Before Darth Plagueis became the Sith Lord who trained Palpatine, he was still only an apprentice.
In Legends, he did not become the Sith Master through ceremony, inheritance, or permission. He took the title the Sith way, by killing the master who came before him.
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Plagueis Was Trained By Darth Tenebrous
Before he became the Sith Master, Darth Plagueis was Hego Damask, a Muun born into wealth and power.
His path to the Sith began long before he ever trained Palpatine. In Legends, his mother discovered that he was sensitive to the Force and gave him away to Darth Tenebrous, the Bith Sith Lord who would become his master.
Tenebrous trained him in the ways of the Sith, but Plagueis was not raised only as a warrior. Under Tenebrous, he learned how the Sith worked from the shadows. By day, Plagueis lived as Hego Damask, a powerful financier connected to Damask Holdings. Behind that public life, he was being shaped into the next Dark Lord of the Sith.
Tenebrous himself also hid behind another identity. Publicly, he was Rugess Nome, a brilliant starship designer. Privately, he was part of Darth Bane’s Sith line, carrying the Rule of Two forward while preparing Plagueis to serve the Grand Plan.
But Plagueis was not meant to remain an apprentice forever.
Like every Sith trained under the Rule of Two, his place beneath Tenebrous was temporary. One master held the power, and one apprentice was expected to crave it. For Plagueis to become the Sith Master, Tenebrous had to die.
Plagueis Killed His Master On Bal’demnic
Plagueis finally became the Sith Master on the planet Bal’demnic.
In 67 BBY, Darth Tenebrous traveled there with Plagueis after learning about rich deposits of cortosis ore beneath the planet’s crust. Cortosis was valuable because of its resistance to lightsabers, and Tenebrous wanted to inspect the mining operation himself.
But the mission had already been sabotaged.
Inside the cave system, their mining probe struck a pocket of lethane gas and triggered a massive explosion. Tenebrous was powerful enough to contain the blast with the Force, but the cavern around them began to collapse. That was the moment Plagueis had been waiting for.
Instead of saving his master, he used the disaster against him. As the cave came down, Plagueis brought the ceiling crashing onto Tenebrous, crushing him beneath the stone.
Tenebrous was still alive, but badly injured. He understood what had happened. His apprentice had chosen the moment, used the accident, and turned it into a Sith betrayal.
Then Plagueis finished him. With Tenebrous dead, Plagueis was no longer the apprentice. He had taken the title the way the Sith expected it to be taken, by murdering the master who stood above him.
Plagueis Had To Secure His Place As Sith Master
Tenebrous was dead, but Plagueis soon learned that his master had not been honest with him.
After killing Tenebrous on Bal’demnic, Plagueis discovered that he had not been Tenebrous’s only apprentice. Tenebrous had secretly trained another Sith named Darth Venamis, a Bith who believed he also had a claim to the Sith legacy.
That meant Plagueis’s new title was not completely safe.
Venamis eventually confronted him on Sojourn. He did not come as a normal rival. He came as another apprentice of Tenebrous, someone who had been prepared in secret and who saw Plagueis as the obstacle standing between him and the mantle of Dark Lord. The two fought, and Plagueis defeated him.
But Plagueis did not simply kill Venamis in the usual way. Instead, he kept him alive, poisoned him into a coma, and later used him as a subject in his experiments with midi-chlorians and life itself.
After that, Plagueis began removing the other Force-sensitive beings Venamis had been watching as possible future apprentices. He was not only killing a rival. He was cutting away every loose thread Tenebrous had left behind. Only then was Plagueis truly secure.
