Cronal

"It spoke with a male Human voice. A voice I can only describe as sinister&hellip; threatening&hellip; and evil!"

- C-3PO to Mistress Mnemos

Cronal, a male Human and former Prophet of the Dark Side, was better known by his code name Blackhole, the mysterious Director of Imperial Intelligence who collaborated with Darth Vader after the Battle of Yavin to eliminate the Rebel Alliance. Adept at divination, Cronal was recruited by Emperor Palpatine from the Prophets to join the Empire. He abandoned himself to his meditations in the dark side, becoming withdrawn, physically frail, and paranoid. Considered Palpatine's "monster-maker," Cronal was responsible for the creation of several Sithspawn and other devices of Sith Alchemy. As time passed, Cronal withdrew further, growing steadily more mad as the dark side consumed him.

After being exiled during the Galactic Civil War, Cronal returned as a warlord, and took the name of Shadowspawn. With a cadre of the Emperor's Royal Guards and a legion of shadow stormtroopers at his disposal, Shadowspawn laid waste to worlds of the New Republic. He and his splinter Imperial faction blazed a path of death and destruction, committing acts of piracy, terrorism, and mass slaughter. Conquering the Inner Rim, the warlord established his base of operations on the world of Mindor. The New Republic, responding to the threat of Shadowspawn, sent the newly appointed General Luke Skywalker after him, starting a campaign that resulted in a substantial loss of life. Planning a trap for Skywalker on Mindor, Shadowspawn was defeated during the ensuing battle. He survived, however, and later served the reborn Palpatine.

Early life
In the time of the Empire, rumors abounded regarding Blackhole's origins. Some believed he was once a senatorial page taken under Palpatine's wing, while other rumors asserted that he was an assistant at the Jedi Archives on Coruscant who was ultimately seduced by the dark side of the Force.

Lord Cronal was, in fact, originally a Prophet of the Dark Side, a member of a Force-sensitive cult based out of Dromund Kaas. During this time he fathered a daughter, Sariss, though she remained unaware of her parentage. As Cronal and the other Prophets heaped abuses on her, Sariss suspected one of them was her father, but never knew which. As a Prophet, Cronal also helped train Palpatine's Inquisitor Jerec, and first taught him about the legendary Valley of the Jedi.

Cronal's abilities at divination were unequaled, and the unerring precision of his visions impressed Palpatine. At the same time, however, Cronal feared his own fellow Prophets were beginning to turn against him. When Palpatine, realizing that Cronal's power was such that he could not be ignored, placed him at the head of Imperial Intelligence, Cronal felt that it was just in time. Taking the code name Blackhole, Cronal left the Prophets for Imperial Intelligence.

Imperial intelligencer
Lord Cronal's addition to the ranks of Imperial Intelligence was so smooth that few even realized he had joined. Cronal himself was extremely reclusive, even more so than Emperor Palpatine. Most of his work was carried out through droids, agents, and various fronts. In his rare appearances, Cronal presented himself through a holographic transmitter equipped with an image distorter and went by his code name, "Blackhole." Blackhole, to most, took the form of a vaguely humanoid figure anywhere from 1.8 to three meters tall, with a body resembling a shimmering starscape&mdash;or the robes of the Prophets of the Dark Side. The figure's head was entirely featureless, though eyes were sometimes visible and sometimes not, and the voice Blackhole transmitted was modulated so as to be androgynous.

Only a handful knew Cronal's true form: a shrunken, withered, and frail old man. Steeped in the affairs of the dark side, Cronal had abandoned what was left of his former self. The dark side sapped at his physical and mental health, and he was forced to spend his time in a specially-designed life support chamber. To aid his servant, Palpatine gifted Cronal with a Neimoidian mechano-assembly that could carry the spherical chamber around on its insectile legs.

As head of Intelligence, Cronal was granted virtually unlimited access and control over the Imperial HoloNet. He could take control of and appear in any holocomm unit in the Imperial Navy, or any one connected to the few civilian HoloNet nodes that still existed. He had unrivaled access to the galaxy's enormous quantities of information, and would spend his time in his sanctum meditating over the data that flowed across his screens and awaiting visions from the dark side of the Force.

Cronal was given a ship of his own, the Imperial-class Star Destroyer Singularity, a wing of TIE/ln starfighters, the 123rd Nightstalker Group, and his own division of shadow stormtroopers, all of which he covered in a black stygian-triprismatic polymer coating that gave them increased stealth to sensors. Only a few years into his position as head of Imperial Intelligence, Cronal became convinced that his life was in danger and relocated to the Singularity, from which he would spend the rest of his career on the move.

Dark servant
In addition to his Intelligence position, Cronal also became one of the Emperor's Hands, Palpatine's personal agents. While many of the Hands were adept in combat-related skills, Blackhole used fear and paranoia as his tools.

Blackhole was a master of both Sith Alchemy and the science of genetic engineering, and his skill at using these abilities to transform living beings into Sithspawn earned him the epithet of "monster maker." When Cronal sought a pair of subjects to run one of his tests on, he turned to Tuzin Gast, whose Project Chubar provided him with a Kowakian monkey-lizard and a Gamorrean. Cronal's alchemical experiments on his two subjects resulted in the creation of the Dark Jedi "twins" Pic and Gorc, who would later serve under Jerec.

Cronal was also one of Palpatine's many servants involved in bridging the gaps between technology and the Force. Cronal was put in charge of modifying all the Empire's Force Detectors using his "Science of Darkness". With thaissen crystals from Mimban and techniques adapted from lightsaber construction, Cronal gave the Force Detectors the ability to magnify any Force detected, as well as sense dark side tendencies in the subject. In the course of his work, Cronal used many secrets of the long-dead Sith Lord Belia Darzu, preserved over the millennia in Sith scrolls.

The Vorzyd V affair
Approximately a year after the Battle of Yavin, the Rebellion embarked on a new strategy: they would lose all direct confrontations with the Empire, while focusing on recruitment efforts. When Cronal learned of this plan, he promptly informed Darth Vader of it. Though Cronal wished to take the opportunity to take out the Rebel recruiters one by one, Vader knew that this would only draw ire towards the Empire, and ordered the Intelligence Director to kidnap them instead, leaving no trace that the Empire was involved. Cronal had received word that Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa would be going to Vorzyd V to make contact with local sympathizers, and determined to begin with them. He ordered his stormtroopers to stun and capture the two Rebels, and the soldiers successfully kidnapped them. In addition, Cronal's troops apprehended another pair of Rebels, Falud and Paxin.

Cronal's stormtroopers took the four Rebels to the spaceport, and the Intelligence Director began his interrogation. Paralysis beams held the Rebels in place as Cronal used an interrogation droid on each of them in turn. The first three did not know the name of their contact, leaving only Leia left to face the droid's mind probe. Unfortunately for Cronal, the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 had seen him and made their way onto the ship, and they cut the paralysis beams. Luke attempted to attack Cronal, only to be surprised when his hand passed through the holographic apparition. Cronal and his soldiers caught up to the party as they fled the ship into the spaceport. He ordered his troops to hold their fire, since there were now witnesses.

Vader later lambasted Cronal for his failure, refusing to accept his excuses and ordering him to capture the Rebels and eliminate their contact. Cronal set a tail on them, and when Luke Skywalker left to meet with the Rebel contact, his troopers tracked him. However, the local Rebel sympathizers had been thorough in their preparations, and with their help Luke soon shook his tail. Cronal ordered his forces to close in and capture Luke, but Luke avoided the soldiers and made his meeting. The Director soon had a stroke of luck, however; the members of a local gang, the Freelies, were able to kidnap Leia Organa, and were offering her return for a ransom. Cronal learned of this through one of his spies, Rbann, and ordered him to take his soldiers and capture a Freelie. When they succeeded in capturing one, Cronal presided over his interrogation, though it was disrupted by the arrival of Luke Skywalker. Luke turned off the holographic transmitter and headed for the Freelie hideout. Cronal knew its location, however, and his troops launched an assault. Tired of excuses, he berated his soldiers to press the attack, but they were ultimately unsuccessful; the Rebels managed to escape.

Later, in debriefing, the Rebellion was informed of the encounter with Blackhole. They ordered C-3PO to provide all information on the mysterious figure to the Rebel supercomputer Mistress Mnemos, who obtained Threepio's account of the events on Vorzyd V and visual data of Blackhole from his memories. Mistress Mnemos cross-referenced the data and located an espionage feed from a Rebel spy in the Imperial fleet, showing an earlier encounter between Vader and Blackhole.

Disappearance
As Cronal's madness and paranoia increased, the Empire relied on him less, though he still remained an effective enemy of the Alliance. The Alliance launched its own attacks at Blackhole, including a mission to infiltrate his Star Destroyer. How they fared is unknown, but at some point after Vorzyd, Lord Cronal vanished completely, as he was banished to the Outer Rim Territories. Cronal's disappearance in turn allowed Ysanne Isard to rise to power, also as Director of Imperial Intelligence. In exile, Cronal studied the ancient Sith and amassed a wealth of knowledge on their ways. He also developed an expertise in the field of modern technology, giving him the confidence to mount a bid for galactic domination.

In the wake of Palpatine's seeming death at Endor, Cronal was able to return from exile and put his plans into motion. He made his way to Coruscant, where he and Emperor Sate Pestage established the Church of the Dark Side, a false version of the Prophets of the Dark Side intended to fill a gap in Imperial spirituality and morale. Cronal was aware that Palpatine had survived, and renewed his service as one of Palpatine's Dark Side Adepts. Approximately one year after Endor, Cronal contacted his old student Jerec on his master's behalf, and charged Jerec with finding the Valley of the Jedi for the Emperor. As a show of loyalty, Jerec turned his Star Destroyer Vengeance II over to Cronal to take back to Byss and Palpatine.

At some point after Endor, Cronal appeared on the planet Trailia, where he began abducting the native Trailians to perform alchemical experiments on, intending to turn the planet's population into a race of dark side warriors that could be used against the New Republic. Cronal conducted his experiments from a hidden lab in the Trailian jungle, guarded by several of his own alchemical creations. Though he was pleased with his creations and their success on his missions, Cronal's processes were imperfect, and as a result his warriors were unstable and poor at following orders. His plans for Trailia were ultimately thwarted.

The Mindor campaign
Later in 5 ABY Cronal, taking the name of "Shadowspawn", became a warlord, heading one of the many Imperial splinter factions that opposed the New Republic. Following the death of their master, several of the Emperor's Royal Guards that had not participated in the mass suicides thinning their number joined Shadowspawn's cause. Shadowspawn was able to capture and hold the Inner Rim Territories, while making the strategically advantageous world of Mindor his base of operations. With his shadow stormtroopers deployed, Shadowspawn committed acts of terrorism and piracy, in addition to wholesale slaughter against worlds of the New Republic. It was Shadowspawn's hope that he could break the Republic's hold on the galaxy and breed fears of an Imperial&mdash;and Sith&mdash;resurgence. In aid of this, he declared himself to be the new Galactic Emperor, intending to fully restore the Galactic Empire.

Refusing to tolerate Shadowspawn's destructive bid for power, Luke Skywalker&mdash;now a General of the New Republic&mdash;led the campaign against Shadowspawn to free the worlds of the Inner Rim he had conquered, resulting in a protracted and bloody string of battles that left thousands dead. Prophecy had told Shadowspawn that he would have to face one significant obstacle, which he surmised to be Skywalker. Looking forward to the confrontation, the warlord devised a trap for the general.

Toward the end of the campaign, his troops entrenched themselves on Mindor in preparation for Skywalker's inevitable assault. There, Shadowspawn hoped to lure the heroes of the Republic into his trap. Skywalker soon attacked the planet, with the aid of Fenn Shysa's Mandalorian Protectors, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2, and the pilots of Rogue Squadron.

Shadowspawn and his shadow stormtroopers fought in the Battle of Mindor against Skywalker and his allies, with the warlord himself taking to his enemy with a pair of unusual lightsabers, although he had underestimated the resourcefulness of his foes. The arduous battle finally ended, with the participation of the Mandalorians on the side of the Republic turning the tide. Shadowspawn's men fought to the death, resulting in a tremendous loss of life on both sides. Disgusted at what he perceived to be tremendous waste, Skywalker resigned from the New Republic military as a result of the events on Mindor, and focused on his Jedi studies.

Later movements
During the height of the Imperial Civil War, Palpatine arranged for the capture of the traitorous Mara Jade, who had left the service of the Empire and cut herself off from the Emperor's telepathic commands after killing a clone of Luke Skywalker in 9 ABY. Cronal had Jade imprisoned, but she was eventually rescued by New Republic forces.

The whereabouts of Cronal after these events could only be speculated on. The Imperial leader Carnor Jax, who seized power after Palpatine's final death and had once himself been a member of Blackhole's stormtroopers, obtained some of Cronal's forces for his own ranks. Lord Cronal was also thought to have been involved in the transformation of Irek Ismaren to the cyborg Lord Nyax.

Personality and traits
Lord Cronal was cunning, and one of Palpatine's most powerful dark side magi. But Cronal's heavy immersion in the dark side of the Force took a toll on him. Physically, the dark side ate away at Cronal, making him frail, shrunken, and dependent upon his life-support chamber. Cronal suffered mentally, too, with every vision and use of the dark side chipping away at his sanity. He became paranoid over nonexistent threats to his life, driving him further into seclusion. Cronal's tendency to mark his forces in black was another mark of his eccentricity, though it provided a tactical advantage as well. He was also able to manipulate his foes so they would play directly into his hands. Considered to be vicious in temperament, he ordered his troops to lay waste to many Republic worlds, and in doing so created wholesale slaughter and carnage in the year following the Battle of Endor. He was eager to confront Skywalker on Mindor, but was proven foolhardy when his trap failed. As a result, he was defeated, but not before having his soldiers fight to the last man.

Powers and abilities
Much of Blackhole's power derived from fear and paranoia. Individuals who spoke with him claimed to feel a noticeable chill, though measurements showed that the temperature of the air did not change. Though part of this fear was his physical presence, Cronal was also capable of inducing fear in others through the Force.

Cronal had many other powers of the Force, including the ability to control minds, rip thoughts from the minds of others, cast Force Illusions, and heal himself. Cronal could also speak Bothese, Huttese, and Neimoidian.

Behind the scenes
Blackhole first appeared in the comic Gambler's World by Russ Manning. Little information was given on the character, including his true name and why he only appeared in an insubstantial form. He would not make a second appearance under that name until 2001, 23 years later, for the article The Emperor's Pawns, in which some of these questions would be answered.

The Emperor's Pawns author Abel G. Peña originally intended for Blackhole to be Lord Shadowspawn, an Imperial warlord first mentioned in 1993's Dark Empire Sourcebook, by Michael Allen Horne, as one of the numerous warlords defeated by the New Republic early in its tenure. Rather than be a hologram projection, Blackhole/Shadowspawn was supposed to be a dark side spirit returned from death, an idea that Peña would later use for the Dark Underlord. However, Pablo Hidalgo had already prepared a biography of Blackhole for the Rebellion Era Sourcebook; rather than have two conflicting reports, Hidalgo's biography was used in place of Peña's in the article. Peña later, in The Dark Forces Saga, identified Blackhole with Cronal, a villain from Gamemaster Screen for Second Edition. Minor elements concerning Shadowspawn cut from The Emperor's Pawns were later resurrected by Peña for use in The History of the Mandalorians, published in 2005.

Joe Corroney had drawn a preliminary illustration of Blackhole based on the idea that he was Shadowspawn, which he labeled "Blackhole aka Lord Shadowspawn." When Peña's text was dropped, Corroney redrew Blackhole without the Sith sword and physical details. When Daniel Wallace was writing The New Essential Chronology, he gave Corroney's original sketch to illustrator Tommy Lee Edwards to use as the basis for his own illustration of Shadowspawn at Mindor. Peña, however, no longer considered the two characters to be the same. In 2004, along with Wallace, he developed a new framing story for Shadowspawn in an article on Imperial Warlords intended for Polyhedron magazine, but the publication was canceled before the article could be published. The article would have identified Shadowspawn as Atha Prime, the villain from an abandoned project submitted to Lucasfilm Ltd. by Kenner in 1985.

Shadowspawn returned to the Star Wars franchise as the primary villain of Matthew Stover's Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, slated to be released in December 2008. Stover's novel adapts and expounds upon a brief account of the Battle of Mindor given in The Essential Chronology. A blurb of the book released by StarWars.com provided a number of new details on Shadowspawn's character, identifying him as a Prophet of the Dark Side and an Imperial Intelligence agent like Blackhole. Phrasing from the blurb concerning Shadowspawn's exile and eventual return following Palpatine's death also mirrors Kenner's brief for the Atha Prime figure, leading to speculation on the Jedi Council Forums that the character would be finally proven to be Cronal and Atha Prime at the same time. Approximately a month before the novel's release, The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia revealed that Cronal and Shadowspawn are now, in fact, the same character.

While reading the Jedi Council Forums thread on Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, cover artist Dave Seeley noted that some were disappointed with the fact that the cover did not feature Shadowspawn. This prompted him to create a back cover for the book featuring its primary villain. Working from Tommy Lee Edwards' original artwork from The New Essential Chronology, Seeley set out to add more detail to Shadowspawn's design, using influences from both Eastern and Western culture.

Appearances

 * Gambler's World
 * Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided
 * Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor