Korroth Karn

Under Construction This page seems to be Under Construction. Watch out for large groups of Rebel fighters. After construction is complete, please place a note on the article's talk page and remove this message.

Korroth Karn is a young Pau’an learning in the ways of the Dark Side. He is a Krath Guardian in House Acclivis Draco, Clan Scholae Palatinae and a Neophyte of the Antei Combat Centre.

Biography

Foundations

Korroth and his twin brother were born in 14 BBY in the sinkhole of Ika, on Utapau. Following their mother’s family name, they were baptized Korren Noren and Turren Noren. Their mother Mavana Noren was a prominent member of the Council of Administrators, which was the ruling government in Ika. The Council had been instituted six months before the twins’ birth, after his father’s regime had been overthrown. Tuvon Karn, father to the twins and husband of Mavana Noren, had since then dominated Ika in a harsh dictatorship. All bowed to his will, and those who refused were arrested and imprisoned. Unbeknownst to him, the dictator’s wife had joined an undercover group which planned to restore freedom to the sinkhole. In a quick and non-violent coup d’état, Tuvon Karn was deposed and exiled to the surface of the planet.

A bright future

Six months after the creation of the Council, upon the twins’ birth, it was decided that they would be the future rulers of Ika. Up until then, the Council would have directed the sinkhole, and the twins would be prepared for their duty. Since their earliest age, the two children were taught the art of politics and diplomacy, the laws and constitutions of the sinkhole and were even trained in duels with the sword and musket. At home, their loving mother told them tales of justice, honour, hope and freedom, so as to instil these principles into them as their bedrocks. For the same reason, Mavana never told her sons of Ika’s modern history. She did not want them to know of their greedy father and his despotic reign. When the twins asked her about Tuvon, Mavana answered simply that he ‘went away to the surface’ before they were born. This only made Korren more curious about his mysterious father. When he was little, he daydreamed of his father’s brave exploits and his travels to faraway fantastical lands. Even though there still were people who despised Mavana and her sons because of her exiled husband Tuvon, Korren refused to let go of the frail image he had built of his father.

In their adolescent years, the twins’ abilities matured. Their mother and the rest of the Council of Administrators recognized them to be indeed promising for their future at the head of the Council. Turren Noren was gifted at making inspiring speeches to audiences, and he had a remarkably accurate aim with the musket. Korren Noren’s talent lay in persuading people to his point of view, and his skill with the sword and the riding of the winged dactillions was surpassed by few in the sinkhole. Yet, the most impressive thing was the twin brothers’ bond. They shared every thought and every secret; at times they acted as one person, the one’s weaknesses compensated by the other’s strengths. They said that, when they came of age, they would lead Ika into a golden age together. This pleased the Council greatly, and the people of Ika themselves voiced their anticipation at being guided by the twins.

However, there was another faction in Ika that had watched the twins’ progress since they made their first tottering step. No one but the members knew of the existence of this organization, as they had laid dormant since the fall of Tuvon the dictator, silently analyzing and evaluating the evolving state of affairs. By the age of eighteen, the twins had their unofficial word in some of the Council of Administrators meetings, although they were not its members yet. Pau’ans come of age at twenty, but their opinion was still taken as advice.

The sinkhole of Ika

Dark clouds

The secret organization noticed this, and one night Korren found a letter under his pillow. It stated simply a place and time, two days hence, and it warned not to bring or tell anybody else, even his brother. At the bottom of the message was stamped the insignia of the old Tuvon regime.

For two days Korren secluded himself to his room. He read the letter over and over again, trying to divine who wrote it and why, and most of all struggling to understand why it said that he had to go without his brother. The night of the encounter came, and Korren Noren was finally overcome by his curiosity. He followed the message’s directions down into dark underground caves at the bottom of the sinkhole. He walked deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of damp passages and bridges going over underground rivers, until he entered a large circular room. Inside, a small group of short stocky Utai and tall Pau'ans were waiting for him, with their faces hidden by hoods. They identified themselves as the Arbiters, a body of sorcerers created by Tuvon Karn in secret during his reign. They had acted as the eyes and ears of the dictator, and their duty had been to seek out those who questioned the will of the regime and make them disappear.

Since the creation of the Council of Administrators, they had kept silent, blaming themselves for the success of Mavana Noren’s treason and the fall of Tuvon’s reign. But now, after having observed the two brothers from the shadows, they had chosen the leader that would help them restore the regime. They had already appointed Korren the rightful heir of Tuvon and his reign, giving back to him his true name, Korroth Karn. The Arbiters then revealed the whole history of his father’s regime; how he had risen to power through murder and brute force, how he had kept Ika under the iron fist of fear and hopelessness, extinguishing any thought of rebellion before it even materialized, and how he had fallen to the seduction of the duplicitous Mavana.

Perceiving the confusion and outright shock on Korren’s face, the Arbiters almost regretted not having waited until he was older. Hoping they had not overestimated this still fledgling Pau’an, they led him back outside the caves, asking him to ponder on what he had just heard. In the next few weeks, Korren did just that. He had no doubt that what the Arbiters had told about his father was true; it all fitted together now: his mother’s silence about Tuvon, the animated discussions that suddenly stopped when he came near, the hateful looks from strangers when he went to the lower-class quarters. Then he searched for the reason why he didn’t now despise his father for his immoral actions. After long meditation he realized that he admired Tuvon even more, not necessarily because his actions had been so vile, but because of his proficiency at obtaining and maintaining power. His despise had now transferred to the Council of Administrators itself. It had been difficult, for he still loved Mavana as his mother, but in the end he acknowledged their weakness and how uselessly frail and fragmented their power was. Korren finally committed himself to follow in his father’s footsteps and walk the path of self-seeking that leads to Power.

A new path

After long days of meditation in his room, he waited for the next message from the Arbiters, and presented himself to them once again, his resolution set. This time they received him in a colossal natural cavern that appeared to be their centre of operations. A much larger number of Arbiters had gathered compared to the last meeting, and they all had their hoods down. They told Korren that they already knew of his decision, and they announced that all of the Arbiters would from now on assist him in claiming his father’s vacant throne. However, for now they advised him to wait. He should carefully gain the Council’s trust so that, when the time came, they would be taken by surprise.

Korren exited the caves with a new purpose. He set about making friends and allies in the Council, while the Arbiters worked covertly on gaining supporters in Ika’s population. By the time Korren turned nineteen they had made good progress. Some of the Administrators in the Council were now so devoted to Korren that the Arbiters thought about enrolling them to their cause when the time came. No one in the Council, or in the rest of the sinkhole, would ever suspect Korren to be planning such things. No one, except his brother. Only he had noticed how Korren had changed over the past year. Their bond was still as strong as before, but Turren knew that he was guarding a secret; a thing that neither had ever done to each other. Korren had become more solitary, and he seemed to be on the alert all the time, especially the time he sneaked away to the lower levels.

A taste of Power

The day before the twins’ twentieth birthday, which would have been their coming of age, Turren decided that he would follow his brother on one of his furtive visits to the lower levels. He stalked Korren down into the caves, silent and careful to remain out of his sight. As they descended into the deeper parts of the caves, Turren puzzled over what his brother could ever be doing in such a dreary place. Turning a corner, he suddenly noticed that he had lost Korren. He began running through the stone corridors, without even taking notice of which forking he took, until the tunnel ended abruptly over a great chasm. Turren stopped himself just in time, and saw that he was standing on a ledge high up near the ceiling of a massive lit-up cave. Voices came from below him; he looked down and spotted an aggregation of Pau’ans and Utai wearing dark cloaks. They were talking loudly enough for Turren to hear what they were saying. It didn’t take him long to figure out who they were. Their discussion outlined their future plans for the Council of Administrators. Turren heard them talk about an uprising, and the disbandment of the Council. Many of them were of the opinion that the Administrators should be killed so as not to have trouble in the future. Then a young voice spoke up, expressing his agreement as long as Mavana Noren was kept alive. Turren narrowed his eyes, it couldn’t be true. He was too far away to be sure, he had to be wrong. But it was unquestionable; Korren was the one who had just spoken.

The group had now moved on to debate the method of assassination for each Administrator, then it disbanded and each conspirer exited the cavern through a different passage. Turren collapsed to his knees, too horrified to move or think. After a while Korren appeared unseen behind him. At first he seemed to be perplexed; he was torn between acting to protect the Arbiters now that they had been discovered and the love for his brother. Just as Turren became aware of him, Korren devised a way to appease both sides. He explained fully to Turren the Arbiters’ plans. Turren’s expression was blank; so Korren tried to convince his brother to leave the feebleness of the Council of Administrators. Together, they could establish a dominion more powerful than their father would ever have hoped for.

Turren refused to listen to him; he begged Korren to see through the lies and acknowledge the wrongness of what he was doing. Korren’s face gradually distorted with rage, inside him the beast of wrath had been released and now it controlled him completely. With a fire burning behind the deep black eyes, he grasped his brother’s neck in his hands and throttled him to death. As Turren’s body crumpled to the ground, Korren felt a river of molten lava surge through him, threatening to pull him under the surface, where he could see pure evil flowing. He drank in the power from this river, that he would later come to know as the Dark Side, craving for more and more; until everything turned black, the river drained, and he passed out.

The chains are broken

When he awoke, Korren felt like somebody had ripped a piece of his heart out and his soul was now bleeding freely out of the hole. No, it was I who wrenched it off, he told himself, and that hurt even more. But then he grasped why he had ripped that part of his heart out. It had been like a malignant cancer, weakening the rest of his body. The part of him that had belonged to his brother had been a useless burden on the walk to power.

Korren opened his eyes and recognized the Ikan prisons. In the cells next to his were all of the Arbiters’ doyens. Briefly, they explained to him what had happened since he lost consciousness. From what they had heard, one of the Council’s own shamans had detected the surge in Dark Side energy produced by Korren. The shaman sent the civil guard before the Arbiters could hide themselves and the two brothers. They were all captured and taken before the Council of Administrators, while the unconscious Korren was brought to the prisons and Turren’s body carried to Mavana. Without even a trial, the Council voted unanimously for the exile of Korren and the execution of the Arbiter elders. The sentences would be performed tomorrow at sunrise.

A Civil Guard on his dactillion

Korren’s last hope lay with Mavana. He was let out of jail and the warders escorted him to his mother. Korren was aware that she already knew of his fratricide, but he had to try out every possibility; exile to Utapau’s lifeless surface meant inevitable death. Korren knelt at her mother’s feet and begged to be shown mercy, seeking for any remaining vestige of her motherly love, but the hatred exuding from her was almost palpable. She threw her last surviving descendant out, bidding him to never come in her sight again and rejecting Korren as her son.

This broke Korren’s last connection to his old life, that in which he had ideals, pride, kindness and love. A new life of darkness had begun; he had made his first true step on the path of power, the path that had first been forged by his father. He was now Korroth Karn.

On the morning of his twentieth birthday, while the gallows were being set up for the Arbiter doyens, Korroth was flown out of the shaded safety of the sinkhole of Ika and conducted under the harsh sun to the barren and windswept surface of Utapau. The Council of Administrators, convened in a semicircle in front of him, drew out an ancient ceremonial sword and used it to draw a line in the parched ground. With their robes jerked behind them by the wind, they marched him to the edge of the line and then pushed him beyond it. They proclaimed solemnly that he was now banished from Ika, he was never to come back under pain of death. They turned, mounted their dactillions, and left him solitary on the plains. Korroth was exiled.

Path of Power

Test of fire

For a long time Korroth remained kneeling, having lost all hope. Just now that, with the murder of his brother and the rejection of his mother, he had found his true purpose, the objective to which he would strive through hardship and suffering, he would end his days among these lifeless dunes, his body covered by the sand and forgotten. He would never be able to taste the intoxicating nectar of power, never hold another being’s fate in his hands for him to do as he wills. He would vanish into nothingness just as his father before him had. But...what if Tuvon Karn had in fact survived these merciless lands? The Arbiters had installed a tradition upon the exile of Tuvon in which one of the younger Arbiters would go up to the surface every fifty nights and make certain light signals until sunrise. Could it be that this wasn’t just a useless rite of mourning for the lost, but a way to help Tuvon find his way back? Could it be that the Arbiter doyens actually knew that Tuvon would survive the Kati desert? A tiny, distant glimmer of hope appeared, too small almost to be considered; but in the darkness of despair that enshrouded Korroth’s mind it was the only thing that held him to this world.

Holding this uncertain hope in front of him, Korroth started walking towards the distant horizon and away from Ika. He would give his last breath fighting death, he told himself; but by the sixth day all of the food they had given him before the banishment had finished, and his horn-hilt sabre was useless, since nothing lived in these wastelands. The water was gone two days after, and Korroth finally collapsed to exhaustion under the midday sun.

(A more detailed account of the last part of this section can be found in the forum: http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5156)

The Urata

When Korroth woke up, he thought at first that he was in the afterlife, about to be judged by the same deity that millennia ago razed to the ground the fertile surface of Utapau. However, he soon discovered that he had been found by some sort of primitive tribe that somehow lived upon the surface. The scout that had discovered Korroth unconscious and that was currently letting him recover in his tent spoke the same language that was used in Ika, only with a heavily slurred accent. After quenching his thirst, Korroth garnered from the scout, called Utat Baki, that the tribe’s temporary camp was stationed far to the West of Ika, across the Kati desert and over a range of mountains called the Peaks of the Vile. Utat only gave away the reason for this strange name with reluctance. He said that they were named after a sect of sorcerers that practiced an evil form of magic called Bogan. They had a reputation for capturing children from the tribes that wandered too close to their tower and turning them into mindless slave monsters. He would tell Korroth no more, and was very glad when he returned to explain the geography of his land.

The Urata tribe, to which his people belonged, was a nomadic group of Pau’ans that migrated, according to their food and water needs, inside the Gorge Lands. Every family had at least one dactillion that they used to move across the ravines and seek water in their narrow crevices. The Peaks of the Vile lined the Gorge Lands to the East and South. To the North was the Talaran Basin, a vast plain completely covered in salt, so large that none of the tribes had yet attempted to cross it. Further to the West were the Utai Setag tribe, friends of the Urata, with their underground cave cities and deep water wells. To the South-West, the Ymu tribe roamed the Talari steppes on their fast varactyl mounts. They were not on friendly terms with the other two tribes, and they often fought skirmishes for territory or for water wells along the borders. Going back to describing the Urata, Utat portrayed the tribe as having a strict regime centred on the possession of water. The servant caste was the lowest and had the least water; then came the herders, who looked after the various large birds they used as a source of meat; the carpenters and tanners, who made and repaired tents and tools; the water-hunters, who used the dactillion’s acute sense of smell to seek out water; the blacksmiths, who forged weapons and harness for the dactillions mounts; the merchants, who traded goods with the Setag tribe and were almost a separate tribe themselves; the sages, who practiced the religious rites, cured the sick and taught the youngsters; and finally the warriors, who had been made the most water-rich caste with the rise of the new chieftain twenty years ago. Korroth interrupted him then, and asked him to repeat the chieftain’s name. Ka’Tuvon Karn, Utat answered.

Revelations

As soon as the Urata learned that Korroth was their own chieftain’s son, they sent a messenger to call Tuvon Karn back from his raid on one of the Ymu outposts. When the Ka, as the tribe called him, came back with his incursion party, the tribe had already prepared a large feast for the event, and the celebrations went on for so long and were so intense that Tuvon and Korroth were barely able to talk for three days. They finally managed to find a moment undisturbed in the chieftain’s tent. Looking at his father in the dim pitch-lamps’ light, Korroth saw a Pau’an past his middle age, but still sturdy and sharp, with deep black eyes bright with wisdom and intelligence. However, in that sun-weathered face and wrinkles at the edges of his eyes Korroth saw something he had not expected; sorrow? Self-contempt, maybe? Korroth soon forgot these silly ideas as Tuvon begun revealing what had been truly taking place in Ika in the last twenty years.

Several months before his expulsion from Ika, the dictator Tuvon Karn had instructed his Arbiters on what they were to do should he be imprisoned, exiled or murdered. By that time, he already suspected that the underground dissident factions were preparing for something they had not dared do ever before. The dictator was proven right when, following a bait left by these factions in the caves on the lower levels of Ika, he was caught without his escort and was surrounded by armed revolutionaries. Led by Mavana Noren, who had been the dictator’s wife but also a secret member of the revolution, the newly instituted Council of Administrators put Tuvon to trial and voted unanimously for his exile. There was no bloodshed throughout the process, since the ex-dictator’s soldiers were not prepared to stand against the jubilant people of Ika, who had just been freed from decades of oppression and were now celebrating in the streets. The Council of Administrators also arrested most of the dictator’s closest subordinates, although they could not find any of the infamous Arbiters. Even during Tuvon’s reign, they had always kept their identities hidden, and although now their leader was gone, they stayed hidden. This allowed them to fulfil the scheme that Tuvon had set them in the case something like this happened. During these past twenty years, they had been relating the unravelling of this scheme to Tuvon using light signals sent across the Kati desert, although Tuvon could not communicate back.

Shortly after the dictator’s exile, Mavana realized that she was pregnant with Tuvon’s child. Eight months later, Ika celebrated the birth of the twins Korren and Turren. This was when the Arbiters were supposed to have set in motion Tuvon’s plan, but they hesitated, since the plan did not include a possible rival heir for the dictator’s throne. However, as the twins grew up, the Arbiters came to see that this was an advantage, because when the time came, they would be able to choose the most suitable of the twins, and use the other for the initiation of the chosen twin.

At the twins’ seventeenth year, the Arbiters finally made their choice and met with Korroth in secret. They revealed to him his true destiny as heir to his father’s vacant throne and introduced him to the notions of self-seeking and individual power, while branding altruism as a weakness. Seeing that this struck a deep chord within Korroth, the Arbiters understood that they had chosen the right one to achieve the plan set by Tuvon Karn. Thus, they enrolled him in the ranks of the Arbiters, so that he may secretly serve as the mouth of the Arbiters in the Council of Administrators, where he would be able to gradually prepare Ika for the culmination of Tuvon’s plan. During the next three years, the Arbiters indirectly taught to Korroth the twists and turns of the path of power, and how the path itself could be straightened to reach power more swiftly. Korroth did not understand these things yet, but he unconsciously recorded them into his brain, so that they became like a charged bomb; a touch in the right place and it would all explode. This was exactly what the Arbiters had intended, since this allowed them to control the time when Korroth would actually become what Tuvon’s plans had intended him to be. However, the ‘bomb’ in Korroth’s mind was set off too soon when he murdered his brother Turren in the caves. Shortly after this event, the Arbiters stopped communicating with Tuvon with the light signals. Suspecting something had happened, Tuvon sent Utat Baki in the direction of the sinkhole of Ika, telling him that it was just a reconnaissance run. He hadn’t even hoped to find Utat coming back with his last son. This turn of events would entail some problems; however, now Tuvon would be able to personally finish off what the Arbiters had started twenty years ago, which was, following Tuvon’s whole plan, the creation of a new dictator.

To be continued...

Trivia

• Despite being born in 14 BBY, Korroth Karn is still a young Pau’an, since the average life-span of his species is around 400 years.
• Korroth has been taught by four different Masters: Armand al’Tor, Scorpius, Rasilvenaira Stormraven and Prelate Lucien Kaeth.