Wookieepedia:Featured article queue/September 17, 2010

Zule Xiss was a female Falleen who served as a Jedi Padawan during the waning days of the Old Republic. Aggressive and headstrong, she was apprenticed to the Human Jedi Master Glaive prior to the outbreak of the Clone Wars. Several weeks after the Battle of Geonosis, she and her Master were dispatched to the Naboo system with fellow Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in response to a loss of communication with the Gungan colony on Naboo's moon of Ohma-D'un. Upon arriving on Ohma-D'un, the Jedi and their clone troopers found the Gungans dead, victims of the Confederacy of Independent Systems' experimental swamp gas biological weapon. Before Xiss and the Republic forces could warn Naboo of the threat posed by the gas, they were assaulted by Durge and Asajj Ventress, agents of the Confederacy. In the ensuing skirmish, Ventress killed Glaive and sliced off Xiss's arm. The Falleen was able to escape Ohma-D'un alongside Kenobi, Skywalker, and Advanced Recon Commando Alpha-17.

Xiss, now bereft of a Master, joined the "Padawan Pack," a group of Jedi apprentices whose Masters had been killed over the course of the war. A year after the genocide on Ohma-D'un, the Padawan Pack was dispatched to the embattled world of Jabiim to fight there on the Republic's behalf. Command of the Republic army on Jabiim fell to Xiss and her fellow orphaned Padawans, as all higher ranking Jedi eventually fell to the Jabiimi Nationalists, a pro-Confederacy political movement that wished to secede Jabiim from the Republic. After weeks of fighting, the Padawan Pack pulled their forces back to Cobalt Station, where they were assaulted by the army of Alto Stratus, the leader of the Jabiimi Nationalists. The conflict at Cobalt Station lasted for several days, and Xiss gradually began to slip to the dark side of the Force, becoming more and more brutal on the battlefield. On the forty-first day of the Battle of Jabiim, Zule Xiss was crushed to death by a damaged Republic AT-AT while attacking enemy forces. Except for Anakin Skywalker, every other member of the Pack was killed by the end of the battle, and the Republic was forced off the world only days later. The surviving Republic forces fled to New Holstice, where Skywalker added Xiss's name to a memorial for fallen Jedi.