Mercia Holt Mercia Holt was a female Human archaeologist who was born during the time of the New Sith Wars . Holt lived on the planet Aquilaris Minor with her husband , Aron Holt , and her daughter , Kerra Holt . In 1042 BBY , while expecting their second child , Mercia and Aron were captured during an attack on their homeworld by the forces of the Sith Lord Odion . The pair were subsequently transferred to Odion ' s Project Pandemonium , an effort to locate the Helm of Ieldis . Their last known location was Sarrassia where they cooperated with the Grumani Hierophant s to conceal the fact that the Helm was located on Skarpos , a bleak desert world in the Menagerie . There , she and her husband sacrificed themselves in an attempt to deny the Sith with access to the Helm , by using explosives to destroy the chamber within the Morbollon Mesa storing it . Despite their deaths , their sacrifice motivated Kerra to stop Odion ' s bid to dominate the galaxy . Biography . Wartime Separation . Mercia Holt was an archaeologist and a field researcher associated with the University of Sanbra , who lived on Aquilaris Minor during the Republic Dark Age . She married Aron Holt and became the mother of Jedi Knight Kerra Holt , residing at a house in the city of Capital Cay . Prior to the Sith invasion of Aquilaris , she and her husband Aron was involved in an archaeological research project sponsored by Sanbra University which was searching for the Helm of Ieldis , a Sith artifact developed by Lord Ieldis . The Helm was capable of turning sentient beings into mindless killers by harnessing dark side energies . During a research expedition to Sarrassia , she was accompanied by her husband and her young daughter Kerra . They established contact with the Grumani Hierophant s , one of the many religious sects on the planet . They befriended the Grumani priestess Aunt Zoojoo who became a close family friend . When Kerra climbed onto the roof of the Great Hall , she caused the abbot to suffer a stroke . Kerra was later reprimanded by both her parents for her mischievous actions . In 1042 BBY , Sanbra itself was invaded by the Sith Chagras Hegemony and the researchers were forced to scatter . The Holts along with ten other researchers fled to Aquilaris Minor where they had planned to meet some Jedi to discuss their findings . However , Sith Lord Odion obtained intelligence about the meeting and launched an attack on Aquilaris Minor to capture the researchers , under the pretext of capturing the Jedi Knight Vannar Treece , a perennial foe of the Sith . At that time , Mercia was pregnant with her second child . Later that year , Aquilaris was invaded by Odion ' s forces who wiped out the weak Republic defenses and slaughtered and enslaved much of the population . During the invasion of Capital Cay , she attempted to conceal her research while her husband was seen sporting a blaster pistol in the event that Sith troops stormed their house . They planned to flee to the harbor and escape on a submersible manned by the Seacroppers ' Guild . While their house was being besieged by Sith troopers , Mercia instructed her daughter Kerra to flee to the harbor first . Her parents would then meet up with her and they would flee with Joad Kreel and his father into the open seas . Finally , Mercia told her daughter not to come back looking for them and promised they would join her . After Kerra fled , the house was invaded by a group of Sith troopers who overpowered and took the couple captive . Odion had ordered his troops to capture the researchers alive so that he could obtain the Helm of Ieldis before his Sith compatriots could . Her daughter Kerra would flee to the harbor but would return when her parents did not join her and Joad . Kerra subsequently was found by the Jedi Knight Vannar Treece who managed to evacuate her offworld in a starfighter . She subsequently became a Jedi Knight herself and would return to help her homeworld during the Aquilaris campaign . Captivity and Death . Due to their occupations , Mercia and her husband were forcibly inducted into Odion ' s Project Pandemonium which aimed to locate the Helm of Ieldis . These researchers became part of Odion ' s core research team tasked with capturing the Helm . During their incarceration , Mercia at some point gave birth to a second child but mother and child were forcibly separated . The child was sent to an Odionate cloister , a network of orphanages within the Odionate where children were indoctrinated into slaves and warriors for Odion ' s death cult . In 1039 BBY , Mercia and Aron returned to Sarrassia as part of their research project . This visit occurred a few days prior to the conquest of Sarrassia by Lord Ayanos Bactra . While they revealed to Aunt Zoojoo that they had been sent by Odion to find the artifact , she sensed that they had not yet succumbed to his nihilistic ' sickness . ' Together , the pair conspired with the Grumani Hierophant s to locate and hide the Helm of Ieldis from Odion . By translating ancient Hierophant markings , Mercia found out that the Helm was located at the Grumani temple chamber at the Morbollon Mesa on Skarpos , a barren desert world in the Menagerie , a realm ruled by the Sith Lord Malakite . Mercia and Aron agreed to deny Odion access to the Helm at all costs . In exchange , the Hierophants agreed to guard the temple beneath Mount Diligence at all costs . On Skarpos , the Holts found the Helm . Lacking the means to destroy the Helm themselves or escape since they were besieged by a Sith army , the Holts detonated explosives within the chamber , causing it to collapse . The Holts were buried beneath rubble but they succeeded in denying Odion further information about the Helm . Prior to their deaths , they left their daughter with a holorecording , outlining the rationale for their sacrifice . Legacy . Since they never returned from that trip , Zoojoo could only assumed they had succeeded . Following that trip to Sarrassia , there were no further written records of what they did after that . Prior to their Sarrassian trip , Kerra deduced that Mercia had given birth to another child under Sith captivity but little else was known . In 1032 BBY , Kerra Holt infiltrated the Odionate disguised as a Novitiate recruit following the Battle of Darkknell with the connivance of rival Sith Lord Daiman , the estranged younger brother of Odion . At Jubalene , she learned that her parents had been captured by Odion and had been conscripted into Project Pandemonium . Kerra subsequently traveled to Sarrassia during the Sith invasion and quickly learned about details of their Sarrassian trip from Aunt Zoojoo prior to her demise . After learning that the Helm was located on Skarpos , Kerra would follow her Sith companions in her quest to ascertain the fate of her parents and her younger sibling . During the Second Battle of Skarpos , Kerra managed to enter the Grumani temple chamber only to discover a mound of earth and that Odion had already claimed the Helm for himself . Kerra was subsequently taken captive by Odion and brought to the top of the mesa . General Beld Yulan ' s troops did an excavation of the collapsed temple chamber and discovered the skeletal remains of Aron Holt and his wife . The realization that her parents had died drove Kerra into a deep grief , which activated the Helm of Ieldis . The Helm was capable of amplifying negative emotions like grief and despair to increase its user ' s dark side powers . Odion subsequently use the Helm to destroy three entire armies on Skarpos , forcing his two rivals Lords Daiman and Malakite to flee . Following the battle , Beld Yulan showed Kerra the holorecording left by her parents where they explained their decision to bury themselves with the Helm in order to deny it to the Sith . During the recording , Mercia lamented the loss of their second child to Sith captivity and also reached out to Kerra , expressing her hopes that she had somehow survived the events on Aquilaris and found someone to take care of her . She also reiterated that they never gave up on her and that their sacrifice would save future future generations from the ravages of the Sith . While Yulan was unable to understand why they chose to die for everyone else , Kerra perfectly understood that if death could have a meaning then life must have a meaning . This made Kerra better appreciate the sacrifices of her parents and galvanized her determination to stop Odion from testing the Helm on more subjects : the children incarcerated with the Odionate cloister at Vanahame .