Darth
Vader
Darth Vader was a master of the dark side of the force, the servant of his master Darth Sideous, the emporers most trusted servant. However he wasn't always this way......
He began life as Anakin Skywalker, a young slave from Tatooine who was skilled in piloting and electronics, and extremely strong in the force. His origins are a mystery...his mother, Shmi, revealed that there was no biological father to Qui-Gon. Some among the Jedi believed this to be part of the ancient propechy of the chosen one, willed into life by the midi-chlorians, who would bring balance to an increasingly darkening Force. There was another possibility, though. The child could have been the creation of sinister Sith manipulations, as the Dark Lords Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious conspired to bring about the perfect apprentice by coaxing life from lifelessness.
Once discovered by maverick Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, Anakin was taken before the Jedi Council to be trained. There was some controversy on the subject -- despite Jinn's adamant assurances that Skywalker was one spoken of in the prophecy, the council was hesitant to allow his training at the age of nine, and with the ever present element of fear, which clouded his future. However following the death of Qui-Gon, and the promise made by Obi Wan, the council had little choice but to allow Obi Wan to train Skywalker.
Skywalker was seduced by the dark side of the Force. His boundless abilities fueled a sense of pride that hastened his fall. He chafed under the rigid strictures of the Jedi Code, and would discreetly transgress from the Jedi teachings to suit his wants. Despite it being forbidden, Skywalker secretly married his love Padme Amidala. It was his deep-rooted concern for her safety that became his greatest weakness, one that the Sith Lord Darth Sidious was able to exploit. In searching for his mother, whom he sensed was suffering, hatred and anger took control and he slaughtered allof her captors.
Skywalker was plagued with prophetic visions of his wife dying in childbirth. His friend and confidant, Chancellor Palpatine, revealed to the troubled young Jedi that a pathway to immortality lay among the teachings of the Sith. Palpatine revealed himself to be the shadowy Sith Lord Darth Sidious, and poisoned Anakin's faculties with well-crafted words of praise and conspiracy. Anakin, who had reason to doubt the Jedi's capabilities and intentions, began to lean more and more to the dark side. When the time came to make the fateful decision, he agreed to follow Sidious' teachings and knelt before the dark master.
Anakin was renamed Darth Vader. The Sith conspiracy, which had been festering in the shadows of the Republic for a thousand years, sprang into action. Palpatine elevated himself to the position of Emperor, and dispatched Vader as his ultimate enforcer. With his unparalled Force abilities, Vader swept through the Jedi temple, killing allof the younglings. Vader then brought an end to the Clone Wars by slaughtering all the masterminds of the Confederacy of Independant Systems on Mustafar. In his twisted perception, he was bringing peace and order to the new Empire, wiping away the corruption and chaos of the Republic's twilight.
His wife, Padmé Amidala, followed Anakin to Mustafar, to plead for him to return from the dark side. When Obi-Wan Kenobi emerged from Amidala's ship, Vader was consumed with rage. He saw betrayal at every corner. Distraught, he reached out with his hand and began to telekinetically throttle Padmé. She gasped for air before collapsing, unconscious, on the Mustafar landing platform. Shocked at how far his apprentice had fallen, Kenobi vowed to stop Vader and the two entered into a fierce lightsaber duel that traversed the burning Mustafar landscape. Despite his newfound power bestowed by the dark side of the Force, Anakin was grievously wounded in the fight. Kenobi's blade sheared from him his lower legs and his left arm, and his crippled body tumbled onto the black sands of Mustafar. He caught fire, and Vader was severely burned all over his body. His burning anger kept him alive, and he was forever scarred not only by his wounds but also by betrayal. He abandoned his former identity. Sidious took Vader from Mustafar to an Imperial Rehabilitation Centre where he was rebuilt. Here Skywalker's transformation was complete....he was no longer Anakin....but Darth Vader.
At the time of his transformation, Vader never knew that Padmé had given birth to twins. Obi-Wan Kenobi hid the children from the Dark Lord and his master, Emperor Palpatine. Vader somehow discovered that he had a son, Luke Skywalker, but never suspected he had a daughter, Leia, who was secretly taken to be raised by Bail Organa, Viceroy and First Chairman of Alderaan. In the chaos that accompanied Palpatine's rise to power, Vader became one of the Emperor's most loyal servants. The Emperor entrusted him with the elimination of the Jedi Knights. During these dark times, Vader and his agents destroyed the remnants of Jedi order.
When the Galactic Civil War raged across the Empire, Darth Vader was tasked with discovering the location of the Rebel Alliances secret base. Vader captured Rebel operative Princess leia and had her tortured to reveal the location of the rebel base and the whereabouts of the stolen plans. These plans carried the complete schematics of the Empire's most powerful weapon, the Death Star battle station. When a rescue team successfully liberated the princess, Vader found himself face to face with his former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Vader defeated the aged Jedi Knight in a lightsaber duel.
Three years after the destruction of the Death Star, Vader led an elite squadron of Star Destroyers headed by his flagship, the Super Star Destroyer Executor. He was to seek out and capture the Rebels responsible for the Death Star's demise. Eventually, Vader tracked the Rebels down to the ice-world of Hoth. There, he launched a ground attack destroying the base.
During the Hoth campaign, the Emperor commanded Vader to track down the "son of Skywalker," and have Vader turn him to the dark side of the Force. Vader planned to use Skywalker's friends as bait to lure him into a trap. He hired a gang of bounty hunters to track down the Falcon, and drew Luke to Cloud City. There he and Luke fought in a lightsaber duel that Vader won by ruthlessly severing Luke's sword-hand. Vader then revealed to the broken young Jedi that he was his father, and that they would rule the galaxy as father and son. Luke refused to succumb to the dark side, and escaped his father.
After these incidents, Palpatine reassigned Vader from the Imperial fleet, and instead put him in charge of overseeing the new Death Star operation. The Emperor began to distrust his once loyal servant. Vader's contact with his son sparked something within him, something the Emperor did not like. Palpatine was scheduled to arrive at the second Death Star. The Emperor foresaw that Skywalker would come before the two, and then they would seduce young Luke to the dark side, just as Anakin had been drawn to its power decades earlier. When Luke surrendered, and was taken before the Emperor, Palpatine pitted father and son in a lightsaber duel. Skywalker refused to fight and give into the temptation of the dark side. Vader, probing his mind, learned of his daughter, Leia Organa. He threatened to turn her to the dark side. At this threat, Luke gave into his hatred and attacked his father. In the ferocious assault that followed, young Skywalker nearly killed Vader.
Luke refused to turn to the Darkside, and Palpatine unleashes his deadly power upon the young Jedi. Vader stands watching helplessly as his son lurches towards death. Unable to watch further Vader turns on his master, and throws him into a bottmoless reactor shaft. In the process Vader himslef was mortally wounded, yet as he lays dying Anakin returns...asking his son to remove his armour so that he can look at his son 'with my own eyes.' He then dies, and Luke burns his armour on the Endor moon, with Anakin disappearing into the light side of the force. The last vision we see is of Obi Wan, Yoda and Anakin together......
The
Sith Lord Darth Sidious
The Sith, an ancint order of force practitioners devoted to the dark side, were long thought to be extinct, the current incarnation thought to be a rogue Jedi dissident from the order. Two thousand years ago the Jedi had come to the understanding that the true power of the force lay 'not through contemplation and passivity' but through tapping into the dark side of the force. Of course the Jedi were not too keen on this, and the Dark Jedi were outcast, yet as time progressed more followers accrued. This new Sith cult continued to grow, yet by harnessing hateful energies from the darkside it would only be a matter of time before this movement self destructed. This came in the form of power struggles between power hungry Sith's, and so weakended by infighting the movement imploded and dwindling numbers were easily wiped out by the Jedi.
However one Sith had the cunning to survive; Darth Bane restrucuted the cult so that there could only ever be two - the master and the apprentice. He took an apprentice, and when he was suceeded that new Sith Lord would take an apprentice. On this basis the Sith could continue to exist with little chance of being detected. When Sidious appeared it was he who was responsible for the revenge of the Sith against the Jedi; and his measured and carefully engineered plot spanned decades. Sidious himself was apprentice to Darth Plagueis, a wise Sith Lord with excessive powers. By Sith tradition Sidious killed Plagueis, leaving an opening for a new apprentice - Darth Maul.
The dark side, for all its power, is ultimately hard to detect if so desired. A shadowy master like Darth Sidious was able to keep his presence a secret, even though he maintained a guise as a very public figure. Sidious was a politician, a seemingly humble Senator from Naboo. Though he would eventually rise to the position of Supreme Chancellor, and worked closely with the Jedi during the Clone Wars, they failed to detect his true nature until it was too late. With the death of Darth Maul at Naboo, the Jedi Council realized that the Sith menace was true. What they hadn't fathomed was whether Maul was the master, or the apprentice....
The next apprentice taken by Sidious was Count Dooku, a former Jedi who became a political firebrand. As Darth Tyranus, Dooku engineered the vast armies that would fight on both sides of the Clone Wars: the assembled droid armies of the united Confederacy of Independant Systems, and the secretly created clone army of the Republic. The Clone Wars were an elaborate and costly sham: a massive ruse that spread the Jedi ranks thin across the galaxy, and drew more political power to Darth Sidious. When the time was right -- when Sidious had in his grasp his ideal apprentice, the powerful Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker-- he dispatched a command to the clone forces that identified their Jedi generals as traitors to the Republic. The Jedi were wiped out by their loyal clone underlings. What few survivors remained were branded as enemies of the state.
With Sidious as the Galactic Emperor, and Darth Vader as his loyal apprentice, the Sith ruled the galaxy and plunged it into darkness. It remained so for years until a new hope arose to bring Darth Vader back from the dark side and extinguish the menace of the Sith once and for all......
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