Gorlan Palladane

During the Sith civil war of the Republic Dark Age in 1032 BBY, Gorlan Palladane, a former Jedi, found himself working in the mining colony of Jenith on the planet Chelloa while it was under the control of the Sith Lord Daiman. He utilized his position as a relief worker and the leader of the Jenith mining community to oversee the mining and export of baradium, all while secretly assisting the Jedi Master Vannar Treece in the planning of Operation Influx. The goal of this operation was to disrupt the Daimanite war effort by cutting off the supply of baradium to the front lines. Alongside his wife, Roah Palladane, he operated a soup kitchen for the benefit of the impoverished miners. Palladane and his Rodian colleague, Skodo, used a transmitter to reactivate an interstellar routing station in order to communicate with the Jedi. However, this transmission was intercepted by the rival Sith Lord, Odion, who sought to harness the baradium to fuel his own war efforts.

When the designated day arrived, he assembled a group of miners and prepared to meet his Jedi contacts at Jenith Spaceport. As Daiman's forces were unloading baradium at the port, they were ambushed by Treece's Jedi team, who had taken control of a Daimanate Heavy-Lift Starcrosser. The Jedi swiftly overwhelmed Daiman's security forces and quickly secured the port. When cornered by Sith troops at the South Work Yards, Palladane was rescued by the female Jedi Knight Kerra Holt. She used her lightsaber to incapacitate a T'surr Daimanate Sith trooper, while Gorlan subdued a human officer. Although the slaves welcomed the Jedi, the celebrations were cut short due to disagreements between Treece and Palladane regarding the mission's objectives. While Treece envisioned the raid as a quick in-and-out operation, Palladane had hoped for the Jedi to liberate Chelloa from the Sith occupation.

However, this brief victory was interrupted by the arrival of an offensive force of ships at Squatter's Hill under the command of Daiman's older brother and rival, Lord Odion. During the raid, the majority of the Jedi task force, with the exception of Holt, were killed. Many workers and guards lost their lives in an explosion triggered by Odion's kinetic corruptor, which released baradium gases from shale by igniting the veins. Palladane and several of the workers survived because they were sheltering inside the Starcrosser transport. Later, he revived the unconscious Holt and informed her that she was the only remaining Jedi on Chelloa. A significant number of the wounded suffered from burns due to the extensive baradium deposits on the ground.

As the survivors began to care for the wounded, Lord Daiman arrived on a repulsorcraft. He showed no concern for the loss of life and the wounded, instead demanding to see Palladane, the spokesperson for the workers. Palladane pleaded for assistance in treating the wounded, but Daiman was more interested in finding out how his rival Odion and the Jedi had discovered his secret baradium mining operations. When Palladane claimed to have no knowledge of the matter, Daiman used Force choke to strangle him. However, Kerra intervened and attempted to force Daiman to stop tormenting Palladane at gunpoint. Amused by her courage and dismissing her as an orphan, Daiman released his grip on Palladane and touched her inappropriately. He mockingly told her to embrace her anger as a distraction and released her, as he was preoccupied with the threat posed by Odion to his goals.

Showing little regard for the well-being of his subjects, Daiman ordered them to erect one of his statues in the village square before dismissing the crowd. Following the erection of Daiman's statue, Palladane held a public meeting outside his Jenith home, instructing his fellow workers to use the runoff water from the electric fuel cells on the excavators for basic consumption, such as washing food, clothes, and bathing. Due to poor infrastructure and the damage caused by Odion's raid, water supplies were limited. During a discussion with Holt, he reprimanded her for foolishly challenging Daiman and nearly exposing her cover. After introducing his soup kitchen operation and family, Palladane explained his reasons for leaving the Jedi Order.

As a native of Chelloa, Palladane had refused to leave before the Jedi withdrawal from his planet. He and Master Treece also disagreed over Jedi strategy in Sith space. While Treece focused on the strategy of the entire war, Palladane was more concerned with helping civilians. Since the Jedi outlined that no Jedi could achieve anything alone, Palladane left the Order. Following the Sith conquest, he survived by hiding most of his Force talents except his Force healing. Concerned about the effects of Daiman's mining on children, Palladane had contacted Treece for assistance by using Skodo's transmitter. Despite his efforts to dissuade the young Holt, she remained determined to eliminate Daiman out of her hatred of the Sith and embarked on a lone mission to assassinate Daiman.

Meanwhile, Daiman's Sith troopers had apprehended Skodo, who was tortured with Force lightning by an enraged Daiman, demanding to know who had contacted Odion. For refusing to disclose information on Palladane, Skodo was murdered, and his body was dumped in the plaza in the morning. Figuring that Daiman was still unaware of his role, Palladane found the transmitter in Skodo's house and told Odion that all mining operations on Chelloa were offline. Unbeknownst to him, Daiman had replaced the transmitter with one of his own and had troops waiting nearby. Palladane was quickly apprehended and taken to Daiman's alpine compound, where he was beaten and tortured by a livid Daiman. Believing Palladane to be Odion's spy, he challenged his estranged brother to war and ordered a security crackdown on the ten mining settlements of Chelloa.

After outlining his narcissistic philosophy to Palladane, Daiman agreed to spare Palladane's life. However, if a second Jedi was revealed, he vowed to destroy the entire population of Chelloa. Daimanate security forces pillaged and burnt Jenith while others rounded up the other community leaders for an audience with Daiman. However, Kerra Holt returned from her confrontation with Odion and saved Palladane's young family from being murdered by Sith troopers. Learning of Palladane's incarceration, Holt hitchhiked on a shuttle carrying the Chelloan community leaders and infiltrated Daiman's compound a second time, killing the guards and freeing the prisoners. Kerra rescued the wounded Palladane from Daiman's dungeons. Gorlan revealed that his attempts to contact the Jedi with a transmitter had attracted the attention of Odion who had intercepted the interstellar transmission. Initially he had thought that Odion's attack was a coincidence until the death of Skodo at the hands of Daiman.

Kerra comforted Palladane by telling him that he sacrificed himself to save the Chelloan people by contacting Vannar and Odion. Palladane also revealed that Odion was bringing a fleet of kinetic corruptors and that Daiman was preparing for a showdown with the rival Sith Lord. By this stage, Holt realized that her true mission was to evacuate the Chelloan people rather than seeking to eliminate the two Sith Lords Daiman and Odion. However, before departing with Palladane and the village leaders on their shuttle, she personally beheaded all of Daiman's statues as a gesture of defiance.

Later, Palladane, Holt, and the other village leaders sought refuge in a safehouse located in the town of Arboth, where he was reunited with his family. In the meantime, Holt observed the vast transports carrying workers to Daiman's mobile munitions plants and noticed that they were empty. Concluding that Daiman had no intention of further investing in his mining and industrial projects on Chelloa, she proposed to Palladane that they utilize the empty transports to evacuate the entire population of Chelloa, which consisted of 60,000 sentients scattered across ten mining towns. Aware that Odion was planning to conquer Chelloa, Daiman had allowed Holt to escape to Odion and thus leak intelligence on the mobile munitions plants. Odion planned to utilize the factories for his own goal of defeating Daiman's faction. Seeking to aid a fellow Jedi in what he regarded as a noble endeavour, Palladane offered his services to Holt and reactivated his lightsaber, signifying his re-commitment to the Jedi cause.

Meanwhile, Lord Odion launched an invasion of Chelloa with a planetary assault force composed of elite Lightning Guards. Following his earlier duel with Holt, Odion had been dissuaded from his plan to destroy Chelloa with his kinetic corruptors with intelligence that Daiman was expanding baradium mining operations with mobile munitions complexes. Desiring an industrial base for his war effort, Odion changed his plans to capturing these factories. However, this played into Daiman's plan to eliminate both the Jedi and his estranged brother. In reality, the mobile factories were actually disguised kinetic corruptors which would incinerate Odion's forces while destroying Chelloa's surface, rendering it uninhabitable. As planned, Odion's forces descended on the surface and overwhelmed a poorly-trained detachment of Daimanate troops. They arrived at the pyramidical factories only to discover too late that they were actually Kinetic corruptors. The corruptors initiated an explosion which ignited the volatile gases beneath Chelloa's surface, killing many Odionate and Daimanate combatants alike. Meanwhile, Daiman and his forces made preparations to escape using a fleet of transport ships.

Putting their plans into action, Holt and Palladane organized a mass evacuation of Chelloa's people by organizing the villagers into teams. These teams infiltrated the spaceport at Arboth and seized control of the transport fleet, overpowering the crew and guards. By the end of the battle, they had managed to evacuate most of Chelloa's population on a hastily-assembled fleet known as the Freedom Fleet. Facing death from lava flows triggered by the kinetic corruptors, Odion and his surviving troops fled for Daiman's transports at Arboth but were prevented from boarding by Kerra and Gorlan. Having achieved their objective and with all teams safely aboard, the Freedom Fleet departed into space.

Meanwhile, Kerra and Odion engaged in heated lightsaber pursuit in the upper atmosphere above Chelloa. The Jedi Knight commandeered an airspeeder while her Sith opponent donned a jetpack. Kerra managed to reach one of the ascending cargo liners but Odion caught up with her. However, this duel was interrupted by Gorlan who opened one of the entry hatches while fastened to a cable. Armed with a lightsaber, Palladane took on the Sith Lord and drove him to the engine thrusters, expressing his desire for retribution. During the confrontation, both men were severely burnt but Odion managed to escape because of his jetpack. Mortally wounded, Palladane crawled back up to the entry hatch with the assistance of Holt. In his last moments, Palladane commented that Kerra was dying for the wrong thing while he himself was living for the wrong thing. Kerra promised to bring the Chelloan people back into Republic space but Palladane reminded her they were now her people and that she had a responsibility to save billions of other sentients living under Sith domination. The Freedom Fleet then made its way to the Daimanate world of Nilash where they liberated the native slave workers before making their way to Aquilaris, Holt's former homeworld.

Gorlan Palladane possessed innate leadership qualities and was deeply committed to protecting the well-being of his community. His leadership abilities led him to assume the role of de-facto leader of the Chelloan resistance against the Sith occupation. He maintained a gentle and calm demeanor, which aided him in concealing his identity as a Jedi Knight during the Sith occupation of Chelloa. His primary concern for the welfare of ordinary sentients brought him into conflict with Vannar Treece, who believed that military action against the Sith Lords was the Jedi Order's primary objective in ending the protracted New Sith Wars. He also disagreed with other members of the Order that they were impotent when alone and felt that his contemporaries were more concerned with fighting the Sith than the consequences of their actions.

Gorlan's concern with the greater good resonated with Kerra Holt's desire to alleviate the plight of civilians in Sith occupied Space but contradicted with Sith Lord Daiman's narcissistic outlook and the nihilism of Odion. His sense of righteousness and selflessness led him to endure both torture at the hands of Daiman. Ultimately, these traits combined with the desire to become one with the Force led him to willingly die trying to defeat Lord Odion.

As a Jedi Knight, Gorlan Palladane received training in the art of lightsaber combat, but he rarely demonstrated his combat skills during the Daimanate occupation. Nevertheless, he utilized the Force to heal other sentients and to conceal his Force abilities from Lord Daiman, who aimed to eliminate the Jedi from his feudal territory.

Gorlan Palladane was first presented as a supporting character in the new comic Knight Errant comic series which debuted in August 2010 with the release of Knight Errant 0 during Celebration V. His story background was developed by John Jackson Miller, drawn by artist Federico Dallocchio and colored by Michael Atiyeh. He appeared in the series' first five issues but was killed off in Knight Errant: Aflame 5, the conclusion of the Star Wars: Knight Errant: Aflame story arc.