"Ajunta Pall beheaded their ruler, Hakagram Graush, and claimed the throne as the blood heir to the ancestral King Adas—and we became his Shadow Hands."
Hakagram Graush was a maleSith of the Sith Empire who ruled on the planetKorriban as the Sith King around the year6,900 BBY. After the arrival of the Dark Jediexiles on Korriban, following the Hundred-Year Darkness, the Sith sorcerer and monarch, alongside his people, disallowed the outsiders from learning their secrets of Sith magic. However, through the monarch's second-in-command known as the Shadow Hand, the numerous Dark Jedi eventually lured the King into their confidence. 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 demise, the tomb received a visit from the Sith LordDarth Plagueis, who was inquiring on the existence of Force ghosts, but no specter of Graush ever showed itself.
Unbeknownst to Graush, the Dark Jedi infiltrated the power structure of the Sith society, seeking to undermine the monarch's authority from within.[3] Betrayed by his own Shadow Hand,[2] Graush was lured into the Exiles' confidence, which led him to his death as Pall eventually decided to execute the Sith King. Graush was literally brought on his knees and beheaded by a swipe of his own war sword.[3] The Sith people concluded that the fallen Jedi were themselves more powerful gods than even the King, and they accepted Pall's takeover.[7] 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.[3]
Darth Plagueis sought to contact the spirit of Graush.
With Graush's demise, the Sith Order was founded, and the culture of the Sith race was turned into a dark side religion.[7] However, millennia after his death, the name of Hakagram Graush was still remembered. The MuunSith LordDarth Plagueis traveled to Korriban and visited the burial grounds, then 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, 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.[3]
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.[1] In spite of Korriban's cold[8] 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.[1] When he chose to appear bare-headed, the King's long dark hair could be seen flowing on his neck.[3] When Graush first met the Exiles, he was not overly impressed by the newcomers' superior technology. He did not hail them as deities, considering the Exiles powerful but not godlike.[3]
"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]."
In Book of Sith, Graush was mistakenly depicted as being killed by Pall with a lightsaber.
Hakagram Graush, last King of the Sith, first appeared in the second issue of the 1990scomic book series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi.[1] 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.[3]Daniel Wallace, author of the Book of Sith, originally intended the murdered monarch to be the Sith sorcerer Dathka Graush. However, Wallace realized it would not fit with Dathka's established timeline, and he introduced his probable descendant Hakagram instead.[9]
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.[9]