The War of Darkness pt. 2
The War of Darkness can be divided into four main stages. The first stage was the stage of feints, also known as the preliminary stage, which lasted for a year and a half. Following this, was the alignment stage which lasted for two and a half years. Next came the warring states stage, which lasted for four years. Finally, came the fragmentation stage which lasted for the remaining two years. The actual specifics of the war cannot be elaborated on in great detail simply due to the sheer length and span of the war, but each period can be elaborated upon to an extent.
The Preliminary Stage:
In the preliminary stage, the strategic brilliance of the Star Forge Strategy was especially highlighted. Since several of the original Jedi conspirators were wealthy, their money could be used to secure black market trading deals. Star Forge ships were sold to the highest underground bidder for massive sums. These bidders were often small, despotic outer rim nation states were constantly warring with each other and a sleek, technologically advanced warship could go a long way in their petty conflicts.
However, Pall did not authorize the distribution, or even production of blaster technology. He did not want to risk it falling into the hands of the Republic. Instead, he relied upon the traditional triple blaster, pulse wave pistol, and the occasional projectile firearm. With the money gained by the warship sale, he hired scores of mercenaries. These mercenaries were often young men who had lost their families and now had nothing. Pall wanted them primarily for they would have no home attachments to worry about, thereby allowing them to spend months or years in service. The Dark Jedi needed things to be this way to ensure their project's secrecy.
In 6910 BBY, the feingts began in earnest. Pall did not personally participate in any of these early battles, but he did assist them by peering into the future to come up with perfect strategies and modes of attack. Before the first series of strikes began, Pall was known to have meditated without food for up to a week in the central chamber of the Star Forge. He writes that during that time he saw the Force throughout the galaxy as if it were a massive crystal lattice. He pushed and probed this lattice, looking for fault lines. He described the Jedi as being a series of dim lights mixed in with the crystal of all living things. The Jedi were like sand-sized diamonds on a beach, but each grain was linked to each other. He sought to strike this crystal lattice in such a way as to destroy these small grains of light while keeping the overall structure intact. Pall did not want to cause an unnecessary loss of life, and he wanted to keep the Republic somewhat stable, but he wished to simply remove the Jedi and to take over and shape the Republic as he saw fit. He was still haunted by the specter of a dead galaxy, and he wanted to prevent this reality from coming to pass. This overall end goal shifted with each stage of the war, but it was highly idealistic in the beginning. He saw the weakness of the Republic and thought that the war would be over in less than four years- obviously a generous estimate.
The first strikes were bold attacks against the world of Kuat in the First Battle of Kuat. It was thought that Kuat was impenetrable because of the fact that all hyperspace routes leading to it stopped at other further out planets. However, Pall was able to use his ability to see the shatterpoints in space to navigate a new path to Kuat- a more advanced demonstration of common Jedi navigation technique. Dreypa then used his vast mental powers to project battle meditation over the fleet thereby coordinating the attack and disorganized the defense. The result of the battle was that a large portion of the Kuat shipyards was destroyed. While under normal circumstances this would trigger a sharp backlash and increase in production, the Republic simply could not afford to mass produce ships and repair the shipyards. It did, however, spurr the Republic into action.
The Black Fleet then retreated to the unknown regions. Over the next year, more and more strikes were launched in this guerrilla-style. The Republic, while crippled, was able to rise to the challenge, which is exactly what Pall wanted. The Republic could not spring into action right away, but these attacks provoked an increased economic drive to produce more, mainly war supplies. However, it is important to remember that the Black Fleet was just one of many rouge fleets and systems attacking Republic worlds. Others were mainly conflicts between sectors due to rival warlord factions. However, the Black Fleet was infamous as one of the most powerful and mysterious of forces.
The Dark Jedi took advantage of this. Their reputation for battle meditation caused Dark Jedi groups to seek them out. Most were rejected, and many were killed, Pall considered them to be too far gone and a liability, but others were recruited to join the ranks of Dark Jedi. The planet Korriban, and other worlds with Star Maps, were off limits, as Pall was sure to erase their existence from the records, but other Sith worlds became training grounds for hopefuls. Another effect was that smaller systems were quick to make alliances of protection with the Black Fleet. Towards the end of the preliminary stage, these alliances built up and became sizeable states.
Sith Synthesis:
Most of the Dark Jedi-Sith synthesis occured before the end of the Hundred Year Darkness. Pall believed that the entire conflict was a farse, or rather an effect. He saw the real conflict as not a clash of warships but a clash of the Force. To him, everything else was secondary. This was especially true towards the end of the war as Pall became more and more detached from the physical world, being only invested in the Force itself. Since this was a war of the Force, he made sure that every effort was taken to understand it.
The Dark Jedi had access to ancient Sith worlds such as Tund and Malachor. It was on these worlds that Pall as well as other Dark Jedi such as Syn, Hord, and Broodica began work on translating ancient Sith texts and distributing them to hopefuls for instruction purposes. The idea was to utilize these texts to gain an edge over the Jedi. After all, the preexisting dark side cults that the Dark Jedi were taking in derived most of their teachings from corrupted forms of Jedi experiments in the dark side. The Sith on the other hand were true masters.
In the early days, hopefuls were mainly used for translation purposes. They were taught the basics of the language and allowed to discover for themselves the meanings of the texts. However, due to infighting, as the war went on and the Dark Jedi in charge became more knowledgeable about the source material, this process was streamlined and made a common curriculum. This continued throughout the war.
The Alignment Stage:
When the Black Legions alliances built up, they switched from guerilla tactics to a more traditional style of warfare. The reason for this switch was because while guerrilla tactics worked fine to weaken the Republic, it would get nowhere on its own as the Black Fleet was too small to take Coruscant and Alsakan, and over time the Republic would recover and root out the Legions. Another factor for the change in tactics was the presence of the Jedi. The Dark Jedi did not want the Jedi to find the location of the Star Forge or any of their teaching centers, and so to safeguard them, it was necessary to create a bulky confederation. This may seem like an extravagant means to protect something as trivial as a Sith academy, but Pall increasingly believed that the physical world was irrelevant and only a means to the end of the Force and the world of ideas. Worlds like Malachor contained thousands of years of teachings and knowledge about the Force, this information was too valuable to allow to fall into the enemy hands.
As the war drove on, the Dark Jedi took world after world. The confederacy created around the Black Fleet as a lynchpin allowed the war to be fought on more or less equal fronts. It is somewhat of an enigma as to how these allies saw the war. On the one hand, smaller nations joined for the purpose of having a strong neighbor for protection, and other, more medium sized nations joined to avoid conflict. It is thought that Pall and the Dark Jedi also used an increasing amount of mind tricks to persuade them into joining. Therefore, even though they were at war, the Black Legions continued to act as a grain of dust around which a hailstone of war formed. In this stage, the two most important battles were the battles of Ossus and Coruscant. Another important event was the exile of Tulak Hord. All three events will be discussed in the next chapter.
