Nightmare Fuel / Star Wars: The High Republic

Shrii ka rai ka rai
We're coming to take you away
Shrii ka rai ka rai
We're coming to take you away
They'll do what they can
and they'll do what they must
but when they find you all you'll be is dust.

For the first time since childhood, Stellan Gios was afraid.

— The Rising Storm

The High Republic era may have been a relative golden age for the Republic and Jedi Order, but that doesn't mean they didn't encounter their fair share of terrors waiting to be discovered.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

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General

• The Great Disaster is a perfect example of just how catastrophic a hyperspace accident can be and a good example of why things like the Holdo Maneuver are rarely done.
  • What caused this accident was something absolutely unprecedented even to hyperspace experts: the Legacy Run somehow collided with another ship while in hyperspace. According to experts such as the San Tekkas, this shouldn't be possible, as starships enter their own private dimension when they enter hyperspace. Apparently, this was caused by a Nihil ship jumping between public hyperspace routes at weird angles. Even worse, Eye of the Storm would reveal that Marchion Ro deliberately orchestrated the disaster.
  • The result of the accident is many worlds across the Outer Rim being hit with debris that is moving just below lightspeed, which is a lot like getting hit by a meteor. This almost destroys the Hetzal System. Until everyone could figure out how bad this was and what caused this, Chancellor Lina Soh had to mandate a hyperspace lockdown across the Outer Rim for damage control. In a galaxy historically known for having planet-destroying weapons, a mere Space Pirate managed to be just as destructive using an unusual variant of an everyday tool.
  • An unfortunate side effect of the lockdown is that some space travelers may be stranded either in deep space or on an inhospitable planet. Planets that have some civilization, but are only just getting settled (and the Outer Rim has only started being explored in this era), are cutoff from essential supplies.
• The fall of Starlight Beacon is elaborated on from the perspectives of several Jedi aboard the station or trying to evacuate others. Both vertical halves are separated from each other by debris and radiation leaks, and the hangars are completely locked down. And while that's going on, the Nihil agents who sabotaged the station are perfectly willing to die with the station if it means making sure no one gets off and there are Rathtars that have been let loose to cause chaos. But those threats are nothing compared to the Nameless terrors that the Nihil have sent there to deal with the Jedi. The encounters with the Nameless are played out like a scifi horror film.
• As the franchise progresses, it becomes more and more clear just how deranged Marchion Ro is. He may be soft-spoken and charming, but he's also incredibly ruthless, especially towards Jedi. In The Eye of Darkness, he can be soft-spoken one moment before frothing at the mouth when demanding a Jedi be executed by the Great Leveler. It's clear that Marchion doesn't just want to destroy the Jedi and the Republic; he wants them to suffer. Marc Thompson's portrayal of him in the audio books makes him sound even more terrifying.

The Drengir

• The Drengir being sentient, carnivorous plants that want nothing more than to spread themselves and consume all non-botanical life is already terrifying enough, but what they are capable of is even worse.
  • They are capable of inflicting prey with a Dark Side mind control toxin (and the victims we've seen so far are conscious about what the Drengir are trying to do to them) that can not only be spread like a plague, it can also be spread through Force bonds such as that of Ceret and Terec. And according to Dez Rydan, it can become bad enough to break a Jedi's connection to the Force.
  • Drengir are very difficult to kill as they are capable of regenerating instantaneously. Cut off their limbs with a lightsaber? They'll just grow them back. Cut one in half straight down the middle? Congratulations, you've just created another Drengir. Try to cut them into a lot of pieces? They can regenerate with even the smallest scrap of darkness. Not even chemical weapons like the Nihil's poison gas will hurt them. So far, some Jedi have taken extreme risks just to defeat them. (Reath Silas using himself as bait so he could throw them out into space to freeze to death, Sskeer willingly letting them mind-control him so he could learn their weaknesses and risking getting his mind destroyed just so Keeve could Mind Trick the Drengir hive mind into thinking the "meat" was tainted)
  • Aside from reproduction through division, they also apparently reproduce through seeds, and those seeds can somehow find their ways into the bodies of living beings. Eventually, that seed will start growing into a plant inside that being, before bursting out of them gruesomely.
  • The cherry on top? Despite being heavily attuned to the Dark Side, these creatures were bad enough back in the day that the Sith were the ones to lock them away on the Amaxine Station. Unfortunately, a few hapless Jedi visiting the station didn't realize that the source of the Dark Side there wasn't from the Sith statues (which were the seals) until it was too late. And once they spread throughout the Outer Rim and started feeding on people (even making it to Starlight Beacon), even the Hutts considered them enough of a threat to temporarily form an alliance with the Jedi. And even through the threat they posed to the galaxy on their own, the Drengir were ultimately a distraction the Jedi couldn't ignore and that the Nihil directly capitalized on (even directly collaborating with the Drengir and planting their seeds at key locations) while they carried out a devastating terrorist attack at the Republic Fair.
  • The Edge of Balance introduces a mutated variant of the Drengir that not only looks much more demonic than usual, they are capable of slowly turning living beings into wood instead of just draining them dry. And the other scary part, it's implied that the Nihil mutated them, seeing as not only did the Nihil plan for the seeds to get to Banchii like many other worlds, the wood-changing ability is eerily similar to the Great Leveler's petrification ability.
• Issue 7 of The High Republic comic has Keeve experiencing disturbing visions following her tapping into the Drengir's root-mind, one of which includes her suddenly having the Drengir speak through her. The last image of that issue is an unsettling possible vision of the future: Avar Kriss reduced to a mere skeleton in robes, with Drengir vines crawling throughout her corpse◊.

The Nameless

• In The Rising Storm, Marchion Ro gets his hands on a living weapon known as the Great Leveler, a weapon so terrible that Marchion's ancestors kept it locked away. This creature is capable of psychically assaulting Jedi through the Force, cutting them off from the Force, and at worst, leaving them as brittle, petrified husks with a look of terror on their face, as first demonstrated with Loden Greatstorm (seen in the page image, the scene being revisited in the first issue of Trail of Shadows), and those that survive its effects are horribly traumatized. And even worse, The Fallen Star reveals that the Leveler isn't the only one of its kind; the Nihil have a number of them at their disposal, and Marchion knows where to get more if any of them die.
• The Fallen Star gives us a few examples of what it's like to be killed by the Nameless from the perspective of Jedi, specifically Regald Coll and Orla Jareni. Before they turn to stone, they go through some horrifying hallucinations where they perceive reality melting around them while being cut off from the Force, leaving nothing behind but fear. After he's captured by Emerick Caphtor and Sian Holt, Doctor Uttersond reveals that it basically feeds on the Force.
• In some stories from Phase II, some Jedi don't sense those who've been killed by Nameless becoming one with the Force. As life is supposed to become one with the Force when it dies, it is heavily implied the victims are Deader than Dead if not suffering A Fate Worse Than Death.
• In visual medium stories where the Leveler or other Nameless are featured, the hallucinations we see from the Jedi's perspective are all sorts of deranged. In Emerick Caphtor's case, he gets visions of Ruustha Vidyarvrikt, the already-creepy Ongree nursemaid that took care of him and Stellan as babies and turn her into the subject of many a Nightmare Face (of note, no Ongree seen in other Star Wars media, who just have strange face structures at best, has ever been as deliberately terrifying as her) while the "Shrii ka rai" nursery rhyme plays in his head.
  Shrii ka rai ka rai
  We're coming to take you away
  Shrii ka rai ka rai
  We're coming to take you away
  They'll do what they can
  and they'll do what they must
  but when they find you all you'll be is dust.
  • The origins of that nursery rhyme? According to Doctor Uttersond, "Shrii-ka-rai" is one of the other names of the Nameless, which translates to "Eater of the Force". Phase II reveals that the nursery rhyme is actually the ramblings of a Jedi — Azlin Rell — who was driven irreparably insane by the Nameless compared to other Jedi during the Battle of Dalna. How irreparable? Even when the Nameless aren't clearly around, he's still having hallucinations of his allies as indescribable monsters, he's still getting messages about "the death of the Force", and not even the Jedi's best healers are able to undo the damage before he disappears without a trace from the Grava Monastery. 150 years later, he's not only shown to still be alive (bear in mind that Azlin is a human and not a naturally Long-Lived alien species), he's had to embrace the Dark Side of the Force to overcome the Nameless's effects on his mind and he implicitly gouged his own eyes out to block out the hallucinations.
• As terrifying as the hallucinations that the Jedi experience can get, what the Nameless are revealed to actually look like isn't any better, being desiccated, twitching long-limbed abominations with claws, many sharp teeth, octopus eyes and mouth tentacles. Most of the Nameless simply look misshapen, but the Leveler is a more imposing, pale-skinned, skeletal-looking hellbeast with large spines growing out of its back.
  • In Phase III, many of the Nameless in Nihil captivity look like the Leveler. Why? According to Niv Drendow Apruk (Baron Boolan's protege), most don't even survive hatching away from Planet X (a radically different ecosystem from any other planet in the galaxy), and those that do often suffer from fatal birth defects (and the first "successful" subject, Grendrek, still had perpetually rotting flesh and only lived as long as they did because Niv Drendow used a fungus-derived antiaging cream on them). In short, the Leveler wasn't exactly in a healthy state either when it hatched in the Path's captivity, and is lucky to have even survived. And that's without mentioning that the Nihil starve full-grown specimens taken from Planet X to capitalize on their Horror Hunger for the Force.
• Phase II would reveal that 150 years before the Great Disaster, the Path of the Open Hand (who are precursors to the Nihil) weaponized the Nameless not just against Jedi, but all Force users to enforce their religious agenda. As shown in Cataclysm, they were even willing to feed their own cult members to the Leveler for being outed as Force-sensitive, something they have almost no control over.
• Some of the Nameless's victims are consciously aware of what's happening to them as they are being calcified, struggle to speak and even watch as parts of their own bodies crumble to dust on top of already being deprived of a sixth-sense they've known their whole life (or had to suppress if they are a Path cultist that got outed). In short, death by Nameless is not a fun way to die if you're Force-sensitive.
• You may be thinking that just because their hallucinations only affect Force users, they're a pushover to non-Force users with blasters, right? Well, The Nameless Terror comic is there to prove you wrong. That comic reveals that not only are they incredibly hard to kill, they are also incredibly intelligent in spite of their animalistic behavior and constant hunger for the Force. When Rok Buran tries to bait the Nameless while Coron Solstus prepares a trap for the creatures, the Nameless doesn't take the bait and charges for the back of the crashed ship instead to go after the rest of the Jedi's allies.
• In Defy the Storm, Jordanna Sparkburn and Cair San Tekka come across an unusual blight on Arli's moon, which is home to a San Tekka manor. This blight causes any organic matter to slowly calcify on contact, and has nearly consumed the moon. After Cair is unwittingly infected (and has to have his right hand amputated), several characters remark how similar the calcification is to the Nameless's predation on Force users, and Vernestra and Azlin Rell can sense that the Force has been completely drained from Cair's severed hand. Given that the Nihil had blockaded Arli's moon and trapped the San Tekkas there, it is suggested that this blight may be a Nihil bio-weapon designed to emulate the effects of the Nameless against non-Force users, but the fact that Azlin Rell is familiar with what has been reported suggests this may be something even worse.

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