Sith Emperor's ritual

The Sith Lord Vitiate's ritual represented a sophisticated form of Sith sorcery, demanding substantial power from the dark side for its execution. It necessitated a large-scale sacrifice—mass death—to commence, enabling the user to absorb the Force essence of the deceased, thus augmenting their own power at the expense of their victims' existence. Upon the ritual's completion, the Sith magic spread across the targeted world as an energy surge, effectively stripping the Force from the affected planet in under a minute, killing all remaining living organisms instantly and transferring their life force and power to the ritual's practitioner.

During the initial execution of the rite on Nathema, Vitiate harnessed the strength of eight thousand other Sith Lords to amplify his Sith magic, requiring ten days for its complete realization. Centuries later, Vitiate, now the Sith Emperor, could perform the ritual on Ziost using only his own vast Force abilities. On Nathema, Vitiate employed the ancient superweapon Zildrog to achieve the necessary death toll, while on Ziost, he controlled the planet's inhabitants, turning them against each other.

Living material, including human and plant bodies, was reduced to ash upon contact with the Sith magic. Some bodies maintained their form, appearing as ash sculptures of the victims. Tree trunks remained as solid ash structures, and even stone statues on Ziost were destroyed by the Sith magic. Aside from Vitiate, only a few entities could survive the ritual—Sithspawn called Monoliths, created from dark side energy rather than through the mutation of living beings. The act also decimated most of the planet's technology, overloading droid circuits and erasing their memory banks. The rite drained color, sound, and heat from reality, leaving the targeted planet a brown, barren, and lifeless world where the absence of the Force could lead to the death of any living being on its surface, especially Force-sensitives, if they remained for too long.

The Emperor later developed a synthetic version of the ritual by integrating it with Sith alchemy and biomechanical enhancements, eliminating the need for sacrifice. This artificial process involved inserting numerous wires and IV tubes into the subject's body, connecting them to generators and vats filled with bubbling green liquid. As the subject embraced the dark side, the Emperor and his machines stripped away their mortality over a few minutes, causing them constant pain for the remainder of their existence. Both the original and synthetic versions of the Sith magic diminished the subjects' ability to fully experience their physical senses, as they sacrificed their emotional capacity in exchange for immortality.

As a consequence of the Sith magic ritual, Vitiate achieved immortality and gained immense Force power. Following centuries of further dark side study, the Sith Emperor developed the ability to repeat the ritual independently and planned to amplify its effects on a galactic scale. Success would have enabled him to consume the life force of every living being in the galaxy, transforming him into a godlike entity. The Emperor used the synthetic ritual to grant immortality to select servants, including the twelve Servants of the secret organization known as the Emperor's Hand. Another recipient of immortality through the ritual was the Sith Lord Scourge, appointed as the Emperor's Wrath—the Sith ruler's personal enforcer—due to his loyalty.

The Sith Emperor, originally known as Vitiate, was the sole known practitioner of this immortality rite. In 4999 BBY, a year after the Sith Empire's defeat in the Great Hyperspace War by the Galactic Republic, Vitiate summoned the remaining Sith Lords of the Empire to his homeworld, Nathema. There, he dominated the minds of the eight thousand Sith who answered his call, forcing them to participate in the Sith magic and turning the Zildrog superweapon against them. The resulting mass death, channeled through the ritual, bestowed immense power and immortality upon him at the cost of all life on the world.

The newly empowered Sith Emperor attributed the event's effects—known as the Ritual of Nathema—to the Jedi who had destroyed the Empire in the Great Hyperspace War. He gathered the Empire's survivors and led them on a twenty-year exodus from the Sith Worlds. Shortly after reestablishing the Empire on Dromund Kaas in 4980 BBY, the Emperor gathered twelve Sith purebloods and performed the synthetic version of the rite upon them, granting them immortality and appointing them as the Servants of the Emperor's Hand. During the ritual, he bound their life forces to his own, drawing on their strength to sustain himself.

In 3950 BBY, nearly a millennium later, the Emperor chose to reward Sith Lord Scourge with immortality after he betrayed Jedi Masters Revan and Meetra Surik by killing Surik during the Jedi's attempt to assassinate the Emperor. The Emperor performed the synthetic rite within the Imperial Citadel on Dromund Kaas, emphasizing to his new Wrath that the ritual's pain would be permanent. Following Revan and Surik's attack, the Emperor resolved to ensure his survival at the expense of the entire galaxy, initiating preparations to repeat the ritual on a galactic scale. Three centuries later, during the Galactic War between the Republic and his Empire, the Emperor tasked his agents with orchestrating the necessary sacrifice of thousands of lives, but their efforts were thwarted by the Jedi known as the Hero of Tython.

The Sith Emperor sustained severe injuries in combat with the Hero, forcing him into hibernation on Yavin 4 until a now-insane Revan attempted to restore the Emperor to permanently destroy him. Revan's plans failed, but the Emperor thrived off the deaths caused by battle against Revan's followers, replenishing his strength. Rejected by the Empire he once led, Vitiate, now a bodiless Force entity, began influencing the population of Ziost. His influence soon spread across the world, allowing him to possess nearly the entire population and incite them into a frenzy of death.

Despite efforts by the Galactic Republic and the Empire to break Vitiate's control, he continued to consolidate his power and create monstrous Sithspawn called Monoliths. Employing Sith magic as he had on Nathema, Vitiate fed off the dead and unleashed an energy wave across the planet, turning all living beings to ash and distorting reality, transforming Ziost's tundra into a gray wasteland with muted colors. Millennia later, the Sith Lord Darth Bane discovered a transcription of the ritual and its effects within Revan's Sith Holocron, using it to develop the thought bomb technique.

The Sith Emperor's ritual was initially presented in Drew Karpyshyn's 2011 novel, The Old Republic: Revan, and it plays a significant role in Act III of the Jedi Knight class storyline in the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Ziost storyline introduced in Game Update 3.2 culminates with Vitiate consuming all life on Ziost using the ritual, representing the first visual depiction of the ritual and its aftermath. Game Update 5.9: "The Nathema Conspiracy" retconned the origins of the Ritual of Nathema, adding the involvement of the Zildrog superweapon, although the game's head writer, Charles Boyd, clarified that Zildrog was used to instigate the death toll necessary for the ritual, just as the Emperor's agents attempted in the Jedi Knight storyline.