"So," Ciaran said, as she walked alongside the phantom Sith Lord through the corridors of the Home. "We're facing a conspiracy that you were a part of in life, and yet you've said almost nothing about its function. Now, I understand that you don't want to betray the secrets of the Banite Order...."
"Um, yes," Darth Vectivus said. "That's
definitely the reason I haven't told you about the history of the Banite Sith up to my time."
A Brief History of the Order of the Sith Lords
The Order of the Sith Lords was founded, as is well-known, by Darth Bane. The Jedi for a long time believed that this Order also ended with Darth Bane. That was not true, for Bane survived his supposed death, to be succeeded as Sith Master by first Darth Zannah and then Darth Cognus. These Sith followed the Grand Plan that Bane had proposed for overthrowing the Republic. According to this Grand Plan, the first century following Ruusan was to be spent in hiding, so that the Republic would become convinced of the Sith's extinction.
Darth Cognus's first apprentice, Darth Millennial, would reject the Banite philosophy of the Rule of Two, and leave the Sith to found the Dark Force religion. Cognus chose not to pursue him, and trained a new apprentice, Darth Oina, who would eventually kill Cognus and ascend to the title of Sith Master, taking one Darth Ilerge as her apprentice, who would in turn succeeded by the Devaronian Darth Despis.
The time of Darth Ilerge's and Darth Despis' Mastery coincided with the first attempts to overthrow the Republic. Darth Ilerge built up a significant network of allies in the criminal underworld, which Despis extended to other old allies, notably the Mandalorians. The dream then was to launch a military revolt against the Republic. Unfortunately for Despis, he met his end at the hands of some of those allies. On the forest moon of Endor, an attempt to persuade a tradition of Darksiders among the local Dulok sapients to join his cause ended in Despis being eaten alive by another group of locals, the Ewoks. Despis's apprentice, Darth Choate, was left with her training incomplete, forcing her to spend much of the following decades trying to recover her master's traditions, with partial success.
Darth Choate wished to avoid the risk of history repeating itself in this respect, and during her long life she trained at least three separate apprentices, none of them aware of each other's existence. Ultimately, in 738 BBY, Choate's plans to conquer the galaxy collapsed when the Mandalorian military buildup was discovered by the Republic. A Republic invasion led by the Jedi glassed much of the planet, and two Jedi Masters in particular discovered Darth Choate's hideout, engaging in a lightsaber duel with the Sith. She succeeded in killing both Jedi and preserving the Order's secrecy, but was mortally wounded in the process. All of her apprentices would start their own, separate lines of Banite Sith.
The main line (as dictated by later events) continued with Darth Estilent, who tried to synthesize a plague of flesh-eating worms that would devastate the Republic and leave it weak to a takeover. Unfortunately for him, containment in his lab on Onoia was breached, and Estilent was herself eaten by those worms. Estilent's apprentice, who was close to completing his training, became Darth Nevermore. He attempted to use a Hutt superweapon to destroy Coruscant, but in the process lost control of the Dark Side, going insane and seeking to destroy the entire galaxy, so that he had to be killed by an alliance of the Hutts and his apprentice Darth Vrench.
Around this time, one line of the Sith, led by Darth Flammable, was discovered and wiped out by Master Yoda of the Jedi. This line had lost most of the Sith lore to the point where Yoda, even after defeating Flammable in a duel, was convinced that they were not an unbroken line leading back to Bane, but 'merely' a group of latter-day cultists who had discovered some holocrons. This failure to classify them as Sith owed much to Darth Vrench's speedy corrections to certain records. Following this, Vrench chose to spend much of his mastery hunting hints of other Sith groups. One of them was the Sith Revival movement, basing itself on the Sith that preceded the Rule of Two, that spun out of the Dark Force religion, leading a doomed secession movement from the Republic to create a new Sith Empire. It wasn't even a true war - the Revivalists were either killed by or surrendered to a Jedi strike team that they greatly outnumbered, with some of their younglings even being taken into the Jedi, and their non-Force-sensitive allies tripped over themselves to surrender first. Darth Vrench's sabotage of the Sith Revivalists remained unnoticed.
Towards the end of his life, Darth Vrench finally discovered the remaining branch of Banite Sith descended from Darth Choate, or more accurately it was Darth Victus that discovered him and his apprentice Darth Gravid. After several years of contention, Darth Victus and his apprentice were both slain, although Darth Vrench was overthrown by Darth Gravid before this was complete. Darth Gravid then gathered everything known by both Sith branches, and built the greatest Sith archive that existed between Ruusan and now.
And then he went insane and destroyed almost all of it before being killed by his apprentice Darth Gean.
Darth Gean herself followed Darth Choate's example and took at least two apprentices, kept secret from each other. One of them was Darth Ramage, who continued the 'main' line of Sith. But while Gean made one final attempt at overthrowing the Republic that ended when her dreadnought-sized flagship suffered a hyperdrive failure (apparently genuinely accidental, though Ramage might well have been involved), Ramage spent most of his time studying physics, the Force, and the connection between the two. His successor Darth Levitan was more concerned with using the money and influence the Sith Order had accumulated over time to travel the galaxy and visit as many parties as humanly (or, rather, Zeltronly) possible. Levitan's own successor Darth Ypsilon, a Hutt, was more dutiful, but focused mainly on studying the Force to become more powerful, and secondarily on wiping out the other line descended from Darth Gean, whose existence he had discovered, and taking their lore. Darth Ypsilon eventually retired voluntarily, giving control of the Sith over to his apprentice Darth Vectivus, who mainly built up the financial resources of the Order as well as his own, until he himself retired to be with his family. He was succeeded by Darth Terneus, whose biggest contribution was extending the Sith assets to include more political alliances, albeit as with his predecessors, this was done less with any aim of overthrowing the Republic and more for his own and his successors' personal benefit.
*
"And eventually," Vectivus concluded, "Terneus too retired, shortly before my death, leaving the Sith to his own apprentice Darth Qaist. Apparently some descendant of Darth Qaist's line ultimately decided to actually execute the Grand Plan. Or perhaps it was a different line that split at some point earlier. It's hard to tell, without having a conversation with Sidious himself.
"All of which is not to let you underestimate the Sith." He looked at Ciaran again, and despite everything she could not suppress a shiver in her spine. His eyes, translucent though they were, seemed to hold the malice of centuries within them at that moment. "We laid low, true. We did not take undue effort to destroy the Republic. But we also made every effort to ensure that the Republic could not destroy us.
"I cannot tell you of Sidious's plans, for they are his own. I can tell you little of Sidious's defenses, for they, too, will have changed greatly since my time. Of the lore that guides him I have already said much. But I can assure you of this much - an organization does not survive for a millennium in the shadows by being incompetent, or weak, and that is only more true when it spends half its time infighting."
A/N: This turned out more serious than I was intending. Anyway, this is something vaguely like my headcanon as to the history of the Banite Sith. A lot more embarrassing than the Sith would have you believe, with abundant failures in trying to destroy the Republic, the apprentice killing the master after having learned everything being more the exception than the rule, and a whole lot of values drift (as is inevitable given the setup)... but then you turn around, and notice that they're still there, after a thousand years over which discovery would have meant destruction.
