Confrontation on Ambria

A confrontation took place on the planet Ambria in 990 BBY that culminated in a short lightsaber duel between the failed Jedi Padawan Darovit and a team of fourteen Jedi. Darovit had discovered his cousin, the Sith apprentice Darth Zannah, on the planet Coruscant, where she was undercover as a Jedi. Fearing she would be discovered, Zannah took Darovit to her Master, Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane, on the planet Tython. They were followed by a group of Jedi who engaged Zannah and Bane in a duel, and although the Jedi were killed, Bane suffered life-threatening injuries. After the duel, Zannah took Bane to the healer Caleb on Ambria, who refused to heal the dying Dark Lord unless Zannah surrendered her Master to the Jedi Order. Zannah accepted Caleb's demands and sent word to the Jedi that a Sith Lord still lived.
Zannah, however, betrayed and murdered Caleb after his part of the bargain was upheld. She then used Sith magic to drive Darovit insane and furnished him with a gold-bladed lightsaber. When a team of six Jedi Masters and eight Jedi Knights led by Master Tho'natu arrived on Ambria to arrest the Sith Lord, they were attacked by the insane Darovit. Believing him to be the Dark Lord, the Jedi quickly cut him down. Assuming the Sith had finally been eliminated from the galaxy, the Jedi left the planet, allowing Bane's Order of the Sith Lords to survive. The Sith remained hidden from the Jedi for nearly a millennium, until they finally revealed themselves with the power to take over the galaxy.
==Prelude==
Darovit—a failed Jedi Padawan and redeemed Sith—traveled to the Jedi Temple on the galactic capital planet Coruscant in 990 BBY, where he planned to reveal that he knew of two Sith Lords who had survived the New Sith Wars. Before he was able to speak out, however, he found his cousin, Sith apprentice Darth Zannah, who was in disguise as Nalia Adollu, a Padawan who had been stationed on the planet Polus since 995 BBY. Fearing that she would be exposed, Zannah fled, taking Darovit with her to meet her Master, Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane, on the planet Tython. Nevertheless, a group of five Jedi led by Jedi Lord Valenthyne Farfalla tracked down the Sith and engaged Zannah and Bane in a duel.
Although the Jedi were slaughtered, several of the parasitic, impenetrable orbalisks that formed Bane's armor were killed by his own expulsion of Force lightning. The orbalisks released deadly toxins into his body for which there was no known antidote. Zannah took Bane and Darovit aboard the starship Loranda and flew to the planet Ambria to find the healer Caleb, who had saved Bane's life ten years earlier, during the New Sith Wars. However, Caleb had only healed Bane because the Sith Lord had threatened to harm his daughter. Fearing that Bane would return and threaten her again, the healer had sent his daughter away, forcing her to move to another planet and change her name so that she could never be tracked down; Caleb himself did not know her location. The healer further resisted Zannah's attempts to torture him into compliance, and Darovit suggested that Caleb might heal Bane if Zannah called in the Jedi to arrest her Master.
Caleb agreed to the idea, but Zannah was hesitant, as there was still much for her to learn from her Master. If she turned him over to the Jedi, she knew that many secrets of the Sith he had not yet revealed to her would likely be lost forever. On the other hand, if she did not send the message, Bane would die and the secrets definitely would be lost. Darovit pressured her to save Bane's life, join the Jedi when they came, and turn away from the dark side of the Force. Finally, realizing that she had no choice, Zannah accepted the plan. She sent a message drone to the Jedi, and Caleb healed Bane, who eventually regained consciousness. When Zannah told her still-weakened Master what she had done, he expressed his anger and told her to kill him rather than allow him to fall into the hands of the Jedi. Zannah, however, had formulated a plan—she murdered Caleb, mutilated the healer's corpse, and used her skills in Sith magic to drive Darovit insane. She then gave Darovit Farfalla's gold-bladed lightsaber with the intention of having Darovit attack the Jedi when they arrived.
==The confrontation==
Zannah hid herself and her Master in a small trapdoor inside Caleb's hut and hid their presences in the Force so that the Jedi would not sense them. Meanwhile, a team of six Jedi Masters and eight Jedi Knights led by the Jedi Master Tho'natu arrived on Ambria in the Jedi cruiser Light of Truth to take the Sith into custody. The Jedi quickly found the dismembered corpse of Caleb outside of the healer's shack. Moving toward the hut, Tho'natu called out to the Sith that they had arrived and were there to help. Darovit then emerged, screaming and brandishing the golden lightsaber of the recently fallen Farfalla. He attacked Tho'natu and the other Jedi, who fell upon him and killed him in seconds.
==Aftermath==
Recalling that Farfalla had used a golden lightsaber, Tho'natu assumed that Darovit was the Sith Lord who had killed the Jedi on Tython. Noticing that Darovit was missing one hand, he also surmised that Darovit had been grievously injured and had come to Caleb for help. Tho'natu further inferred that the healer had sent the message to the Jedi shortly after Darovit's arrival, but Darovit had found out and, once healed, had killed Caleb in retaliation. The Jedi, mistakenly convinced that they had finally destroyed the last of the Sith, took Caleb's remains to Coruscant for a proper burial and left the Loranda for junkers. Zannah and Bane escaped a few days later in the starship, and Bane expressed his approval of Zannah's actions.
The Jedi Order honored the five fallen Jedi who had been killed at Tython by engraving their names and images on a white block of stone, in which their lightsaber hilts were also inlaid, and Caleb was honored on the list as well. Jedi Master Obba, who had been a member of Tho'natu's strike team and who by 980 BBY had become a member of the Council of First Knowledge, recounted the events of the confrontation to Princess Serra of Doan, who was actually Caleb's daughter. Upon hearing the Jedi's description of the insane man they had killed, Serra became convinced that the Jedi had been fooled—she remembered Bane's appearance from her childhood and was certain he had survived. She thus hired an assassin, the Huntress, to hunt down Bane and capture him. Nevertheless, Bane escaped and enlisted the Huntress as his Sith apprentice; and she proceeded to kill Serra.
Zannah's actions allowed Darth Bane's Order of the Sith Lords to remain hidden from the Jedi for nearly a millennium—990 BBY to 32 BBY—permitting them to grow in power until they were strong enough to take on the galaxy once more. In 19 BBY, the Sith succeeded in eradicating the Jedi Order and establishing the first Galactic Empire.
==Behind the scenes==
The confrontation was created by author Drew Karpyshyn for his 2007 novel, Darth Bane: Rule of Two. The event served to present the deaths of two established characters, Caleb and Darovit; Karpyshyn also used the event as the origin of the Jedi Order's belief that the Sith were extinct, as presented in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. The confrontation later received mention in Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil, the sequel to Rule of Two and the final installment in Karpyshyn's Darth Bane Trilogy. In the novel, Caleb's daughter is told of the events of the confrontation from the Jedi's point of view.
==Appearances==
*Darth Bane: Rule of Two 
*Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil 
==Sources==
*Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
*The Essential Reader's Companion
==Notes and references==
Category:Battles of Ambria
Category:Conflicts during the Great Peace of the Republic
Category:Duels