Hakagram Graush

"Ajunta Pall beheaded their ruler, Hakagram Graush, and claimed the throne as the blood heir to the ancestral King Adas&mdash;and we became his Shadow Hands."

- Sorzus Syn

Hakagram Graush was a male Sith in the Sith Empire who ruled on the planet Korriban as a Sith King around the year 6,900 BBY. After the arrival of the Dark Jedi exiles on Korriban, following the Hundred-Year Darkness, the Sith sorcerer and monarch, alongside his people, disallowed the outsiders from learning their secrets of Sith sorcery. However, through the monarch's Shadow Hand, the numerous Dark Jedi eventually lured the King into their confidence, and Ajunta Pall, the leader of the Dark Jedi, beheaded Graush with the king's own war sword. With Graush's death, Pall usurped the king's throne and the Dark Jedi became Sith Lords themselves, taking Graush's position over the Sith people he once ruled. The deceased king was buried inside a tomb in the Valley of the Sleeping Kings. Thousands of years after the king's untimely demise, the tomb received a visit from the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis, who was inquiring on the existence of Force ghosts, but no specter of Graush ever showed itself.

Life as a Monarch
"The Sith greeted us. Despite our obvious superior powers, we were not hailed as gods when we arrived."

- Sorzus Syn

Hakagram Graush was a member of the Sith, a race of blood-colored, violent humanoids originating from Korriban, a barren planet located within the Stygian Caldera. Like most members of his species, Graush was strongly connected with the Force, and he was thought to be a descendant of the famed Sith sorcerer Dathka Graush. Eventually, Graush was crowned king of his people. The monarch ruled over the Sith with the help of the Shadow Hand, his second-in-command. His reign lasted until around 6,900 BBY, with the arrival of the Exiles, a group of fallen Jedi who had been defeated in a pan-galactic war called the Hundred-Year Darkness. The Exiles' leader, the former Jedi General Ajunta Pall, took particular interest in the techniques used by the Sith for drawing power from the dark side. Despite the strangers' superior powers and impressive weapons called lightsabers, Graush and his Sith did not immediately hail them as deities when they arrived.

Downfall of the King
"It took weeks for us to understand the power structure of their culture, to undermine it, and to annihilate the current king."

- Sorzus Syn

Unbeknownst to Hakagram Graush, the Dark Jedi infiltrated the power structure of the Sith society, seeking to undermine the monarch's authority from within. Betrayed by his own Shadow Hand, King Graush was lured into the Exile's confidence, which led him to his untimely death as Ajunta Pall eventually decided to execute the Sith king. Hakagram Graush was literally brought on his knees and beheaded by a swipe of his own war sword. The Sith people concluded that the fallen Jedi were themselves more powerful gods than even the king, and they accepted Pall's take-over. Pall rose to power over the people of Korriban and Ziost, the capital of the ancient Sith Empire, appointing himself as the rightful heir of the famed King Adas. Pall and his cohorts, including the Human female Sorzus Syn, eventually pronounced themselves Sith Lords. Even though he had been stripped of his throne and murdered, Graush was buried with due honors in the Valley of the Sleeping Kings, Korriban's majestic burial grounds.

Legacy
"The tomb of Hakagram Graush remained silent to my queries."

- Darth Plagueis

With Graush's demise, the Sith Order was founded, and the culture of the Sith race was turned into a dark side religion. However, millennia after his death, the name of Hakagram Graush was still remembered. The Muun Sith Lord Darth Plagueis traveled to Korriban and visited the burial grounds, now renamed the Valley of the Dark Lords, in hopes of encountering Sith spirits and query them for their long-lost secrets. Among other symbolic locations such as the throne room of Sorzus Syn, Plagueis entered the tomb of Graush and tried to contact the specter of the last Sith King, but to no avail. Plagueis witnessed no manifestation of a ghost, which reinforced his belief that there was no such thing. Plagueis wrote a succinct note about this lack of supernatural incident in his scientific journal.

Personality and traits
A crimson-skinned Sith, Hakagram Graush was tall and muscular. Unlike most other Sith, he had five fingers per hand instead of the usual three. In spite of Korriban's cold climate, he used to go barechested, wearing only a cape and an elaborate loincloth. Like most of his peers at the time, he wore many types of ornaments, including metal bracers and shin armors. Graush also wore a helmet made of the skull of a horned creature, with a neck guard made from small metal scales. When he chose to appear bare-headed, the king's long, dark hair could be seen flowing on his neck.

Behind the scenes
"I'd originally written the king's identity as Dathka Graush, but upon researching the timeline a bit more it became obvious that Dathka wouldn't work. Instead I introduced Hakagram Graush as his presumed descendent [sic]."

- Daniel Wallace

Hakagram Graush, last king of the Sith, first appeared in the 1990s comic book series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi. The monarch went unnamed in the series, and his identity was only revealed in 2012, with the publication of Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side. Daniel Wallace, author of the Book of Sith, originally intended the murdered monarch to be Dathka Graush. However, Wallace realized it would not fit with Dathka's established timeline, and he introduced his probable descendant Hakagram instead.

While the text in Book of Sith clearly states that Ajunta Pall beheaded Hakagram Graush using the monarch's own sword, a picture depicts Pall using a lightsaber. In his endnotes, Wallace admitted he did not catch that mistake when he reviewed the artwork.

In the twenty-ninth issue of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series of comics, a horned helmet known as the Helm of Dathka Graush was shown. The design of this helmet is similar to the one Hakagram Graush wore in Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi.

Appearances

 * Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith 2: Funeral for a Dark Lord