Darrus Jeht

Darrus Jeht was a Jedi Master and Senior General during the Clone Wars. He was a black-eyed and -haired Human male who wore dark gray and black robes, light battle armor, and battle gloves. He was trained at the Almas Academy, and although never officially his Padawan, Jeht received much teaching from Mace Windu. In addition to his violet lightsaber, Jeht was an expert at the use of blasters and metal swords.

Methods of travel
While Jeht was an active student in need of transport he was assigned a Z-95 Headhunter purchased by the Academy. Later, once he had graduated to the rank of Jedi Knight, Jeht was assigned a Delta-6 Aethersprite by the Jedi Council, an experimental design that preceded the Delta-7 Aethersprite.

While at Almas, Jeht began receiving crates from a mysterious source near the Taris system. The crates contained many of the parts of a two thousand-year old custom vessel of partially Corellian design. He named the completed ship the Legacy, and over the next six months piloted it almost exclusively, clocking fewer than ten flight hours in the Night Gyre and only using his Delta-6 during a combat mission in the Torrad system.

Return to the Almas Academy
During the Clone Wars, Jeht was sent from Coruscant back to the Almas Academy by the Jedi Council to inform the Jedi there that all Knights and Masters with more than three years of experience had been recalled to wartime duty and ordered to report to new sector staging areas for debriefing and tactical assignments; only the faculty members of the Almas Council were exempted from the order. As a result, the Academy had to expand class sizes, ignore the usual role of only one Padawan per Jedi, and assign Padawans to Knights with only a year or two of experience. Jeht was instructed to oversee the transfer of personnel. When he had completed that task, he remained at Almas Academy as part of the faculty, teaching his skills as a Jedi weapons master.

Jeht rescued a transport convoy (that of Sien'Soro's band) from a Separatist blockade. As reward, Jeht was given three backstage tickets to a Sien'Soro concert only four parsecs from Almas, to which Jeht treated Aayla Secura and the Corellian Trilinae.

When the mysterious gangster, "R", blew up the ship belonging Trilinae and her twin sister Milinae, Jeht helped the two escape the gangster's goons and steal one of his star yachts. During the escape, Trilinae used some of the elementary Force skills Jeht had taught her to assist in their getaway.

Later, Jeht crashed his Delta-6 on a jungle world, where he was hunted by Asajj Ventress. Ventress drove a lightsaber into his chest, and Jeht responded by giving into the dark side and tormenting her with Force lightning. Jeht was repulsed by his own actions, and tears were in his eyes when he boarded the LAAT/i gunship that his clone troops used to rescue him. Ventress reported the results of the conflict to Dooku: they were exactly what Darth Sidious had intended them to be, the planting of a dark seed in Jeht's heart.

The Maelstrom
After healing from the fight, Jeht was assigned a Delta-7. Due to his guilt over drawing upon the dark side of the Force, Jeht refused to return to teaching at the Academy. The Jedi Council later ordered all Jedi, save younglings, to report to strategic locations for reassignment and military commissions. When Darrus returned to Almas with these marching orders, Jeht led the Alman Knights and Padawans to their mustering grounds in his ship, the Maelstrom. Lanius Qel-Bertuk and most other members of the Almas Council chose the Right of Denial, but pledged whatever support the Academy could give to those Jedi who went to war. The choice meant that the staff had to surrender their lightsabers to the Jedi Council, meaning the Academy was seemingly left powerless to protect the Cularin system. In response to this fact and to the suspicions that Cularin's Senator Lavina Wren was in league with the Separatists, the Cularin system was placed under martial law, as dictated by the Emergency Powers Act. Jeht ordered the forces sent to patrol the system to leave Almas alone.

The Maelstrom led the attack to Kromus, a Separatist world where a secret weapon called Starkiller was being constructed. Jeht was forced to bomb the planet before the superweapon escaped into hyperspace, effectively killing 1.3 billion sentients as the weapon's destruction devastated the planet's tectonic plates. After the massacre, Jeht was called back to Coruscant. Expecting to face a Board of Inquiry, he was surprised to find himself reporting to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine himself. Palpatine praised the resolve of the Jedi Master and dismissed the pending charges against him. During the meeting, Darrus found himself not only tempted with vague promises of power but also alerted to the existence of secrets that the Council of Almas could have been keeping from him. Jeht decided to confront Headmaster Qel-Bertuk and uncover the truth by any means necessary.

Order 66
Jeht's confrontation with Qel-Bertuk never happened, though. As he was getting ready to return to Almas, the Maelstrom received a new mission: to bombard Corlax 4, destroy its orbital processing facilities and leave nothing alive in the entire system. Jeht was unnerved by the unorthodox nature of this mission, as the order came directly from Chancellor Palpatine himself, and he questioned the need to exterminate the population of the planet. After hearing of Trilinae's disappearance, Darrus chose to disobey Palpatine's direct order and head back to Cularin, instead. Soon after that fateful decision, ARC Trooper Mar'ek received the order to execute Order 66. Darrus managed to avoid assassination after receiving a vision of his dear friend Aayla Secura dying on Felucia. Tricking his clonetroopers into thinking he was still in charge, Jeht sacrificed himself destroying a Separatist superweapon, the Shadowblade, by fooling it into Cularin's time vortex. His fate after that remains unknown.

Behind the scenes

 * Darrus Jeht was created by August Hahn and Cynthia Hahn, and is one of the most prominent characters in the sequence of short stories that accompanied the Living Force campaign on the Wizards of the Coast website.