Zanna Lightsaber Staff (The First of the Rule of Two)

Hello Everyone, today I am going way back to 980BBY, nearly a thousand years before the events of Star Wars. This is the time of the great Sith War on the planet Rusan, between the warring Sith Tribes and Brotherhoods. The Sith would promote a leader but the remaining members all had aspirations to be the Dark Lord Sith leader and would plot and gang up to overthrow the current head. This lead to a weakening of the Sith Order but one warrior, Darth Bane, saw what was happening and put in place a plan to resolve the problem. The plan was to use a deadly weapon called a “Thought Bomb” which when detonated would wipe out all Force sensitive Sith in the vicinity. As a result he would be the sole Sith left and he would take on an Apprentice. This Apprentice would be a young 10 year old girl called “Rain”. Rain had landed on the planet as her family’s ship was damaged in crossfire and she fell out of the ship as it crashed. The remaining family members thought she had died from the fall but she survived by landing on a soft fluffy creature called a Bouncer. She befriended this creature and recovered from the ordeal, until a Jedi recon squad inadvertently killed her new friend. Enraged, Rain attacked the Jedi. Normally this would be misguided but Rain was unbeknownst to her Force Sensitive and her attacks were fuelled by the Darkside of the force. She killed the Jedi but the disturbance attracted the attention of Darth Bane, who when he found her, took her on as his Apprentice. She reverted to using her birth-name and became known as Darth Zannah! Zannah had to construct a weapon as part of her training and built a double bladed staff, this is my interpretation of that weapon, this is ZANNA…

ZANNA Staff

ZANNA Emitter

ZANNA Upper Staff

ZANNA Switch

ZANNA Lower Staff

ZANNA Reverse Detail

ZANNA Staff 2

ZANNA Staff 3

Artist Impression of Darth Zannah

The staff has emitters that look like Darth Maul’s staff, which is no surprise as it is rumoured Darth Maul based his weapon on Zannah’s original, built around 900 years earlier! The design is functional with a central switch module to control both blades simultaneously. To break up the overall black look I used two dual-toned couplers to add a little decoration. The staff is powered by synthetic crystals, so has “Sith Red” blades but as you may be aware, Disney dismissed the idea of these crystals recently so this design is considered Non-Canon now. The original real world description of the weapon comes from the Bane Trilogy of books by Drew Karpyshyn (a great read btw if you can get copies!) I feel this staff has an important place in the Star Wars history as it was the weapon of the FIRST Apprentice in the famous “Rule of Two” doctrine introduced by her Master, Darth Bane.

Well this concludes my offering today, I had best stop before I go off and start ranting about how Disney should use and integrate the “old” stories! So once more I would like to thank you all for visiting and hope you will return to see more in upcoming posts. And please, if you like what you have seen here then tell your friends! Till next time.

Darth Zannah, Darth Bane and all related names and material are Trademark/©Copyright of Drew Karpyshyn.