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.
Sithspawn is another word for creatures modified with Sith alchemy, just like chrysalides. Although, while "chrysalides" is canonically used only for nonsentient creatures (specifically rancors, gundarks, katarns, and vornskrs), "Sithspawn" is used for those and for sentient beings (such as Twi'leks, Mon Calamari, Gamorreans, and Wookiees) so long as their minds and bodies have been altered or constructed via Sith alchemy, usually turning them into rage-filled zombies. As far as I'm aware, chrysalides can't be constructed from the ground up, they must be an existing creature transformed inside a chrysalis, hence the name. Sithspawn can be entirely lab-grown - and often are - and the Sith alchemy used on them does not need to include a chrysalis of any kind.
I think it's safe to say that all chrysalides are sithspawn but not all sithspawn are chrysalides.
ALSO
If you are referring to the Sith species, you will want to use "Sith People", "Red Sith", or "Sith Purebloods" depending on the era. "Sith People" is the most self-explanatory, "Sith Purebloods" is the most commonly used (thanks to SWTOR), and "Red Sith" reminds me - to a very uncomfortable degree - of slurs used against me and other Native people.
For those who require visual examples, here is a chrysalide rancor and a nathema sithspawn (also previously a rancor):
And here is sentient species sithspawn vs Sith Purebloods:
It is also important to note that
there have been Sith Pureblood Je'daii (such as Sek'nos Rath) and Jedi (such as Praven), and
the Sith Order was built by non-Sith-People Dark Jedi on the backs of Sith Pureblood slaves. (Said Dark Jedi then began an interbreeding program to completely assimilate and wipe out the Sith People. Over the course of the various Sith Empires, Sith Pureblood blood quantum became an obsession, with having Sith Pureblood genes falling in and out of fashion depending on the Emperor. During the reign of Emperor Vitiate (4999-3626BBY, during the events of both KOTOR and SWTOR), himself a Sith Pureblood, the Empire held a viewpoint of Sith Pureblood supremacy that many human-passing mixed beings benefited from. At the end of his reign, 98% of the free population was some form of mixed Sith Pureblood.)
Sith alchemy was an umbrella term describing sinister Force powers that used the Dark Side to completely alter something’s nature. Alchemy was banned by the Jedi Order, who found the processes and results blasphemous to the nature of the Force. Throughout history, the Sith used alchemy to create monstrous beasts and for other disturbing experiments on sentient beings.
Source: The Dark Side Sourcebook (Art: Ashley Wood; 2001)
Warnings: Child abuse (not intentional, but it’s Maul), canon-typical violence, medical horror (Sith alchemy is no substitue for a licensed physician, I guess), colourism/xenophobia (Imperials, ugh), CPR
Creel couldn’t guess how many days had passed since the red man had dragged them down to the cargo bay.
The lights in the bay were always on. Maybe the Jedi couldn’t be bothered to turn them off. He liked that possibility more than the other that came to mind.
The officer training manuals described what he could expect during capture or interrogation. Sleep deprivation and the removal of means to guess the passage of time were standard.
He tracked time by their bodies. How often he dribbled water from a torn corner of his shirt into Moakes’ slack mouth. How often he used the bucket in the corner. The diminishing intervals between the moments Stelkin surfaced from his shellshock to start crying again, and his diminishing patience for consoling the cadet.
He tracked time by the effort it took him to unscrew and slowly pry open a panel over a part of the wall that echoed under his fist: an air vent.
And most of all, he tracked time by when the Padawan came for target practice.
The mad Jedi had at least turned down the power on the blaster to a level that merely left blisters, instead of burning through flesh. The green girl shot like shite. In three visits, she managed to hit herself and everything in the cargo bay except the target. He kept Moakes in the safest space, the corner below her platform, and dragged Stelkin there when he heard the door bang open.
She threw them food and rations before she started firing. Again, Creel couldn’t decide whether their captors did this out of malicious intent--to make them associate fulfillment of their basic needs with their presence—or simple convenience.
By her fourth visit, her rebound shots had covered his back in blisters, and further reduced Stelkin to a trembling mess.
On her fifth, a wayward shot caught Moakes on the cheek, and Creel had enough.
“Stop,” he bellowed, with all his practice leading a thousand drills through thousand mornings in the GAR Reserves. Stelkin shrieked, the girl skittered back against the door, and for a moment, he thought he’d gone too far, that she’d go get the Red Man.
She didn’t. She watched him from up on the platform like a wary tooka, the blaster swinging from her shaky hand, dark circles under her eyes. Apparently his men weren’t the only ones not sleeping.
“Pick up the gun in two hands,” he ordered. “It’s too heavy for you to hold and aim with one hand.”
She curled her lip and shot at him.
She missed.
“Kark,” he swore. “Don’t listen to me then.” He stomped back to the corner.
His intercession helped somewhat, at least. Now that she was deliberately trying to hit them with the rebounds, of course, not a damned bolt came near them.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall and ignored the whine of the blaster above him. He imagined himself home again, his wife smiling at him from over her sewing, his daughter in his arms. She’d be about as big now as that little jedi, he thought, stomach turning.
He wondered if his superiors had declared him dead yet.
He banished the thought. It was useless to dwell on that. He grounded himself with the memory of Corine by candlelight, squinting her way through a difficult bit of embroidery for some offworld client, tired yet pleased with her progress. He thought of her fingers, stained from her work at the dye manufacture during the day, raw from plying her needle all night long.
He wished he could take a holo of the tunic the little Padawan seemed to live in. Corine loved textiles from other worlds. He did his best to collect them for her at every outpost. He’d seen the Padawan’s tunic in the shop, would have bought it as a gift for both Corine and Rudith, but for the price. The garment, now singed with blasterbolts, had been worth more than he made in a month.
So much for Jedi being above material concerns.
He thought of every garment he’d ever seen pass through Corine’s hands, the colours, the bitter smell of mordant and the sweet scent of the herbs she used to keep the insects out of her stock, and had almost drifted into sleep when something hit him.
“Stang, Stelkin, stop it,” he grumbled, and Stelkin made a sound that wasn’t a word, but something kept bumping against his legs, and he opened his eyes.
Moakes was convulsing.
He scrambled up and ran back out from the corner, even though the girl was still shooting.
“Stop!” he thundered, and the girl flinched back, finger twitching on the trigger and sending another bolt caroming around the room. “I need help! One of my men is dying!”
The little bitch shot at him for the third time that day. “You didn’t stop,” she accused him. He flashed back to when he’d pulled her from the vents not long ago, screaming and crying and biting.
“I was trying to save you!” he reasoned with her—or tried, dodging a fourth bolt. Stang, but the girl would decide to follow his advice on how to shoot now, of all times. “The Jedi are terrible. They take kids like you—” he dodged the fifth bolt, and rethought explaining the girl’s situation to her just now. “Please! Help!”
She didn’t quit shooting.
The door banged open. The Jedi Master stalked in and laid a hand over the girl’s, where it gripped the gun.
She stopped firing, but Creel could her breathing from down in the cargo bay, low and fast.
“Apprentice,” the Jedi murmured. “Gather the med kit and meet me down in the cargo bay.”
Her breathing accelerated. Rudith always collapsed into hiccoughing sobs after hyperventilating like this. He expected the Padawan would do the same, but she merely muttered a “Yes, Master,” and hustled back into the galley of the ship.
The Jedi Master descended in the lift, unhurried, and sauntered over to the still convulsing Moakes. Stelkin, who had pulled his head out of his ass long enough to check Moakes’ pulse, scrambled back on his hands.
“You’ll help him,” Creel said.
The red man ignored him, slowly turning rather to the platform. “Come down, apprentice,” he ordered, kneeling next to Moakes.
The green girl paused, lips pursed in a way that always preceded a tantrum in Rudith, but she came, stumbling at the weight of the heavy medical kit over her shoulder. Creel bent to take it from her. She swerved away from him, glaring, and dropped the bag down by her Master.
“Tell me what you think is wrong with him, Apprentice,” the man asked calmly.
Creel stared in disbelief. “He’s dying. He has a head injury, and he’s dying. Buy the kid a textbook, this isn’t some kind of school exercise—”
The Red Man lifted a hand, and in the space between heartbeats, Creel careened into the backwall, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, and slid down to the floor.
“—not interrupt my lessons again,” the Red Man told him. “As the man said, it’s a head injury. It’s a closed head injury. See how his eyes are dilated, and how he’s having a convulsion?”
The girl nodded.
“Get the drill out of the kit.” The Jedi Master flipped Moakes over, as casually as Corine shook out her sheets, and held the back of the man’s skull. “If you ever need to keep someone alive with this condition, you have to relieve the pressure on the brain by drilling a hole for the blood to come out.”
The little Jedi staggered forward, with a drill that, like everything else on this ship, was designed for adults and too heavy for her. Surely the Jedi wasn’t going to allow…
The Master took the girl’s hand and set it down on the Moakes’ scabbed scalp. “Close your eyes and reach out—no, not for the man’s mind. For his body. <i>Yes</i>. <i>Feel</i> the little deaths, those cells winking one by one under your hands—where is the greatest number of these?”
The girl’s left hand moved, her right coming forward with the drill.
“Draw on the Force to steady your hand,” the Master breathed, “let it tell you exactly how deep—”
The drill whirred. Creel could hardly look until it was over, and bloody fluid trickled out of the messy divot the apprentice had left in Moakes’ skull. Creel could have thrown up.
He didn’t. Even if there was nothing he could do, like hell he’d leave Moakes alone to these witches.
The convulsions lessened, but the little girl breathed in sharply. “He’s still dying.”
“Good,” the Red Man approved. <i> Good? </i> Creel raged. “Feel his pulse. No, like this,” the man ordered, positioning the girl’s fingers on Moakes’ wrist. “What do you feel, with your hand?”
“Nothing.”
“Precisely. Get the injector marked epinephrine out of the case, quickly.” The girl rummaged through the sack. The Master flipped Moakes on his back again, then gestured to Creel. “Start life support on your friend. I assume the Empire covered that much,” he sneered.
Head ringing, Creel still rushed to comply while the girl fumbled the injector out the wrapping.
“What can I do?”
Stelkin. The pup had discovered some spine. “Tilt his head back, pinch his nose, and give him two breaths by mouth when I tell you—” Creel huffed as he finished chest compression, “—now!”
Creel glanced up and saw the girl holding the injector.
“—IM CPR marked on this injector means it can be delivered through muscle to try to restart someone’s heart,” the Jedi Master was saying.
“You don’t have any IV epi in that medkit?”
“Would you like my apprentice to try injecting into a vein?” the Red Man asked, amused, and Creel could have bloodied his fists on the man’s face. “I would, but we haven’t the time. Girl, press the plunger against the man’s thigh and hit the button on the side.”
She squeaked as the auto-injector disengaged. Done. The epi given, the compressions continued, Stelkin huffing into Moakes’ mouth.
Still, no pulse.
It was going on too long, Creel knew. Too long. Moakes’ eyes bulged glassily out from his skull. He thought of those eyes, gloating over a hand of sabacc during the games played by flashlight after lights out. Thought of that great chest, now caved under his hands, heaving with laughter. Thought of all the infinite small things the clone had taught him—how to guess the distance of a ground battle from the flash and thunder of the guns. How to pack a kit only with the essentials. What insects were edible if you had no rations and were starving.
Moakes’ lessons had saved his life. Would probably keep on saving it, long into the future. And now, he was to die?
Creel glanced up sideways, through his sweat-slicked bangs to the Red Man.
He was smiling.
“Do something, dammit,” he snarled at the Jedi, arms still pumping. “Save him! You’re a gods-damned Jedi, you have the power—”
The Red Man sneered. “So now you beg the Jedi for mercy.” He regarded them all in distaste, his little Padawan hiding behind him once more. “Where was mercy,” he spat, “when your mobs were piling on half trained children and ripping them limb from limb? When an Imperial Moff was so afraid of a single Jedi that he ordered an orbital strike to take her out?”
“We had nothing to do with that,” Creel said, and not <i> they deserved what they got </i>, but the Jedi Master heard what he’d left unspoken.
“Oh, they deserved it,” he said, “but not at the hands of their inferiors.” The Jedi wiped a smudge of blood on a rag he’d floated out of their corner, threw the rag away, and began to rise. To leave.
“No, please. Anything. You can do something,” Creel urged, and then swallowed his pride. “I’m begging you. Please.”
“Anything?” the Jedi Master repeated, his strange gold eyes glittering.
“Please,” Creel said again.
A pleased smile passed over the man’s demonic visage. “I have meant to try something,” he murmured, and Creel felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck. This was a bad idea.
“Apprentice? Hands off the man but reach out. Feel his life. His arms, his heart, his brain. Feel—good,” coaxed the Master. “Very good. Now, feel as I seize the life at his very fingertips, and…”
You couldn’t tell at first, through Moakes’ dark skin, as his fingertips turned blue, but they did. Then they pruned and shrivelled like an old man’s, his hand withering in turn. The skin on his arm thinned and sagged, even as the flesh of his fingers suddenly dissolved into dust. The clatter of the small bones on the steel flooring shook Creel from his horror. Stelkin had long gone back to gibbering in the corner.
“No,” he breathed. “This isn’t—”
“This is a branch of skill known as energy manipulation,” the man lectured. “I take the life from his arms and transfer it to his dying heart and brain. A great deal of energy is lost in the transfer, but there should be just enough from his arms to do—there.”
Moakes’ arms had disintegrated up to the shoulder socket, but his chest rose and fell with regular breaths, and he no longer bled from his scalp. He didn’t get up though. He stared vacantly at the ceiling.
“Come, Apprentice,” the Jedi Master bid his Padawan, who complied, scrambling up onto the platform lift.
“Wait,” Creel said, “he’s still not right.”
“You asked me to do something,” the Jedi Master mocked. “I have ‘done’ something. If he’s not as you expected…” he lifted his hands in a parody of a shrug and activated the lift.
The Jedi and the Padawan ascended, leaving Creel alone in the cargo bay with Stelkin, and a living corpse.
Ugh. Tonally, this is just so unrelentingly dark. I need to figure out a way to loosen the tension in between the angst, or I suspect the thing is going to be just too depressing to read.
For all the people asking for more details about Sith bioweapon!Stewjoni, since I can’t art, here’s a collection of pictures from RL and the headcanons I’ve come up with so far.
Background is that Sith Alchemists took an already very dangerous race and twisted them into being even more dangerous. They tend to self-isolate on their own planet and are classified as a bioweapon under Republic law and technically not actually even allowed to leave their planet. At one point they were part of the Mandalorian Empire, perhaps the only point in their history since first encountering a Sith Alchemist that they had something like freedom off planet, as the Taung held them in extremely high regard as beautiful, deadly beings that got the Taung all hot and bothered lolol
These aren’t the only things that are different about them or ideas I have, but the easiest to write about right now haha
Below are descriptions and pictures of close-ups of wildlife that some might find disturbing or akin to body horror. There is also the suggestion throughout of non-consensual body modifications of a sentient species.
Claws:
Made for fighting, killing, and performing tasks such as helping them climb in their natural environment or dig in the dirt, the light colored claws with the right chemical treatments and trimming can just manage to pass for human nails. Naturally, think something like a wolverine.
Teeth:
Along with sharp, extremely durable teeth lining their mouths, Stewjoni had retractable barbs lining their front teeth that can inject a paralytic venom. In their natural environment, after luring in their prey they would use this to keep them in place (image from cone snails).
Spines:
Along the back of Stewjoni are spines that are also capable of injecting small amounts of the same paralytic agent. These are mostly for protection and not used as an attack mechanism. The spines are sensitive to changes in the air and water, as well as vibrations. When grown naturally, they extend noticeably off a Stewjoni and make it hard to perform any melee attack from behind with something shorter than a spear.
Eyes:
Stereoscopic and capable of viewing multiple wavelengths beyond human sight. Capable of picking out even the slightest changes in color, thus seeing through camouflage and other effects. Stewjon itself is a myriad of colors, most of which human eyes can’t see. Basically mantis shrimp, but set inside a skull.
The Force:
But the most dangerous part of the Stewjoni is not the physical features, but the way they feel in the Force--incapable of the wide range of “Dark” emotions found in many sentient species, they are incredibly alluring and distracting to Force users.
This was what first garnered their attention from the Sith Alchemists, when members of the Sith species spoke of the dangerous predatory beings that lured them in and then destroyed them. They described encountering a Stewjoni like hearing the sweetest songs, tasting the most delicious flavors, feeling the most extreme of pleasures. Most, however, did not survive long after that, as the Stewjoni had adapted to feeding off of the lifeforce of other sentients, the more powerful the tastier.
An illustration for a swtor player over on discord; a Sith (on the verge of earning her Darth status) with a focus on decay and corruption. This was a great fun concept to work with!
