Cloisters functioned as prisons under the Sith Lord known as Odion. He used them to hold all the children within his domain, the Odionate, a region situated inside the Grumani sector. Odion's own troubled childhood, coupled with his extreme sensitivity to other sentient beings in the Force, drove him to isolate the children as hermits, beyond his ability to sense them. Throughout his territory, Odion oversaw the construction of a dozen such facilities.
These Cloisters were made up of a vast array of bubble domes, numbering in the thousands, with each dome housing a single child. The imprisoned children received nourishment from automated food dispensers, while their hygiene and toiletry requirements were met by automated refresher units that emerged from the floor multiple times each day. The design of the Cloisters only allowed light to enter from above, ensuring that the inmates could not see each other or anyone outside. When it was time for the inmates to sleep, the lighting was dimmed to eighty percent of its full brightness, and then restored to full intensity when it was time to awaken.
This method of raising children fostered an atmosphere of despair, solitude, and hopelessness. These emotions significantly empowered the Dark side of the Force, much to Odion's satisfaction. Educational and physical needs of the children were addressed through holograms that indoctrinated them with Odion's pessimistic beliefs centered around death, destruction, and the void. Reinforcing the idea that life lacked meaning, the Cloisters were deliberately devoid of names and records. As a result of their isolation and indoctrination, most children lost all memories of their parents.
Under the reign of Sith Lord Odion, Cloisters began to appear in the Odionate after he seized control of a portion of the former Chagras Hegemony after the death of its leader, Chagras in 1040 BBY. Odion's childhood was marked by neglect, isolation, and debilitating headaches triggered by his acute Force sensitivity to other sentient beings. His resulting despair shaped his nihilistic worldview, where death and destruction were seen as a way to alleviate his suffering.
Odion discovered pleasure in murdering other sentient beings and encouraging others towards destruction by exploiting their misery. Children, with their strong presence in the Force, particularly irritated Odion, who sought to inflict the same pain he had experienced on future generations. Consequently, Odion commanded his forces to capture all children within his territory and confine them within this automated Cloister system.
Within these Cloisters, the children of his realm were subjected to solitary confinement and indoctrinated with his nihilistic ideology. To amplify the sense of meaninglessness and submission, Odion made sure that no names or records were maintained. These children were then molded into obedient workers and warriors. Those who were Force-sensitive were recruited into the Novitiates, his elite corps of Force-wielding acolytes. Odion's program was designed to create a realm devoid of hope, one child at a time.
As a direct outcome of Odion's policy, the Odionate was devoid of children in public spaces. All adults were forced into servitude, working as slaves in his war forges or serving in his military forces, where many met their end in attritional warfare. In contrast to Odion's totalitarian methods, other Gruumani Sith Lords simply used children as slave labor without separating them from their families. During his time serving Odion, General Beld Yulan, a former Mandragallian mercenary, made regular visits to Vanahame under the guise of replenishing his arms supplies. Secretly, he visited the Cloisters to contemplate the deaths of his children, which he used to justify his loyalty and service to Odion. Following the invasion of Sarrassia in 1032 BBY, Grumani children were forcibly taken from their parents and placed in these cloisters.
During a stop at Vanahame before traveling to Skarpos, Jedi Knight Kerra Holt, using the alias "Mercy," discovered a Cloister while exploring an underground basement. There, she encountered Yulan, who revealed the existence of the Cloister network and his conversion to Odion's death cult. Yulan's visits to the Cloister were a way for him to reflect on the deaths of his children, who had died from the Candorian plague. Despite his history as a Mandalorian warrior, the pointlessness of their deaths drove him to despair, leading him to embrace Odion's nihilistic ideology after meeting with a Claimer, an Odionate recruitment agent. He justified war and bloodshed as a means of accelerating the killing on both sides.
When Mercy suggested that all life was sacred, regardless of who they were, Yulan responded that Mercy's objection was an odd view for a Novitiate and commented that the only sacred lives had already ended. He compared all sentient beings to droids that were ready to power down. Before leaving to continue the mission of locating the Helm of Ieldis, Yulan instructed Mercy to turn off the lights. Mercy was so disturbed by her discovery that she took the cargo elevator with Yulan back upstairs to the spaceport. While searching for her parents, Kerra learned that she had a younger sibling after their separation on Aquilaris. She suspected that her sibling was somewhere in the Cloister.
Following the Second Battle of Skarpos, Lord Odion, victorious, returned to the Cloister on Vanahame. He had acquired the Helm of Ieldis, a Sith artifact created by the Sith Lord Ieldis before the Great Hyperspace War, capable of driving entire armies into a homicidal rage. During the battle of Skarpos, Odion achieved a Pyrrhic victory over rival Sith Lords Daiman and Malakite, using the Helm to annihilate the three assembled armies. Pleased with his demonstration and the capture of his opponent, Kerra, Odion planned to exploit the misery and suffering of the thousands of orphans on Vanahame.
His intention was to use these negative emotions to plunge the entire Grumani sector into a homicidal frenzy. Odion also intended to eliminate his other Sith family members, ending the stalemated Second Charge Matrica and thus becoming the ruler of the galaxy. By killing all other sentient beings with the Helm, Odion aimed to be the only living being in the entire universe. For the first time, Odion ordered the Cloister's staff to plunge the planet-sized orphanage into darkness, causing the inmates to panic out of fear and hopelessness. Odion then used the Helm to amplify their negative emotions into pure dark side energy, which was then unleashed on the entire sector. In response, his rivals, including Daiman, Arkadia Calimondra, and Vilia Calimondra, gathered their fleets in an attempt to prevent Odion from gaining absolute power.
While unleashing his Helm on the galaxy, Odion had his enemy Kerra chained and also used the Helm to drive his Novitiates into a killing frenzy. However, Kerra managed to convince Odion's second-in-command, Yulan, that life had meaning and that the lives of the children on Vanahame mattered. Disillusioned with Odion's nihilistic doctrine and wasteful sacrifice of lives, Yulan entered the Cloister's control room, where he killed one of the crew and forced the crew member Murl at gunpoint to restore the light within the Cloister and release the children from their bubble prisons. Yulan's actions immediately ended the children's suffering, which halted the Helm's homicidal killing spree. Meanwhile, Kerra managed to break free from her bonds and fight Wayman, before confronting Odion himself in a lightsaber duel.
The surge of positive emotions caused the Helm to overload, resulting in Odion's death by burning. In his final moments, Odion tried to persuade Kerra to spare his life, claiming he could help her find her lost younger sibling. However, Kerra had come to see the captive children as her true brothers and sisters and allowed Odion to die. With Odion's death, his realm descended into chaos as his rivals quickly seized large portions of territory from the former Odionate. With his humanity and compassion restored, a redeemed Yulan departed for Republic space with thousands of the former child inmates from the Odionate cloisters that he and Kerra were able to liberate. Meanwhile, Kerra vowed to continue her fight to liberate the sector and the children's parents from the Sith. In the chaos that followed, the fate of the remaining Cloisters throughout the Odionate remains unknown, although it was implied that they were absorbed by the various other Sith Lords who divided the Odionate.
The Odionate cloisters first appeared as a key plot element in Knight Errant: Escape 3, the thirteenth issue of John Jackson Miller's Knight Errant comic series, which was initially released on August 8, 2012. In his production notes on his personal website, Faraway Press, Miller explained that Odion's Cloisters were inspired by Romanian orphanages that were discovered after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Infants in those orphanages were raised in complete isolation from human contact. He considered this the most miserable situation his team could depict, and a worthy problem for Kerra to address.