics’ depiction of it is anything to go by.
Anyway, the Omen crashes on this planet, coming to perch precariously at the edge of a mountaintop overlooking the ocean. The surviving crewmembers, including several Massassi, members of the Sith warrior caste, disembark and make their way down the mountain to set up a crude base camp. Something in the planet’s atmosphere is harmful to the Massassi and they all die off after a few days, while the non-Sith Sith all squabble among themselves and are more interested in casting blame than in finding a way out of their predicament.
Yaru’s brother, Devore, is a total douchehole and ends up killing Marcom, the elderly navigator, for bringing them here. I get that the Sith are supposed to be evil, power-hungry jerks and all that, but these guys are just dicks and I don’t know why their Red Sith overlords ever let them have lightsabers. Yaru Korsin is the only one interested in trying to figure out a solution, although really all he’s worried about is getting in trouble with Naga Sadow for losing the Lignan crystals.
Yaru hikes back up to the Omen alone to try to send a distress call to the Sith fleet. He finds that the ship’s communications array was destroyed in the crash and that his brother is already in the ship, sitting in the captain’s chair and getting high. Devore tries to convince Yaru that they have to stay on the planet. They’ve already been gone two days and Naga Sadow will think they stole the crystals for themselves. If they go back now, Devore thinks Sadow will blame him for what happened, because he lost his temper with the Dark Lord when Yaru was given command of the mission instead of him.
Devore attacks Yaru and they fight for a while on the precipice. Yaru finally defeats his brother and Devore begins to cry and begs for help as he starts to come down off his high. In response, Yaru vows that he will complete his mission and protect his crew and throws Devore over the side of the mountain.
Yaru returns to his people and explains that they’re going to be there a while so they need to make the planet their own, like true Sith. What he doesn’t tell them is that, as he fought his brother on top of the mountain, he spotted a winged beast carrying a rider, meaning that there is another intelligent race on this planet. Meanwhile, Seelah, knowing that Yaru has killed Devore, begins plotting her revenge.
This story is all right, I guess. The writing is okay, nothing spectacular but completely readable. I found certain descriptions very difficult to comprehend, however, such as exactly what is happening when the crew uses the Omen’s torpedo ports to slow the ship’s descent, and the position of the crashed ship relative to the continent’s geography. The descriptive language just didn’t make much sense to me, although that may have been due to how quickly I read through the story. The prose doesn’t really lend itself to lingering analysis; it’s fast and punchy and inspires a similar reading style.
Basically Gilligan’s Island in space, but with more fratricide. 2.5/5 Death Stars.
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I don’t see King’s Landing anywhere on here. |
Lost Tribe of the Sith: Skyborn
The winged creature was an uvak (not a vacuum) and its rider was Adari Vaal, a female Keshiri. The Keshiri are the indigenous race on the continent of Keshtah on the planet Kesh. They look identical to humans except that they have purple skin. Aliens!
Adari is the widow of an uvak-rider whose surly mount, Nink,
murdered him one day by flying out over the ocean and turning upside down.
Adari is okay with this, however, because she never liked him anyway and she
barely likes their two dim-witted children any better. She lives with her kids
and her overbearing mother in her dead husband’s luxurious house; Nink stays in
the backyard. Adari tries to socialize with her family as little as possible,
however, and spends most of her time collecting rock samples and studying
geology.
Her inquisitive, scientific nature has put her at odds with the rigid, faith-based society of her people. The Keshiri believe that Keshtah was created in ancient times from the blood of deities known as the Skyborn, and Adari has been labeled a heretic for suggesting that volcanic eruptions may be caused by something other than the Skyborn’s displeasure with their worshippers. So Purple Space Galileo is being publicly reprimanded for her heresy by the village elders on the day the Omen crashes, and the Keshiri witness its impact on a mountaintop in the distance.
Believing the Omen
to be an omen of the Skyborn’s displeasure, the whole town turns up at Adari’s
house that night to burn it down, but she escapes out the back door and flies
away on Nink. It is illegal for a woman to ride an uvak, so she has no choice
but to flee to the edge of the continent, heading towards the exploding
mountain out of geologic curiosity. She arrives just in time to see Yaru Korsin
throw his brother off the mountaintop. She and Nink are equally freaked out by
this non-purple dude with a beam of light for a hand killing some guy next to a
giant metal egg that fell from heaven, and the uvak hightails it out of there
with Adari clinging to his back foot for dear life.
She steals back to the mountain later that night, however, after receiving a telepathic summons from Korsin. She tries to watch the Sith camp from a distance but they immediately sense her presence and overpower her. They telekinetically hurl her against a tree and force their language into her brain. She is unconscious for an entire day as a result of the trauma, but when she awakens, she is able to understand them.
She stays with the Sith for a few days as she recovers from
her ordeal. Korsin treats her with kindness but Seelah, Devore’s widow (I guess
they were married now even though in the previous story Korsin only thought of
her derisively as “Devore’s woman”), acts like a psycho the whole time, yelling
and glaring at her and treating her suspiciously. Dude threw the wrong person
off that mountain, I’m telling you.
Korsin explains that his people are trapped on the mountain and they need her to fly them off so they can search for materials to repair their ship. Adari knows that Nink would never consent to that, though, and convinces Korsin to let her leave and bring back help. She returns a week later with several uvak-riders, who stop dead when they see 240 alien-colored strangers waiting for them with lightsabers drawn. (Seriously, everyone in the Sith Empire has a lightsaber now? The entire crew of this ship, even all the low-level schlubs? It’s like no one even read those terrible boring comics that no one should ever read.)
The Sith claim to be the Skyborn, returned from heaven to
walk among their children for a while, and convince the village elders of this
with a display of their Force powers. They kick the elders out of their opulent
homes and move themselves in, dispatching uvak-riders to spread the word of
their arrival to every village on the continent. Adari is by their side the
whole time, her heresy forgotten, her name put into the history books as the
Discoverer.
Unable to stop herself, Adari confesses to Korsin that she saw him kill Devore. She fears his reprisal, but he tells her that he knows she won’t tell the other Sith for the same reason he knows why she came back to the mountain after witnessing the murder. She is tired of being persecuted by society, and the Sith can make her powerful instead of a victim. Korsin sees her ambition and knows that she was glad when her husband died, because he was holding her back from becoming her true self. He promises that he will help her achieve that goal for however long the Sith remain on Kesh. The story ends with Adari musing that they may be stuck there longer than he thinks, and suddenly she is worried.
This story is actually very good. I really enjoyed reading
it and there isn’t much to make fun of. I wasn’t sold on the Sith as characters
in Precipice because none of them are
very interesting so far, but viewing them through the eyes of an outsider who
doesn’t realize what she’s getting herself into added a lot of tension and
urgency to the story. Since we’ll never get to see the story of the Dark Jedi
exiles tricking the Sith into worshipping them as gods, this same premise
playing out on Kesh will have to do.
Adari Vaal is a great character and very entertaining to read. She is quick-witted, funny, and likable despite her complete misanthropy. She cannot stand any of her own people and is constantly mocking them, either in her internal monologue or right to their faces. The only person from her own planet for whom she evinces a modicum of respect is Nink, because he killed her stupid boring husband. She maintains her cool even when facing the prospect of everything she has being taken from her, because nothing she has really matters, not even her children. The only thing she cares about is her quest for self-realization.
Overall Skyborn is a major step up from Precipice and I’m looking forward to seeing where this series goes next. 4/5 Death Stars.
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| Its name is Quetzalcoatl... just call it Q, that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart! |
Lost Tribe of the Sith: Paragon
The Sith have been stuck on Kesh for 15 years, hatching failed escape attempts and subjugating the Keshiri. Unable to breed with their willing subjects, the human Sith have been reproducing to increase their dominance over the planet, while the Red Sith have been unable to produce any surviving offspring. Korsin and Seelah are married now and have had a daughter together. This chapter in the series is told from Seelah’s point of view.
We open with Seelah standing naked in front of a mirror
after a bath, musing on how fit she still looks for a woman in her forties. Her
personal assistant, a male Keshiri, awkwardly stands nearby and tries not to
look at her. Apparently this is like a daily ritual of theirs. Seelah then
belittles him by ignoring the clothes he has laid out for her and picking out
her own outfit instead. Seems kind of skeevy, but to be fair if I ever became a
licensed Star Wars author I think the
first thing I would do would be to canonize my softcore erotic fanfiction, too.
There’s disappointingly little Adari Vaal in this story. She just shows up briefly to talk with Korsin and we learn that the two of them have been taking long, daily walks in the wilderness together for almost as long as the Sith have been on the planet. Despite marrying Korsin, Seelah still hates him for killing her previous husband and is plotting his murder, but she is also insanely jealous of Adari, even though she knows Korsin isn’t actually cheating on her and she wouldn’t care if he was. Women are complex like that.
Korsin sends Ravilan, the spokesperson for the dwindling
faction of non-human Sith, to some other Keshiri village in the south to
investigate some fluorescent algae. Shortly after his arrival, the town’s
entire Keshiri population drops dead from some unknown plague. At Ravilan’s
urging, Korsin determines that the Sith will cut off all contact from the
Keshiri in order to protect themselves from infection. All of the Sith are
recalled to the Omen’s mountain crash
site, but before they have all returned, several more villages on the Ragnos
Lakes are wiped out as well.
Seelah draws Korsin’s attention to the fact that everywhere the plague has struck was a location being visited by Red Sith. Korsin deduces that Ravilan and his ilk must be spreading the plague on purpose in order to force the Sith to redouble their efforts to escape from the planet, where the Red Sith have proven unable to reproduce. With a heavy heart, Korsin orders the holocaust of every non-human Sith on Keshtah, excluding his friend Gloyd the Houk because he is a Muggle.
Ravilan is captured and Seelah has him tortured while his
people are being murdered and having their severed heads mounted on pikes. In
his despair, Ravilan confesses that he poisoned the water supply of the first
infected village to try to make Korsin care more about getting off the planet,
but he has no idea how it spread to the other outbreak sites. Seelah reveals
that she was responsible for this, having caught on to what Ravilan was doing
and sacrificing millions of innocent Keshiri to turn Korsin against the Red
Sith.
Seeing how badly he’s been played, Ravilan realizes that Seelah, as the Sith’s chief medical administrator, also must have been responsible for ensuring none of the Red Sith’s children lived past infancy. He curses her for her treachery and is hacked to death with a vibroblade and lightsaber by Jariad Korsin, Seelah’s teenaged son from her first marrage. Jariad is unsatisfied with this grisly murder, lamenting that it wasn’t his stupid stepfather, who just doesn’t understand him. Seelah assures him that it will be soon enough.
Also now Adari Vaal feels bad about saving the Sith because
of how they’ve subjugated the Keshiri and she has become the leader of an
underground resistance movement plotting to overthrow them.
I don’t really know what the title of this story refers to, because I feel like everyone in it definitely racks up more Renegade points than Paragon, but this story is up there with the scant few good ones we’ve read so far. Almost as good as Skyborn, it succeeds in making Seelah, my most hated character from the previous two stories, actually interesting to read about, and not just because of the scene where she studies her naked body in the mirror for an awkwardly long time.
The best parts of Paragon
didn’t even come up in the above summary. Each chapter begins with a brief
flashback to Seelah’s early life as a slave in the Sith Empire. It turns out
that she was the personal foot-care servant of our old friend Ludo Kressh. This
particular passage may be the best in the entire canon so far:
“Do
you know why I do this?” Kressh had asked one night. His drunken rage had
touched the entire household, Seelah included. “I have seen the holocrons—I
know what waits beyond. My son looks like me—and so does the future of the
Sith.
“But only as long as we’re here. Out there,” he’d spat, between bloody punches, “out there, the future looks like you.”
Just before this, Seelah reflects on how Kressh spent all
his free time trying to develop a magical device to protect his young son from
harm. In a few short lines, John Jackson Miller takes one of the flattest,
least memorable characters we’ve met so far and completely reinvents our whole
perspective on him. Everything Ludo Kressh did in The Golden Age of the Sith and
The Fall of the Sith Empire, he did out of love for his son. I mean sure,
he was still an evil, murderous, power-hungry dick, but that was all he was
when KJA wrote him. He gets more development in two lines of Paragon, long after his death, than he
did in two entire story arcs of Tales of
the Jedi.
At the same time, Miller also develops Seelah’s character and explains her deep-seated racism against the Sith species. She suffered for years in servitude to Kressh, and eventually saw her entire family executed on his orders because she couldn’t cure his twisted ankle. She ran away and defected to Naga Sadow’s fiefdom, where she met and married Devore Korsin. Sadow was apparently a huge equal rights advocate and believed that anyone could rise in prestige among the Sith regardless of their birthright. Bizarrely, this egalitarianism does have its roots in his original characterization, as a one-off line in a narrative textbox established that he was beloved by the Sith foot soldiers because he treated them with more respect than the other Sith Lords did.
Paragon also
finally explains where all these non-Sith Sith came from in the first place.
The worlds of the Sith Empire were secluded within the Stygian Caldera, a
massive nebula that impeded hyperspace navigation. Ships that ventured in from
the outside were rarely able to find their way back out and their crews ended
up enslaved by the Sith. Apparently this happened so frequently that a
significant chunk of the Sith Empire wasn’t even Sith. I’m not sure when or why
this retcon came about because it doesn’t remotely match the empire’s visual
depiction in Golden Age and Fall, but the Sith in the prequels were
humans with red lightsabers so I guess they had to be that way in the EU too.
This story needed more Adari Vaal child neglect, but it made up for it with classic literary themes of eugenics, racial cleansing, and post-birth abortion. 4/5 Death Stars.
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| If there’s a place you got to go, I’m the one you need to know! |
Lost Tribe of the Sith: Savior
Ten years later, the Sith have gotten used to the idea that
the Omen is unsalvageable and they’re
stuck on Kesh for the foreseeable future. The Sith have settled among the
Keshiri permanently and used the memory of the plague from ten years earlier to
quell unrest among the unfaithful. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Omen’s arrival, Yaru Korsin throws a
huge party and announces to the Keshiri that his people will be staying
forever! Hooray!
Meanwhile, two separate women are plotting his downfall. (Man, how many of my relationships have ended up that way?) Korsin’s wife, Seelah, still hates him for murdering his brother and her first husband, and has spent decades preparing her son, Jariad, to destroy him and take his place as Grand Lord of Kesh. We’re also helpfully told by Korsin’s inner monologue that, despite being in her fifties, Seelah doesn’t look a day over 35. Aaargh the author just wants to fuck her so bad.
Spinning her own independent conspiracy is Adari Vaal, who, while uncomfortable about how Korsin lusts after her purple flesh, doesn’t really bear a grudge against him personally but against the Sith as a whole. We find out that the reason she ultimately turned against the Sith was because, twelve years earlier (so two years before her resistance movement was revealed in Paragon), the elder of her two sons was killed in an accident while working on a Sith labor crew. She brought his broken body before Korsin immediately, and even though she knew that the Sith weren’t really gods, she still almost believed that Korsin would be able to bring her son back to life. But of course he couldn’t, and Adari can’t forgive him for that.
My favorite moment in this story comes here, at the final
meeting between Korsin and Adari. He wants to bang her but knows he never will,
and she has secretly soured on their friendship despite the affection he still
has for her.
Adari turned back to Korsin. “I’m sorry, but I have business in town.”
“Will I see you again?”
“What, today?”
“No, I meant, ever?” Korsin laughed again. She’s
uneasy, he thought. He wondered why. “Of course, today. We’re in the same
city now, aren’t we?”
Adari rolled her eyes at the colossal building behind them. “That’s a lot of effort just to have me around more.” She managed a smile.
It’s a nicely bittersweet, human moment in a franchise that
rarely seems concerned with saying anything about humanity.
The day after the celebration, Korsin and his friend Gloyd go up to the mountain crash site with Seelah to oversee the transfer of the last of her medical equipment to the village. While all the head Sith are isolated at the Omen, Seelah and Adari both decide to spring their traps. Jariad Korsin is the leader of the Sabers, his stepfather/uncle’s personal bodyguards, and all of them are on his mother’s payroll. They surround Korsin, Gloyd, and their other bodyguards when they arrive. Jariad moves in to gloat while Seelah shrieks about her revenge in the background, but Korsin and Gloyd just dis him and joke about the idea of him ever leading the Sith.
Conveniently for Korsin, this is the exact moment that Adari puts her plan into motion. She has spent years maneuvering trustworthy Keshiri rebels into key positions, and at long last they are ready to act. Adari and her agents will steal all the uvak on Keshtah, relying on the species’ flocking instincts to draw them to follow the dominant males the Keshiri will be riding. Adari will then ride her dead husband’s uvak, Nink, into the thermal updraft above Keshtah’s largest volcano, which will blast them and all the hundreds of thousands of uvak following them way out over the ocean where they will never be able to find land again and eventually fall into the sea from exhaustion. With the uvak extinct, the Sith spread across Keshtah will be cut off from one another and unable to maintain control over their dominion.
As Jariad’s Sabers close in on Korsin and Gloyd, they are distracted by the sudden flight of stolen uvaks overhead. Korsin and Gloyd cut their way through the Sabers and escape, although without the uvaks they are trapped on the mountain. Eventually they are separated and Jariad forces Korsin to the edge of the precipice, the same place where Korsin killed his father. Seelah watches gleefully from the Sith’s observation post but her glee is interrupted when Gloyd, cornered in the next room, blows himself up, killing all the Sabers and collapsing the roof on her.
Korsin has been grievously injured and Jariad is about to
finish him off when the one variable Seelah’s master plan didn’t account for
shows up to save the day: Korsin and Seelah’s daughter, Nida, leading a flight
of uvak-mounted Sith. It turns out that Adari’s remaining son, Tona, was in on
his mother’s scheme, but he also had a thing for Korsin’s daughter. He spilled
his guts to her about the Keshiri’s plan to steal the uvaks, and as soon as
Nida had foiled it in the capital city, she went to save her father.
Seelah had tried to delegitimize Nida’s claim to the Sith throne by having her shipped around to different Keshiri towns throughout her childhood, ostensibly to show goodwill to the locals but really to prevent her from being trained as a Sith, while Jariad was molded into his stepfather’s heir. But Korsin had faked the deaths of several of his most loyal followers and entrusted them with his daughter’s tutelage, keeping her true abilities a secret from his murderous wife and holding her in reserve as his trump card.
Adari, meanwhile, realizes that the rest of the uvak aren’t
coming and her plan has been effectively ruined. One of her agents arrives to
confirm her fears and reveals her son’s role in their betrayal. Adari laments
her poor dumb son’s stupidity and likely cruel fate, but, knowing she is out of
options, she and Nink lead the uvak into the updraft anyway. They are blasted
out over the sea and fall to their deaths one by one. Adari passes out and
awakens to find that Nink has led the remaining uvaks and their riders to an
inhospitable little piece of land with no vegetation in the middle of the
ocean. Now stranded there, they have no choice but to attempt to settle it.
Back on the mountaintop, Seelah awakens in her own medical ward to find herself a paraplegic, having lost the use of her legs in Gloyd’s explosion. After taking such care to preserve her beauty, she has been scarred and marked by the falling debris, which is not an example of irony. Her daughter comes to her and explains that Korsin died of his wounds while attempting to telekinetically throw Jariad off the side of the mountain. After he failed, she did the job for him. Nida is now the Grand Lord of the Sith and ruler of Keshtah.
In accordance with her father’s wishes, the Sith will
forever withdraw from the mountaintop, but Seelah will be left behind. Uvaks
will fly overhead every so often to drop supplies, but the path down the
mountain and up to the Omen will be
blocked, leaving Seelah imprisoned in the Sith temple until the day she dies.
Seelah pleads with Nida, reminding her that she is her daughter. Nida consoles
her with the knowledge that she turned out to be the mother of the new Grand
Lord after all, just not the one she wanted. Then she leaves.
These first four Lost Tribe of the Sith entries form basically a complete story arc in and of themselves; the next one jumps forward 1,000 years and features an all-new cast of characters. Precipice, Skyborn, Paragon, and Savior could easily have been reworked and fleshed out into a full-length novel and I think they would have been stronger this way. As standalone novellas, they boast two strong characters in Adari and Seelah, but the rest of the cast, including Korsin himself, are only fractionally as interesting as they had the potential to be. Writing this story as a novel would have allowed more time for character development and let us see the Sith society develop on Kesh firsthand instead of playing catch-up after every time jump.
Because there is a lot of telling rather than showing in Savior. We’re told through narrative
exposition how Seelah had tried to negate her daughter as an heir, how Korsin
had seen through her ploy and secretly trained Nida in the Sith ways, how Adari
came to distrust and dislike the Sith after the death of her son, how the
Keshiri came to resent those they’d once worshipped as gods when their uvaks
were taken away from them to serve the Sith. We don’t actually get to see any
of this, and it’s a shame; the conclusion of this first arc feels artificially
abbreviated because of it.
Still, it’s unfair to judge Savior as a finale since it was neither intended nor written as such and the series continues afterward. In that light, it reads more like a transitional chapter, wrapping up conflicts and character arcs from the first three stories and setting up the status quo going forward. Due to how this impairs its narrative integrity, I can give it only 3/5 Death Stars.
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| Grand Lord Yaru Korsin, looking nothing like how he is described in the book. |
