Okay so Sith alchemy right?
The out of universe reason it disappears for thousands of years is because Veitch invents it in Tales of the Jedi and revisits it in DE II, and then Luceno picks it up again for Darth Plagueis, but they more or less ignore it in between
But my Rule of Two read is funnier
Because hear me out: the Sith Rule of Two is, fundamentally, the most anti-bohemian institution in galactic history, and it created an absolutely unhinged cycle of academic generational trauma.
In the days of the Old Sith Empire, you could be a weirdo! There were enough Sith around that they could support a whole ecosystem of bizarre sub-disciplines. You had tomb architects, dark-side philosophers, and dudes who just lived in caves doing Sith alchemy to selectively breed nightmare hounds.
You could major in Evil Arts!!
But then Darth Bane comes along and invents the Rule of Two, which is basically the worst, most toxic form of practical career counseling.
Under the Rule of Two, the Sith are running a thousand-year revenge conspiracy to topple the Republic. They don't have the budget or the headcount for hobbyists.
So you get generations of Sith apprentices having the evil equivalent of the "No, dad, I want to be an artist!" conversation.
Master, my soul sings when I stitch corpses together to make cryptids!
That’s adorable. You are going to law school, you are going to learn finance, and you are going to infiltrate the trade commission, because that is what puts food on the table for the Grand Plan.
Sith alchemy — the weird, squishy, "I'm doing evil magic science for fun" branch — gets ruthlessly trimmed back.
Which brings us to Darth Tenebrous and Darth Plagueis.
Tenebrous is essentially a STEM-lord Tech Bro. He's a starship designer who believes the Force is just a calculable energy field. He loves math, physics, and predictive algorithms.
His apprentice, Plagueis, is a goth biology nerd. Plagueis complies with the Grand Plan just enough to become Hego Damask, a billionaire banker. He gets the practical "business major" his dad wanted. But, he uses his massive wealth to secretly fund his true passion: a basement laboratory where he does horrifying midi-chlorian experiments and creates life.
Tenebrous looks at this and is disgusted. He thinks Plagueis’s squishy, mystical blood-magic is an embarrassment to his clean, elegant math. But because he is a Sith Lord and doesn't go to family therapy, he handles his disappointment by secretly having a second kid.
Tenebrous trains Darth Venamis.
Venamis is the jock replacement child. Tenebrous trains him intensely in lightsaber combat, specifically teaching him Plagueis’s exact weaknesses so Venamis can beat up his older brother and take his place.
And Plagueis handles this with the most spectacular, petty theater kid revenge of all time.
Plagueis kills their dad. Then, he beats up the jock replacement brother.
But he doesn't just kill Venamis. He poisons him, puts him in a suspended coma, drags him down into his basement, and for the next several decades uses his brother as his primary lab rat. He repeatedly kills and resurrects Venamis using the exact goth biology magic that their dad hated, until Venamis's organs literally turn to soup.
Oh, Dad liked you better because you were good at sports? Cool. Get in the beaker.
And then of course the epilogue to this trauma conga-line is Darth Sidious.
Plagueis eventually takes his own apprentice, Palpatine.
Palpatine is exactly the kind of ruthless political science major the Rule of Two was designed for. He doesn't really care about the deep philosophical limits of flesh; he just wants to be Emperor.
But, Plagueis makes him learn the family trade. He makes Sidious take the alchemy survey course.
And decades later, long after Sidious has murdered Plagueis, what does Sidious do? He digs up ancient, forbidden alchemical texts, sets up a lab on Byss, and creates Chrysalis Beasts — a line of mutated, breeding monster-rancors — just because he thinks they look cool guarding his evil palace.
He has resurrected the ancient Sith tradition of monster breeding because his dad made him learn his special interest.
Somewhere in the cosmic void, Plagueis is watching his treacherous apprentice conquer the galaxy, wiping away a single tear.
My son went to business school, became the Senate, and still made time to breed hereditary abominations.
The family craft endures.
