A lot has been said about this mysterious Sith, by Scourge and other places. I was wondering:
1. Where was his name first mentioned? The NEC just states him as a Rogue jedi, not Ruin specifically.
2. How did he start? Did he locate the Massassi people, and draw strength from them, did he go to Thule, Ziost, Korriban or another Sith planet, and draw followers there?
3. How did he die? Who was his Jedi master? Are there any decent sources telling of him?
Lord Scourge
The only place I have seen the name of Darth Ruin mentioned (in an official source, I mean) is Vader: The Ultimate Guide. The entire material about him from that book reads:
Quote:
The Sith have existed for millennia. Two thousand years before the eruption of the Clone Wars, an intelligent and charismatic Jedi, one of the Knighthood's so-called Lost Twenty, renounced his Jedi oath and abandoned the Order to pursue prohibited teachings. Recruiting scores of Jedi and others strong in the Force, he was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and declared himself a Dark Lord of the Sith. His name was Darth Ruin.
Ruin and his supporters initiated a war with the Jedi Knights, but his Sith Order soon fell apart. Ruin's single-minded ambitions earned him the hostility of his followers and ultimately their betrayal. The Sith Lord was killed, and a millennium of carnage known as the Sith Wars followed. For centuries, the self-serving Sith made war on the Jedi while simultaneous slaughtering their own leaders—Belia Darzu, the Dark Underlord, and Darth Rivan; as soon as one fell dead, another took up the title. Eventually, the Sith banded together as the Brotherhood of Darkness and battled the Jedi Order's Army of Light in a sickening galaxy-spanning cpnflict. The Jedi emerged victorious with the belief that the evil Sith were at last extinct. But one man remained—Darth Bane.
Now then, since on the StarWars.com forums, Pablo Hidalgo confirmed that the "Lost Twenty" were the only twenty Jedi Masters who voluntarily left the Jedi Order, not the only twenty Jedi to leave (there were more than that who followed Revan, after all) - this being yet another notable mistake in the NEC - this means that Ruin was a Jedi Master before he declared himself a Sith Lord. No, we have no information of what traditions he used as the basis for reviving the Sith. For all we know at this point, the Sith Order founded by Ruin was simply an order of Dark Jedi until Darth Bane went to Dxun and reestablished the teachings of the ancient Sith of millennia past. I do not actually think so, but we have that little information about Darth Ruin.
There is a little more information about Darth Ruin, of course, such as the vague references in The Phantom Menace novel and the New Essential Chronology, but this is the most explicit information I have found about his life.
-Scourge
Darth Acheron
Thank you, thats exactly what I wanted. So Ruin was never a true Sith? If he wasn't ordained by a prior Sith, he can't have been a true Sith. You can't just "Declare" yourself a Sith, you must be ordained, or trained by one.
Lord Scourge
I agree that it reads that way, but that tiny piece of information is the most we have on Darth Ruin right now. I don't know whether he actually revived the Sith legacy, or just assumed the position as you suggest.
I agree that if he was simply a Dark Jedi Master, it is entirely possible that no one who was called Sith for the next thousand years had any real claim to the title. I simply don't know until we recover another holocron or other piece of history that I can study.
I hope someday soon to recover the holocron of Darth Bane, as that will surely answer many questions we have about this period.
-Scourge
Darth Acheron
Of course. One can only hope we discover the whereabouts of one detailing Ruin's life, not just Bane's.
Darth Acheron
We now have a Jedi name for Ruin, as of Abel's article in Insider, his name is Phanius. This is what the article says of him:
Quote:
It began when one Jedi abandoned the Knighthood 1,000 years before the last Battle of Rusaan. Known by the name Phanius and believed to be an Umbaran, the pale-skinned man was a charismatic and gifted Jedi Master who exhibited hints of a disturbingly relativistic, some said solipsistic, morality. He became one of "The Lost" when he abandoned the Jedi Order to pursue "alternative" knowledge. Unknown to the order, he infiltrated and united the various surviving Sith clans, intensifying his self-centered views. Phanius, convinced he'd obliterated the mental barriers that had kept him from understanding that his will superceded all things (or, in fact, was everything), took the name Darth Ruin. A number of Jedi joined his Sith cause, and war with the Jedi brotherhood inevitably followed. It wasn't long before the Sith turned the war upon themselves. After countless numbers of Ruin's minions died for seemingly little else than his sheer whim, the Sith acolytes soon came to realize that they meant nothing -- quite literally -- within the scheme of their Dark Lord's abstract philosophy. They conspired and destroyed Darth Ruin, ushering in a millennium-long period of betrayal and darkness.
