Darth Malak
"Savior, conqueror, hero, villain. You are all things, Revan, and yet you are nothing. In the end you belong to neither the light nor the darkness. You will forever stand alone." — Darth Malak
Darth Malak is a character from the fictional Star Wars universe. He was introduced in the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) for the Xbox and PC platforms. The events of Knights of the Old Republic take place 3,956 years prior to the events of the Star Wars feature films.
Darth Malak was a bald, pale-skinned human. His head was adorned with traditional Sith tattoos, and a large metal shield covered his face from the nose down. The shield is a prosthetic made necessary by a ghastly lightsaber injury that completely severed his lower jaw and occurred at an unknown point prior to his becoming Dark Lord of the Sith. He wore skin-tight red-orange body armor that showed off his powerful physique, draped in a cape of blood-red cloth. He always carried his lightsaber with him.
Darth Malak was a master swordsman and an adept Force-user, excelling particularly in such dark side skills as Force lightning, Life Drain, and Stasis.
Early Career
Malak and his best friend, Revan, were Jedi assigned to the Order's enclave on Dantooine. While they were there, they discovered a Star Map that had been left on the planet by the Rakata, a species that had ruled the Galaxy in the distant past.
When the Mandalorian War began and Outer Rim planets began falling, Revan defied the Jedi and insisted on defending the Galaxy alongside the Old Republic. The first to follow him was Malak, his closest friend. Together they rallied many young Jedi and began destroying the Mandalorians in battle after battle, finally defeating the mercenary leader above Malachor V. The pair took the fleet, however, and passed beyond known space, insisting that they had to destroy the remnants of the Mandalorian armada. While beyond the Rim, they found the Star Forge, an ancient marvel of Rakatan engineering. Corrupted by the Dark Side energies present in and the power represented by the Star Maps and Star Forge, Revan and Malak fell to the Dark Side and took control of Exar Kun's dying Sith Order.
Using persuasion and violence they wrested control of a large space fleet from the Old Republic and began their career of conquest. As Revan was the stronger of the two Sith Lords, he claimed the coveted title of Dark Lord of the Sith, and Malak reluctantly consented to be his apprentice. He chaffed under Revan's control, though, and awaited the opportunity to replace his master.
Dark Lord of the Sith
The moment came when a Republic strike team, led by Jedi Sentinel Bastila Shan, staged an assault on Revan's flagship. In an attempt to slay the powerful Jedi and his master at the same time, Malak ordered his ship's guns to fire on Revan's ship. Malak believed that Revan was dead and assumed the command of the Sith Empire, at last taking the mantle of Dark Lord for his own.
While the war against the Republic was going very well, he feared Bastila's rare gift of Battle Meditation, a rare Force power that enabled her to strengthen the Republic forces' resolve and coordinate their fighting effort while sapping the will of their enemies, making her a threat to the entire Sith war effort. Darth Malak expended tremendous resources in an attempt to locate and capture her.
Malak nearly succeeded once when he blockaded the planet Taris. Although he had the planet destroyed to prevent Bastila's escape, she nonetheless was able to return unharmed to Dantooine accompanied by her rescuers. Among these heroes were two citizens of Taris, Mission Vao and Zaalbar; Republic pilot Carth Onasi; the utility droid T3-M4; and Revan himself, his mind reprogrammed as a crewmember from the Republic cruiser Endar Spire. It was Revan who had raced in a hazardous swoop tournament in order to free Bastila from the clutches of one of the street gangs of Taris.
Bastila and her companions left Dantooine in search of the source of Malak's power. While on their search, Bastila was captured by Malak. Malak corrupted Bastila to the Dark Side of the Force and made her his apprentice. (Malak's previous apprentice, Darth Bandon, had recently been killed in action.)
It is not surprising that Malak's fate would be connected with Bastila's. The two were very much alike -- courageous, arrogant, and heedless of the warnings of their Jedi instructors to beware the call of the Dark Side. But the true reason Malak chose Bastila for his apprentice was the unimaginable advantages the Sith Empire could gain from her Battle Meditation. Among the Sith, there is no such thing as comaraderie.
The Final Battle
The source of this power was the subject of the Star Map that Malak and Revan had discovered on Dantooine long ago: the Star Forge. The Star Forge was an enormous space station and battle dreadnought constructed by the Infinite Empire of the Rakata. The Rakata were a technologically advanced but savage species who extended their power through the galaxy through conquest. The Star Forge was constructed above one of the poles of their home star. There, the Star Forge fed on the star's energetic hydrogen and the dark side of the Force to produce an unending supply of starfighters, capital ships, and war droids for the Rakata prior to their collapse, and now for the Sith.
The heroes on the quest for the Star Forge called in the Republic fleet to attack the Sith. For a while, it looked as if Malak would be able to destroy his foes in a single, glorious day. Fate -- or the Force -- handed Malak a stunning defeat, however, and it would be he who would die when his former master, Revan, returned; during the battle, his old master boarded the Star Forge in the Ebon Hawk, defeated an attack force of Forge droids, slew nearly the entire pool of Malak's Dark Jedi and Sith apprentices, and finally killed his old friend in single combat. And so it ended as Malak somehow always knew it must: in darkness.
In the end, Malak's story is a tragic one. He was one of the most gifted and respected Jedi in their Order, and had a lifelong friend in Revan. But by taking the path of the dark side, which, ironically, Revan started him down in the first place, he lost that respect and friendship in a mad quest for power, trading them in for fear, hatred, and, eventually, death. But even after years of the corruption of the dark side, Malak was not entirely evil. As he lay dying, his mortal wounds dealt to him by his best friend, he couldn't help but wonder, had their positions been reversed, if he could have possessed the strength to return to the light as Revan did, and what his life would have been like had he been able to do so. He tried to blame Revan for his fate, but then admitted that, in the end, the only person he had to blame for how his life had ended was himself. Humbled and belittled by that knowledge, still bested by Revan despite all his clever plans and conquests, Malak, realizing that nothing he had ever done or could ever do could compare to the things done by his former master, at last acknowledged his inferiority, and his final words were the truest he had ever spoken: "And in the end, as the darkness takes me, I am nothing."
Quotes
"Wipe this pathetic planet from the face of the galaxy!"
"You are strong, child--but I will break you!"
"Still . . . still spouting the wisdom of the Jedi, I see. Maybe there is more truth in their code than I ever believed. I . . . I cannot help but wonder, Revan. What would have happened had our positions been reversed? What if fate had decreed I would be captured by the Jedi? Could I have returned to the light, as you did? If you had not led me down the dark path in the first place, what destiny would I have found?"
"I wanted to be Master of the Sith and ruler of the galaxy. But that destiny was not mine, Revan. It might have been yours, perhaps . . . but never mine. And in the end, as the darkness takes me, I am nothing."