Urias Orian, also known as Urias Orian the Immortal, was a Sith Lord of the old Sith Empire, creator of the Star of Ombus and the Amulet of Orian. He carved a kingdom of his own on the outskirts of the empire from his seat of power in what would become known as the Orian system to further his private pursuit of immortality. He died attempting a ritual that he hoped would transform him into a living god, but instead turned his body to stone and ripped his soul apart.
Biography
The Empire of the Immortal
Urias Orian rose to power in the early years of the reign of Marka Ragnos. He was descended from the original group of Dark Jedi who fled the Republic after the Hundred-Year Darkness and one of the last Sith Lords to be born from a pure Jedi lineage which had not been diluted by Sith blood.
Orian cared little for the politics of the Sith Empire and pursued a solitary life in the Sepros system where he subjugated the near-Human Ombi race and sought to create his own dominion. The Ombi initially saw him as a god and worshipped him. However, through twisted Sith alchemy he mutated many of Ombi into the Ekind, who he then forced to serve him as slaves. In time, the Ombi came to view Orian not so much as a god but as a demon, living in fear of their dark master.
The Star Map of Sepros
Orian constructed numerous temples throughout the Sepros system. On Sepros he found an ancient Star Map that led him to the planet Lehon in the Unknown Regions where in the volcanic Temple of Lost Souls called Urati Kazinal he discovered the remnants of an ancient thought bomb, inside of which floated a sword. When Orian plunged his hand inside the sphere of dark energy to retrieve the sword, he felt as if he was staring into the very heart of the Force, for which he gave it its name. When Orian returned to the Sepros system—which he had renamed the Orian system after himself—he brought back the sword and what he believed to be the answers to his quest for immortality. He declared himself the Lord Emperor, or Lord Daritha in the tongue of the ancient Rakata of Lehon, and began construction of a network of temples on Sepros based on an array he had found inscribed on the floor of one of the caverns on Lehon: depicting each of the Ways of the Seven Souls. For his palace, he took the Temple of the Void, the Final of the Seven Ways, which he built on top of the ruins of the ancient Star Map.
Creation of the Amulet of Orian
To achieve his ambition of becoming immortal and a living avatar of the Force, Orian believed he needed to replicate the wound he had discovered on Lehon. To do this, Orian decided to sacrifice the remaining members of the Ombi who had not yet been mutated into his Ekind servants. On Aeotheran, he performed a ritual that drained the lives of every last Ombus, sealing them inside what he named the Star of Ombus, a sphere much like the Heart of the Force that he had discovered on Lehon. The ritual left a permanent scar on the planet, leaving a crater where no flora would again grow, and in which the city of Seng Karash would one day be constructed more than five thousand years later.
But there was more work to be done. Orian recognized the risk of absorbing the power of the Star of Ombus in one go, so he took the Star to Dentavii, the fourth planet in the Orian system, where he used the ‘Sword of Orian’—the one he had found on Lehon—to sunder it, splitting the Star into fragments. Unexpectedly, the release of so much energy all at once fractured the crust of the planet itself, in time causing Dentavii to break apart, collapsing into an asteroid field that would forever orbit the sun.
Taking one of the fragments of the Star of Ombus, Orian created the Amulet of Orian, a silver gauntlet imbedded with the violet gem in its back. He believed the Amulet would at last bring him immortality, infusing him with the same power he had first felt in the Heart of the Force.
The Final Ritual
In his palace on Sepros, the heart of his power, at the nexus of the seven temples of seven souls, Orian attempted the ritual to imbue the Amulet with the power he craved to transcend mortality. But, in a final betrayal, Hafalia Seprosin Chunasca, the Dark Lady of the Ekind and former Princess of the Ombi, daughter to the long dead Ombi king, pulled the Sword of Orian from its pedestal just as Orian thrust his hand into the Amulet for the first time. With the chain broken, the ritual backfired and ripped Orian's spirit from his body, irreversibly tearing his soul apart, until the "Immortal Emperor" turned to stone. Thus, rather than drawing the power of the murdered Ombi people into Orian to transform him into a god, his actions instead brought about a fate far worse even than simply death: oblivion.
The Ekind princess who had betrayed Orian recovered the sword and the remaining fragments of Ombus and then fled the Orian system. She ventured to Kangaras, one of the systems within Orian’s domain, where she hid Orian’s scepter, which doubled as a ‘key’ to the Star Map on Sepros, hoping to prevent anyone else from traveling to Lehon and repeating the Sith Lord’s actions. She also scattered the pieces of the Star of Ombus, not wanting to see the souls of her people tormented further. With her people's spirits finally laid to rest, wielding Orian’s sword, the Dark Lady tried to take his revenge on the Sith, joining Okemi's uprising.
Legacy
It is perhaps ironic that Urias Orian the so-called 'Immortal' achieved a measure of undying infamy from his death. Although his spirit suffered a fate worse than death, being obliterated beyond time, his legacy has refused to fade away.
Following his death, the Orian system was forgotten by the rest of the Sith Empire. His Amulet remained bound to his stone body, and the few surviving Ekind carried on with their lives on Sepros, free of their brutal overlord, but forever carrying the taint of his corruption transformed into Sith mutants: their true race, the Ombi, gone forever. After their prince's uprising was ended, Orian’s sword was fought over for some time by other Sith Lords, changing hands—and even name—several times until its ultimate fate was lost.
The Orian system was not rediscovered until Trevarus Caerick came across it by chance while hunting down his former master, Kiln Tobasa, during the Second Brotherhood Civil War in 16 ABY. During the ensuing duel, Caerick wrestled the Amulet from Orian’s stone body, and used it to defeat Tobasa, destroying the Temple of the Void in the process. While Orian was gone, and his soul obliterated, echoes of his former self remained inside the Amulet. In the following years the Amulet’s ‘will’ bled into Caerick’s own, leading the Krath sorcerer to develop Orian’s same obsessions, and to attempt to search out the long lost fragments of the Star of Ombus. During the Great Exodus of the Brotherhood from Imperial Space, it was perhaps this same obsession that led Caerick to suggest the Orian system as a fitting refuge for the disciples of the Lord Sadow, Astronicus Aurelius Sadow.
In 28 ABY, history started repeating itself when Caerick and his apprentice, Darth Vexatus, found Orian’s hidden scepter on Kangaras. Having previously uncovered the ancient Star Map matrix on Sepros, the pair had the ruined Temple of the Void rebuilt; and, on the turn of 29 ABY, they sacrificed the surviving Ekind savages to reactivate the dark side powered device. They then ventured to Lehon to attempt to harness the power of the Heart of the Force, as Orian had tried to do millennia before with the Star of Ombus, unaware they lacked the focusing crystal housed in Orian’s missing sword. Their attempt to absorb the full power of the Heart at once ‘destroyed’ them both: Caerick’s spirit forever devoured by the Dragon, Shan Long; and Vexatus’s, quite literally, ripped to pieces.
However, even after the fateful events on Lehon, Orian’s legacy has still refused to die. Reports of shadows in the Seprosian forests indicate some Ekind may have survived their race’s slaughter, although the reason for their stirring remains unclear. And Orian’s lost sword still haunts the future, even now . . .