WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Wars: The High Republic #4 by Cavan Scott, Ario Anindito, Mark Morales, Annalisa Leoni, and VC’s Ariana Maher, available now.
The Sith famously hate the Jedi, but it’s also clear that the Dark Side worshippers are afraid of their Light Side counterparts. Things like Darth Sidious’ attempt to turn Luke Skywalker away from the Jedi and to the Dark Side and Order 66 show that he knew that the Jedi were the main obstacles to his plans for galactic domination, which means on some level he’s at least a little bit scared of them, even if he would never admit it. However, the latest issue of Star Wars: The High Republic features an alien species that ancient Sith seemed to fear even more than the Jedi Order, the Drengir.
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In the issue, Keeve Trennis is searching for fellow Jedi Ceret on the planet Sedri Minor with a local boy named Bartol. They find Ceret in the underground lair of creatures known as Drengir, several of which then attack them. Meanwhile, another Drengir emerges from the body of a dead Hutt aboard a Jedi space station and attacks. In issue #4, with Keeve’s group and Jedi Marshal Avar Kriss captured, a Drengir that possessed Keeve’s former master, Sskeer, explains its species’ history.
Long ago, the Drengir roamed the galaxy feasting on other beings. Eventually, they gained the notice of the Sith and for a time the two groups worked alongside one another. But the Sith predictably betrayed them, for which the Drengir possessing Sskeer says, “they paid the price.” Eventually, the Sith, supposedly afraid that they could not kill the Drengir, trapped the first of the species, known as “the Great Progenitor” within”totems, which the Sskeer-Drengir says also caused the rest of them to sleep underground until Jedi found the Progenitor by accidentally waking her and waking them all up.
For the Sith to turn their backs on a powerful ally out of fear highlights just how dangerous the Drengir are, especially since the Dark Lords’ egos were so fragile. The Sith are some of the most supremely arrogant villains in all of fiction, so the fact that they were able to admit to themselves that they miscalculated in choosing to ally themselves with the Drengir signifies how dangerous they found the species to be, which also suggests that the Drengir pose an enormous threat to the rest of the galaxy.
However, the fact that it is a Drengir that tells this story casts some doubt on its veracity, as the creature possessing Sskeer could be inflating its peoples’ capabilities, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case.
The Drengir are shown to both be physically dangerous and have powerful control of the Dark Side, and while Sskeer was eventually able to break free from their control (and stated that he purposely allowed himself to be possessed to learn about them) they were also able to use Ceret’s link to their twin, Terec to control the latter, even though they were not even on the same planet. But perhaps the most alarming description of the Drengir is the idea that not even the Sith were capable of killing them, given that it took only a handful of Sith to enact the plan that destroyed the Jedi Order.
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