Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

victorious, he was deserving of the mantle; and if not, then Plagueis might come to accept the true nature of the Master–apprentice relationship.
    An old story that had never made much sense to him.
    But it did explain Tenebrous’s curious behavior in the months and weeks preceding the events on Bal’demnic. It was impossible to know how long Venamis’s attack had been in the planning, but Tenebrous, for all his cool detachment, had plainly worried over the decision. On Bal’demnic he had been distracted, and that inattention had cost him his life. But in those final moments, before he had fully grasped the role Plagueis had played, he had been on the verge of revealing the existence of Venamis. It made little difference now, and, in fact, Plagueis found the Bith’s vacillation contemptible.
    Like Plagueis, Tenebrous had obviously embraced the fact that Darth Bane’s Rule of Two had expired. Precious few Sith Lords had honored it, in any case, and with good reason, as Plagueis saw it. The goals of the Grand Plan were revenge and the reacquisition of galactic power. But while most Sith Lords since Bane had in their own fashion helped to weaken the Republic, their efforts had owed less to selflessness and allegiance to the Rule than to weakness and incompetence. Driven to discharge Bane’s imperative they might have been, and yet each had fallen prey to individual foibles and eccentricities, and so had failed to exact revenge on the the Jedi Order. Plagueis understood. He would never have been one to lay in wait or devote his reign merely to positioning a subsequent Sith Lord for success. Nor would he have been content to remain in Tenebrous’s shadow as an apprentice had the Bith actually triumphed where others had failed.
    How, in all his wisdom, had Tenebrous failed to grasp that Plagueis was the culmination of the millennium-long hunger for revenge? How had the Bith failed to grasp that destiny had called him?
    In a rare moment of compliment, the Bith had even said as much.
    In the same way that tectonic forces cause a boulder to plunge into a river, forever diverting its course, events give rise to individuals who, stepping into the current of the Force, alter the tide of history. You are such a one .
    Was Plagueis now to believe that Tenebrous had also considered Venamis such a one?
    If so, it demeaned him.
    The data discovered aboard Venamis’s starship failed to shed light on how old he’d been when Tenebrous found him, or reveal anything about his training. Set ways of training an apprentice were a thing of the past, regardless. Doctrine was for the Jedi. Where the Jedi courted power, the Sith lusted after it; where the Jedi believed they knew the truth, the Sith possessed it. Owned by the dark side, they ultimately became their knowledge.
    For the past five hundred years, the Sith of the Bane line had eschewed selecting children as apprentices, finding it more advantageous to discover beings who had already been hardened or scarred by life.
    Plagueis, though, had been an exception.
    Muunilinst had not followed suit when, in the madness that was the Third Great Expansion, worlds of the Core and the Inner Rim had stretched out to settle and claim many of the planets surveyed and made available by the Colonization Act and the Planet Grant Amendment. The reason was simple: though the Muuns had wealth beyond the wildest dreams of many species and access to starships of the highest quality, they were unwilling to leave their holdings on Muunilinst unattended. Nor were they interested in colonization for its own sake—in spreading their seed—because the more Muuns the galaxy contained, the less wealth there would be to go around.
    Eventually, though, autarky and isolationism ceded to a desire to make themselves essential to the galaxy, and the Muuns began to fund settlements established by other worlds, or by independent groups, self-exiled as often as not. And so colonies at the distal end of the Braxant Run became dependent on Muunilinst for support, borrowing against the promise of discovering rich veins of ore or precious metals. When, however, the purported treasures failed to materialize, or markets became saturated, resulting in lower prices, the careworn populations of those settlements found themselves hopelessly indebted to Muunilinst and were forced to accept direct oversight by the Muuns.
    So it happened that Plagueis’s clan father, Caar Damask, came to be administrator of the treasure