Darth Ruin

Darth Ruin, born as Phanius, was an Umbaran Dark Lord of the Sith who lived over twenty centuries before the Battle of Yavin.

Biography
An intelligent and charismatic renegade Jedi Master, Phanius was known for the disturbing tone of his philosophy, which included elements of moral relativism and solipsism, possibly echoed in certain aspects by the much later Potentium.

Phanius abandoned his oath and left the Order to pursue prohibited teachings, becoming one of the first of what would eventually become know as the Lost Twenty. He secretly united the numerous Sith clans, possibly, left over from the Old Sith Wars or the post-Cold War Sith Empire and founded the New Sith Empire. In an event known as the Fourth Great Schism, fifty Jedi Knights soon followed him and pledged themselves to his new Sith Order and to the Dark Side of the Force.

The newly rechristened Darth Ruin and his followers initiated the New Sith Wars against the Jedi, but Ruin's Sith Order quickly disintegrated. Ruin was single-minded and his ambitions led to hatred and betrayal by his followers, who killed him.

Behind the scenes
The character of Darth Ruin was created by George Lucas as part of the backstory for the prequel trilogy. In Lucas's notes, Ruin is an unnamed Jedi Knight who fell to the dark side with fifty followers 2,000 years prior to the film saga, founding the Sith. Since the Sith have been well established in other C-canon works for thousands of years, this "foundation" was degraded to be only a schism, after three previous ones. All other information on him was created by Abel G. Peña.

According to Peña, due to the Jedi placing Phanius in the Lost Twenty, they probably did not know his identity of Darth Ruin. When naming him, Peña also considered the names Reaper, Fatalis, Necro, Mortalis, Eradicus, Execute, and Solipsis. He also considered giving him a number of "Sithly" professions such as necromancer, sorcerer, warlock, and archmage.

The name "Phanius" is actually a truncated form of the name Epiphanius, suggesting Ruin's explosive insights. Ephiphanes is also the name of a Gnostic writer in Roman times, connecting Gnostic (recognized as heretical) philosophy with Ruin's heretical teachings in his time.

Appearances

 * Darth Bane: Rule of Two
 * Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace novel