Order of the Terrible Glare/Legends

The Order of the Terrible Glare was a violent and dangerous cult that waged war against the Jedi Order thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin. Although the details of this "monstrous war" — as the Jedi called it — have been almost totally lost, it seems that the shamans of the Order were able to manipulate the Force to some extent, developing soul-snares, crystal prisms that were capable of imprisoning the life force of a sapient being for eternity (even long after the war was ended, stories continued to circulate about these devices, but few believed they were real). They also had the ability to trigger dangerous illusions, and created computers capable of operating for thousands of years equipped with sensors able to detect lightsabers from interstellar distances. Ultimately, the Jedi triumphed and laid waste to the Order's homeworld of Garn, leaving it covered with a sickly yellow fog and diseased trees heavy with gaudy and deadly poisonous fungus, and believed all of the shamans to have died.

However, there was one last survivor: Rur, High Shaman of the Terrible Glare, who escaped death by encoding and preserving his mind into a computer — what he called "devices of knowing" — within the Order's desolate black tower and continued to wage war against the Jedi, using long-range sensors to detect lightsabers and sending false distress signals to lure them to Garn and death. When Luke Skywalker was tricked into entering the Order's vast black tower in the ruins of Garn, he was attacked by phantasmagoric "pale squirmers" and discovered soul-snares, still containing the life forces of fallen Jedi Knights; elsewhere, he discovered the desiccated skeletal remains of armored Jedi, and ancient and alien remains wholly unknown to him.

Ultimately, Skywalker encountered the vengeful remains of Rur, who now appeared as a green-skinned humanoid figured draped in ornate vestments within a green translucent pyramid. Rur accused the Jedi of treachery in their "recent" attack "many months ago," and announced his intention to take revenge on Skywalker as he had done to so many others. For his part, Skywalker — finally recognizing Garn and the Terrible Glare from a story briefly related to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi — explained to him that the Jedi were all dead, killed in the Great Purge, and that he merely carried Kenobi's lightsaber (Skywalker believed Kenobi to have been the last of the Jedi at that time), and that the war had been over for so long that Rur had lost all sense of time.

Unable to reconcile the destruction of the Jedi and the passage of so much time with his ancient lust for revenge, Rur plummeted into a self-destructive fit of dissonance, and destroyed the tower. Skywalker narrowly escaped, reflecting on the obsessive hatred and vengeful spirit that had finally consumed the last of the shamans of the Order of the Terrible Glare.

Behind the Scenes
The Order of the Terrible Glare is in some ways a precursor to later, better-established elements of Star Wars lore, such as the Dark Lords of the Sith (as ancient and terrible enemies of the Jedi, thought long-since destroyed) and the Ssi-Ruuk (as enemies who stole souls and kept them imprisoned in technological constructs).In particular, Rur bears a strong resemblance to the later character of Exar Kun, who also escaped destruction at the Jedi's hands by shuffling off his mortal coil, returning to menace Luke Skywalker thousands of years after his death. Given the use of crystals in the Terrible Glare's unique technology, it is visually similar to the Sith Empire's magic, but in light of Palpatine's interest in the Ssi-Ruuk's entechment technology, it is highly likely that the Sith Lords never obtained the secrets of the Terrible Glare's soul-snares, even though they were able to imprison evil spirits within their holocrons.

The Order of the Terrible Glare was going to be featured in Joe Bongiorno's and Rich Handley's article "Cult Encounters of the Star Wars Universe," but Star Wars Gamer was canceled before it was published. According to Bongiorno, the bit on the Order was going to feature some dialogue between Skywalker and Bodo Baas from the holocron.