Battle of the Marisota Floodplain

The Battle of the Marisota Floodplain occurred in 2974 BBY when the Sith Lord Remulus Dreypa instigated a rebellion against the ruling Lost Tribe of Sith. Following the Seizure of Eorm, his peasant army marched on Tahv where he intended to find a way to leave Kesh and return to the galaxy. Despite some early successes, his forces sustained heavy casualties when the Tribe's commander Grand Consort Iliana Hilts deployed her Skyborn Rangers. Lacking air support, Dreypa's forces retreated to Sessal Spire, a volcanic crater overlooking the Southern Ocean.
==History==
===Background===
Following the Battle of Corbos, the surviving Dark Jedi were exiled to Korriban where they developed the first Sith Order. A group of these Dark Jedi led by Sith Lord Remulus Dreypa attempted to return to the Galactic Republic and seek revenge against their Jedi adversaries. However, they and their Jedi pursuers ended up on Kesh, a remote and primitive world that was home to the humanoid and purple-skinned Keshiri species. The arrival of these Force-users triggered the Great Calamity which devastated much of Kesh and gave rise to legends about the Skyborn and the Destructors. Eventually, Dreypa's Dark Jedi allies turned against him and imprisoned him within his own oubliette, a stasis casket capable of keeping individuals in suspended animation for millennia. Dreypa's former Dark Jedi allies then made peace with the Jedi and founded the Doomed, a Force-sensitive community dedicated to protecting the Keshiri and finding balance in the Force.
Meanwhile, Dreypa remained in suspended animation for four thousand years until he was freed by the Sith outcast Parlan Spinner. Spinner was a member of the Lost Tribe of Sith, another group of Human Sith who had become stranded on Kesh during the Great Hyperspace War in 5000 BBY. Spinner hoped to use Dreypa as an ally against the Tribe, which he disliked for mistreating him. Spinner brought Dreypa back to the port town of Eorm on the main continent of Keshtah Minor. Using his dark side powers, Lord Dreypa seized control of Eorm and raised a rebel army with the aim of overthrowing the Lost Tribe's leadership in the Sith capital Tahv. Dreypa also planned to returned to the stars and seek revenge against the Jedi and the Republic.
===Details===
Following the Seizure of Eorm, Dreypa and his local quisling "Lord" Spinner raised a rebel army consisting of Human and Keshiri slaves who had been exiled to Eorm. Exploiting their grievances against the ruling Tribal elite, Dreypa managed to convince them to march on Tahv, with the intention of seizing the city. Dreypa also had two hostages: the Doomed leader Kaliska, a S'kytri woman, and Takara Hilts, a Sith princess and the daughter of the ruling Grand Lord Varner Hilts. Dreypa and Spinner had hoped to use Takara as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Tribe but the Sith princess and the Doomed woman had managed to escape their Keshiri captors. The two women also used the Force to convince Eorm's entire herd of uvaks, winged reptilian beasts of steed, to accompany back to Eshkrene, the planet's South Pole. This effectively deprived Dreypa's forces of an "air force."
Dreypa's forces traveled through the Marisota Floodplain where they were intercepted by a Sith army led by Grand Consort Iliana Hilts, the wife of Grand Lord Hilts. The Marisota Floodplain had seen many battles between rival Sith factions during the Time of the Rot, a civil war which had devastated Keshtah Minor for almost a millennium. Under the leadership of the reformist Grand Lord Varner Hilts, Kesh had experienced peace for around thirty years. However, this peace had been interrupted by Dreypa's rebellion. Dreypa's forces initially had the upper hand against the Tribe's forces. Dreypa's rebels were armed with lightsabers and inflicted serious casualties on the Tribe's infantry.
Meanwhile, Dreypa used Force lightning to incinerate several enemy troops while Spinner took the opportunity to settle scores against the Tribe. Spinner stabbed an enemy soldier with two daggers, telling the dying the man that the "Death Spinner" had returned and was teaching him a "history lesson." Unknown to Dreypa and Spinner, Iliana had held back part of her forces: the elite Skyborn Rangers, the Tribe's air force which rode uvaks. The Skyborn Rangers strafed Dreypa's forces with glass daggers, inflicting heavy casualties on the untrained and ill-equipped rebel army. Dreypa and Spinner were unable to counter this assault since their army lacked an "air force."
Spinner explained to an infuriated Dreypa that they did not have any riders among their forces and that it took months to learn how to ride an uvak. He also criticized Dreypa for moving his forces too fast and pointed out that their hostages and their guards still had not caught up with them. Dreypa furiously responded that he could not wait any longer since he had already been asleep for four thousand years. At that point, Dreypa suddenly remembered one of his former weapons: the Leviathans, large serpentine Sithspawn capable of draining the life energies of sentient beings. Several of these creatures were residing within the crater of Sessal Spire, a volcano on the southwestern coast of Keshtah Minor. Dreypa then ordered his remaining forces to retreat to Sessal Spire.
===Aftermath===
The Battle of the Marisota Floodplain was initially regarded as a victory by the Lost Tribe's military commander Iliana Hilts. One of her scouts reported that Lord Dreypa's forces were moving southwest towards the peninsula which led to Sessal Spire. Iliana dismissed the enemy commander as a fool since that route ended at a dead end. Lord Dreypa and Spinner eventually arrived at the crater of Sessal Spire with the Lost Tribe's forces hot in pursuit. By that time, Dreypa had apparently descended into a state of madness and was shouting and screaming incessantly. Dreypa's "madness" led Spinner to desert and attempt to cut a deal with Iliana and the Lost Tribe. Dreypa then attempted to convince Iliana to become his consort but was rebuffed by the Grand Consort, who mistakenly dismissed the Sith Lord as a slave with delusions of grandeur.
She then ordered her troops to throw Dreypa and Spinner into the volcano. Dreypa was enraged by Iliana's rebuff and used his amulet to summon the leviathans from their hibernation beneath the volcanic crater. These leviathans then emerged and attacked both Dreypa's former allies and his Lost Tribe pursuers. This set the stage for the Battle of Sessal Spire which saw the destruction of Iliana's Tribal forces and the Doomed.
==Behind the scenes==
While not officially named, the Battle of the Marisota Floodplain was the second conflict of Dreypa's rebellion, which devastated parts of Keshtah Minor in 2974 BBY. It first appeared in John Jackson Miller's Lost Tribe of the Sith—Spiral 3, the third comic issue of the Spiral comic story, which was released on October 10, 2012.
==Appearances==
*Lost Tribe of the Sith—Spiral 3 
==Notes and references==
Category:Battles of Dreypa's rebellion