Rashael Koss

Rashael Koss, Dark Lord of the Sith, is the supreme ruler of the Sith Empire. A confirmed hedonist and diligent scholar, he works through intelligence and minimal action. He has no need for glory, but uses some of the tactics of a cult of personality to strengthen the Sith regime.

Origins
Nassus was a world perpetually in twilight. The clouds were dense, filling the sky and diffusing the sunlight until by the time it reached the high, jarring peaks and deep valley forests of the surface, it was little more than a suggestion. The true day on Nassus took place at night, when the bioluminescent forests blazed a fierce blue, illuminating vast stretches better than the feeble sun ever did.

Humans inhabited a number of cities in the mountainous regions. The world was a discomfiting place to live, with day feeling like night should and the luminescent sea-level forests and dark cloud cover giving the illusion that the sky was below and earth above. Over the centuries the human settlers learned to adapt and cope, but Nassus remained isolated after clerical errors deleted any mention of it from the old Republic’s registry.

The planet remained unnoticed by the galaxy at large until the Jedi scholar Rashael Koss happened upon it in his research. He travelled there and found a world awash in the Force – all of its indigenous creatures were tremendously force sensitive. But it was the dark side that he felt there – the animals operated on instinct, they knew fear and hunger and lust and little else. Koss stayed on Nassus, studying the fauna, the people that had developed largely in isolation, the crystal formations that grew deep in the mountains and the trees that no human could go near without being blinded. While there he fell in love with a local woman and with her, conceived a child.

The sensation of love defied all tenets of the Jedi Order – theirs was a detached way, that of objectivity and neutrality. Koss was an intelligent man and knew he had broken a central law of the Order in falling in love, but at the same time, could not come to understand how so beautiful a feeling could be anything but good. Unable to find resolution, his contemplations on the matter turned to dire rantings, which in turn transformed into an opposition to the sterility of the Jedi Code. Being a scholar, Koss had in his possession a number of artifacts he had excavated at archaeological dig sites on worlds that had once been a part of a Sith Empire some four thousand years prior. One of these was a holocron. He had never before so much as thought to activate it but now, bereft of answers and finding himself increasingly on confused, uncertain ground, he partook of the ancient Sith lore and discovered therein another philosophy, one that embraced the strength and vitality that accepting one’s humanity and emotion could bring. Koss found fulfillment in the things the holocron taught him, and came in time to condescend against and then hate the Jedi Order. He began to take apprentices from Nassus’ settlements, tempering all his teachings with a mantra – “Passion is power, but belligerence is weakness, and stupidity is death.”

Rashael Koss and his students wandered across Nassus for years. They wandered northward, coming at length to miles-long tracts of twisting, dead forests and to jagged mountain ranges that scraped the dark, clouded sky. It was there that they discovered a vast, ancient edifice – rising up from a plateau, many miles long and extending so deep into the mountain that they could not begin to map out its extremities. The citadel, they fast discovered, had belonged to a Sith Lord of antiquity – one of terrifying prowess whose studies, throughout his centuries-long life, had been preserved in perpetuity in the cavernous, gothic libraries and laboratories in the deepest reaches of the mountain’s womb. Time had taken its toll on some of the Sith lore but much was undamaged and the new Sith took up residence in the castle, naming it Niflheim after a cold, frozen afterlife of legend.

The Sith grew in their mastery by leaps and bounds, and under the tutelage and wisdom of Rashael Koss, grew to embrace passions other than bloodlust – they came to love each other fiercely, connect with such terrible potency that not a one could fathom bringing harm to any of the others. It was then that the Dark Lord Koss took on his final pupil, a young boy called Seth DeSchaen, whose father had brutally murdered his mother and then himself.

right|thumb|Koss unmasked.Seth’s talent for the Force was unnerving to his teachers and peers – in the course of a year he had matched those who had travelled with Koss for half a decade or more. By his second year, he had surpassed them. When the Dark Lord of the Sith declared his two best students to be Sith Lords in their own right, Seth was one of them.

The circumstances concerning the fracturing of the Sith fraternity of Niflheim are not entirely understood – what is known is that Seth DeSchaen murdered six of Rashael’s students, and drove another four insane, leaving their minds shattered and useless for the rest of their lives. Rashael Koss faced him and Seth defeated him but stayed his hand, opting not to kill his teacher.

The order slowly recovered from the tragedy, and Seth DeSchaen, if he experienced remorse or punishment, gave evidence of neither. He retreated to Niflheim’s womb, to its deepest chambers that ancient spirits still haunted. He rarely came up, and spoke almost not at all when he did. And then one day, he called a meeting of the order and told them, “Norik Kun, Dark Lord of the Sith Empire, has died. Now is our time.”

By clandestine effort, the Sith sowed the seeds of what would become their eventual conquest over the ancient throne worlds of Sith heritage. And then, one day, they struck – within half a year, the core worlds of the Sith Empire were united under a new order.

The other Sith of the galaxy would not let this presumption stand. Their combined strength drove Koss and his forces into the Sith heartland. When they made common cause against a plague of alchemical monsters, Koss began quietly connecting with key players even as Sirena made herself Sith Empress. Within a year, Sirena had been deposed by her own apprentice and the other Sith Lords, who selected Koss to replace her. Once more, Koss was Dark Lord of the Sith, and supreme ruler of the Sith Empire.