Duel on Doan

Two decades had passed since Darth Bane, the Dark Lord of the Sith, took Darth Zannah as his initial apprentice. However, Bane began to see Zannah as lacking strength, due to her failure to challenge him for the title of Sith Master. Doubting her worthiness, Bane resolved to seek out Darth Andeddu's holocron, rumored to contain the secret to immortality.

Bane dispatched Zannah to the planet of Doan on a mission to unearth Sith artifacts while secretly searching for the holocron himself. However, Zannah determined that the time had come to challenge her master. On Doan, she discovered evidence that a Dark Jedi was also seeking Sith relics. Zannah tracked this Dark Jedi, named Set Harth, to Nal Hutta, where she confronted him and offered him the opportunity to become her Sith apprentice, which Harth accepted. Meanwhile, Bane returned to his residence on Ciutric IV, where he was ambushed by the Huntress, an assassin, and approximately twenty mercenaries hired by Princess Serra. Serra mistakenly believed Bane had murdered her father. The group captured Bane, and the Huntress seized his lightsaber. Zannah and Harth returned to find that Bane had been captured by the Doan Royal Guard.

Bane was imprisoned in the Stone Prison on Doan, where he was incapacitated and tortured with drug injections. Serra interrogated him, but Lucia, Serra's bodyguard—who had previously served under Bane, then known as Dessel, as a member of the Brotherhood of Darkness's Gloom Walkers—realized that Serra had become corrupted by her thirst for vengeance, and secretly freed Bane. Concurrently, Zannah and Harth arrived, and Zannah began her search for her master.

Bane sought to locate and eliminate Serra, but he encountered Lucia, who attempted to persuade Bane that Serra was a virtuous individual. As Bane prepared to unleash his power upon Lucia, he was struck by a powerful blast from Zannah, who had finally located him. Lucia perished, but Bane erected a shield that protected him from harm, and he swiftly regained his footing. Zannah and Bane engaged in a heated exchange, during which Zannah accused Bane of violating the Rule of Two by attempting to prolong his life. Bane retorted by criticizing her for waiting until his age had weakened him before challenging him.

Bane evaded Zannah's initial attacks, but was forced into a retreat, firing bolts of Force lightning at Zannah's feet to keep her at bay. Bane leaped over her, and she retaliated with a kick; however, he caught her leg and attempted to break it. She adapted to the maneuver and struck at Bane with her lightsaber, but he dodged the blow. She cornered him and prepared to deliver the final strike, but he unleashed a particularly potent blast of Force lightning at her, causing her to stumble back and providing him with an opportunity to escape the corner.

She charged back in, striking with her lightsaber once more, but Bane conjured a purple cocoon of dark side energy. Upon contact with the cocoon, her blade unleashed its energy, propelling Bane back into the wall and sending Zannah ten meters across the hall. An alarm then sounded, indicating that Serra had activated a series of detonators designed to collapse the entire prison. As she advanced toward Bane, he fired two bolts of lightning past her ear into the wall, striking a demolition charge. Zannah used the Force to shield herself from the resulting explosion, which caused the stone walls and ceiling of the passage to collapse between them, separating them with stones that would take hours to clear, even with the Force. The two then fled the prison; as Bane departed, he encountered the Huntress, who returned his lightsaber and pledged herself to his teachings.

Bane's new apprentice used the Force to track Serra, discovering that she had returned to her father's home on Ambria. Bane sent a false distress signal to Zannah's ship in an attempt to lure her to the farm and eliminate her, and Bane had the Huntress assassinate Serra. Zannah then arrived, and she and Bane engaged in another confrontation.