Saaj Calician

Saaj Calician was a Force-sensitive Krevaaki male who lived during the Republic Dark Age. As a child, Calician was taunted by other Krevaaki who were jealous of his intelligence, and they referred to him as "Celegian," after a species of sentient invertebrates that resembled floating brains. In his youth, Calician learned to utilize the dark side of the Force, and he studied the ways of the Sith in the service of the Chagras Hegemony, a state established by the Sith Lord Chagras in the Grumani sector. During the course of his Sith training, Calician fought numerous Jedi Knights, Force-wielding enemies of the Sith, and had his first encounter with real Celegians after visiting a colony on the planet Tramanos. He eventually became a Sith Lord and, at some point, authored some writings on how the peak of Sith power could be attained.

At around 1041 BBY, Calician became acquainted with Chagras' five-year-old twin children Dromika and Quillan, and the Krevaaki realized that through them, he could attain great power for himself. Quillan had a greater ability to predict the future than any other Sith whom Calician had met, while Dromika was more proficient with the use of the Force to control minds than anyone else he knew, and he hoped to harness their powers to serve his own ends. Following the death of Chagras in 1040 BBY, Calician became the custodian of the twins, and they established the Dyarchy, a Sith principality based on the planet Byllura, with Calician as their regent. The twins never left The Loft, their private residence in the city of Hestobyll, and perceived the wider universe entirely through the Force, referring to individuals and objects external to themselves as "aspects." The twins regarded Calician himself as their "regent-aspect," and he served as their main link to the outside world. He tended to their every need and acquired some nanny droids to care for the twins when he wasn't present. Chagras' demise left the twins' grandmother Vilia Calimondra without an heir to her extensive holdings, and she initiated a competition among her grandchildren to find a worthy successor, which soon degenerated into an all-out conflict between her descendants. The Dyarchy was pitted against competing Sith states, and Calician planned to strengthen the twins' empire, to make it powerful enough to wage war against their rivals.

Inspired by watching the telepathic communications between jornisae spiders on his homeworld as a child, Calician became determined to establish a telepathic transmission network on Byllura, to place himself and the twins in full control of the Dyarchy's inhabitants. Within a few days of his appointment as the twins' guardian, Calician captured a 200-year-old Force-sensitive Celegian, which he named One, and brought him back to The Loft. There, he tortured One and broke the Celgian's mind, bypassing his judgment centers to make him into a mindless servant with no capacity for independent thought. With his endeavors successful, Calician lured entire Celegian communities into settling on Byllura and used their telepathic capabilities to form a communication web. A force of Sith adepts, known as Unifiers, were installed to use the Force to dull the minds of the Dyarchy's inhabitants and send messages to the web, and through One, Calician could coordinate Hestobyll's defenses and send out orders across the entire Bylluran communication network.

Over the next few years, the Dyarchy's population, manufacturing facilities, and military capabilities expanded under Calician's guidance. However, as the twins aged, they increasingly began to use Dromika's mental capabilities to take direct control of Calician's mind; he often found himself subsumed into the communications web that he had created, becoming an unthinking extension of the twins' will. In 1037 BBY, he initiated construction of the Dyarchy Fleet, a force of battleships that were to be built in secret beneath . Around that time, he also spoke with Daiman, the twins' cousin and the leader of the neighboring Daimanate Sith state, via hologram on a number of occasions, and he found Daiman unwilling to either ally with or engage in hostilities against the Dyarchy.

By 1032 BBY, fourteen vessels in the Dyarchy Fleet had been completed, and Calician made plans to expand the Dyarchy's holdings. Elsewhere in the Grumani sector, Daiman committed the bulk of his military to the invasion of the Bactranate, a territory led by Lord Ayanos Bactra, which Vilia Calimondra had ordered her grandchildren to annex. The outlying Daimanite worlds on the border with the Dyarchy were left unguarded, and Calician believed that once launched, the firepower of his fleet would deter any Daimanite resistance, allowing the Dyarchy to conquer entire worlds without a single shot being fired. Amid the chaos, the troop transport Diligence, operated by the mercenary unit Rusher's Brigade, rescued a large number of refugee children and the Jedi Knight Kerra Holt from a battlefield on the Daimanite-held world Gazzari and headed toward Byllura, where the mercenaries hoped to rid themselves of their passengers. Quillan and Dromika sensed the vessel's approach through the Force and summoned Calician to them to order him to contact Byllura's defensive stations and inform the twins of any reports of foreign vessels in the vicinity of the world. A short time later, Diligence arrived in the system, and Calician permitted the vessel to land and allowed its occupants to disembark. He was excited by the ship's arrival, viewing it as an omen that the time was right to strike against Daiman, because the Daimanite forces would not have permitted a ship to leave their domain if they had sufficient military forces in the vicinity of their border.

With backing from Dromika and Quillan, Calician ordered the Dyarchy Fleet to launch. However, Holt became suspicious of the Dyarchy's intentions and ordered the refugees to re-board Diligence. Calician was concerned by their embarkation and feared that it could be part of a Daimanite trap, but before he could take further action, he was summoned by the twins back to The Loft. Holt left to investigate the city, and through his telepathic network, Calician was informed of the Jedi's approach. The twins viewed Holt as a threat and ordered the Krevaaki to protect them, then took direct control of his mind via the Force. Holt infiltrated The Loft and made her way to chamber in which One was being held, where she persuaded the aged Celegian to stop sending messages on behalf of the Dyarchy, placing the communications network into disarray. Under the influence of the twins, Calician headed to One's chamber and attacked Holt with six lightsaber-batons, which he twirled from his tentacles. He threw himself at her in a nihilistic fury, driven by the influence of the twins, and came close to rupturing One's tank, which would have released a poisonous gas and killed both him and Holt. He regained some control over his body, but Holt was able to outwit him and singe his facial tentacles, then slice off one of his limbs from his middle carapace. He felt no pain, due to the influence of the twins, and realized that Holt was too strong for him to defeat, because his withered mind could not access his memories of how to fight Jedi while it was being dulled by Dromika's mental manipulations. He therefore stopped fighting and offered to take Holt to the twins, and she accepted his proposal.

Upon their arrival in the twins' quarters, several nanny droids hurled themselves at Calician and Holt in an attempt to defend the twins. However, Holt swept them away, and Calician introduced her to the twins. Using the Force, Dromika pinned Holt down and compelled Calician to bring his blade to bear against the Jedi. Calician resisted, because he wanted to be given the chance to fight Holt by himself, free of the twins' mental influences. While he and Dromika were briefly distracted, Holt broke free and severed one of Calician's leg tentacles. Before he could get back on his feet, Holt kidnapped Quillan and fled Byllura with him aboard Diligence. Meanwhile, the other Celegians on Byllura followed One's example and refused to send telepathic messages, leading to a breakdown of the entire telepathic network. Their rebellion made it impossible to coordinate the Dyarchy's manufacturing efforts and led to explosions in all of the world's major construction facilities, destroying the bulk of the Dyarchy Fleet. Calician quickly rushed to The Loft's communications center and sent a transmission to Diligence, to learn if Quillan was still alive. Shortly afterward, the forces of the twins' elder sibling, Arkadia Calimondra, initiated an attack on Byllura and defeated the remaining Dyarchy forces. Arkadianite forces found Calician and executed him; according to a report received by the Bothan spy Narsk Ka'hane, Calician met his end quietly. Byllura fell and the Dyarchy was subsumed into Arkadia's territories, and guardianship of the twins ultimately passed to Vilia Calimondra.

As a child, Saaj Calician enjoyed performing acts of violence and was willing to blind jornisae spiders that he encountered on his homeworld. From an early age, he developed a hatred for Celegians after being taunted by other Krevaaki, and he came to dislike the telepathic beings even more after he first encountered them in the flesh. He found them repulsive and believed that they ignored their own ugliness, yet expected others not to acknowledge it. He also thought that the Celegians were fools for not using their innate telepathic abilities to gain power and influence over others. He was intelligent and, during his younger years, cared primarily about his ego; he would ponder upon the outcome of the conflict between the Sith and the Galactic Republic, and also compared himself to other Krevaaki, seeing himself as their superior because he was more powerful and independent than most members of his species. In addition, he was a believer in the ancient Sith precept of self-glorification and considered that the subjugation of others could only lead to one solution: for just one Sith to rule the galaxy, with their subordinates merely acting as self-regulating components of the wider consciousness of their leader.

While Calician originally began caring for the twins merely as a means of propelling himself into greater power to achieve his dream, he found his mind dominated by them and sacrificed his personal ambitions to become a loyal servant, unquestionably obeying all of their commands. However, his encounter with Kerra Holt led Calician to realize that, to the twins, he was merely a mindless puppet, so he rebelled against Dromika's attempts to use him to kill the Jedi. The rigors of his life on Byllura caused him to age prematurely, although whenever he acted upon Dromika's Force-influenced commands, her presence restored his youthful vigor to him. While serving as regent, Calician wore beige-colored robes, so as to match the walls of The Loft and thereby avoid overwhelming Quillan's visual stimuli. Calician had black eyes and a red, chitinous carapace.

Saaj Calician was an experienced fighter, but Dromika's Force influence dulled his memories of some of his combat skills. His preferred weapons were a set of lightsaber-batons, miniaturized versions of the lightsaber weapon. However, when he dueled with Kerra Holt on Byllura, Dromika used her powers to augment his fighting capabilities and enabled him to access abilities that he had never trained to use. He also knew how to utilize the Force to move objects, although by 1,032 BBY it had been more than a decade since he had used the power.

Saaj Calician made his first appearance in Star Wars canon in Knight Errant, a novel written by John Jackson Miller that was published in January 2011 as a tie-in to the Star Wars: Knight Errant comic series. In the novel, Calician is one of the four main point-of-view characters, with the others being the Bothan spy Narsk Ka'hane, the Jedi protagonist Kerra Holt, and the mercenary Jarrow Rusher. Calician was later featured in the 2012 guide book The Essential Reader's Companion, in which he received his first visual depiction, a picture by artist Jeff Carlisle.

On his personal website Faraway Press, Miller described Calician as playing the role of a typically egomaniacal Sith who would provide the author with an opportunity to frustrate Sith ambitions. Calician also provided readers with an insider perspective of life within the Dyarchy, especially its hallmark of living under constant Force manipulation.

• The Essential Reader's Companion