When Darth Maul Fought Darth Vader

It happened in Legends, on a volcanic Sith moon called Kalakar Six, in the year the Death Star plans went missing. A cult of Sith fanatics resurrected Darth Maul through alchemy and set him on Vader to prove that a pure Sith belonged at Sidious' side. Maul won most of the duel. Vader ended it by summoning his lightsaber, catching the hilt in reverse, and driving the blade through his own body into Maul's stomach.

How Vader ended up there#

The setup is almost mundane. In 0 BBY the Death Star plans were stolen during a prison break, and the Emperor put Darth Vader personally in charge of getting them back. Word came through of a possible Rebel Alliance courier heading for Kalakar Six carrying the schematics, so Vader went to intercept.

He was shadowed the whole way by his Master, which is the first thing that should have made him suspicious.

What he found on the moon was not a courier. It was a splinter group of Sith fanatics called the Prophets of the Dark Side, and they had used Sith alchemy to bring Darth Maul back. Vader could not work out how it could possibly be the real Maul, and could not work out the methods used to do it, but the thing standing in front of him was not the specter he had once encountered as Anakin Skywalker. It was solid, it was armed, and it had every skill the original had.

Maul's argument#

The Prophets had a reason, and Maul agreed with it. In their view, Vader's years inside the Jedi Order had tainted him permanently. Only a pure Sith deserved to rule beside Sidious, and Maul had been that Sith before a Padawan on Naboo cut him in half. He had come to take the job back.

That belief was not baseless. The Prophets saw Vader as too much of a Jedi to ever truly commit to the dark side, and Sidious eventually reached a version of the same conclusion himself, trying at least twice to replace his apprentice with someone better suited. Maul was not fighting for revenge here. He was fighting for a position he thought was rightfully his.

The duel#

Both of them were equals for most of it, and the Prophets watching admitted afterwards that the two were far more evenly matched as duelists than they had assumed. Their money was on Maul.

Vader got the first real advantage, cutting Maul's lightsaber in two. Maul turned that into an upgrade. With two blades now he switched to Jar'Kai, holding off Vader's lightsaber with one weapon while cutting into his helmet with the other. Vader lost his weapon. Maul stood over him, certain of the win, and asked him the question that gives the story its bite.

What could you hate enough to destroy me?

Myself.

Vader summoned his lightsaber back through the Force, caught the hilt in reverse and ignited it. The blade came up past his own right side and punched straight through Maul's midsection. The comic itself puts it plainly: Vader only managed to beat a reborn Maul by impaling both of them through the stomach. He used the one thing he had that Maul did not, which was a total willingness to destroy himself to win.

The Prophets, in a technical sense, were right about Maul. He did beat Vader. He just did not survive being right.

Palpatine turns up#

Afterwards Vader met his Master again, badly damaged and deeply suspicious. Sidious was not remotely surprised by anything that had happened, and Vader came away convinced the entire episode had been another test rather than a genuine ambush. Whether Palpatine arranged the resurrection or simply watched it unfold, he had positioned himself to observe the whole thing and said nothing.

The distrust between mentor and student, already fed by years of similar trials, grew again. That relationship is the real casualty here. Sidious got a data point on how far his apprentice would go, and Vader got confirmation that his master would happily watch him die to find out.

The mission on Kalakar Six was written off as a wild bantha chase. Vader went back to hunting the Death Star plans, which took him to a Corellian corvette called the Tantive IV and a captured senator from Alderaan, and the rest of that story is well known.

Where this sits in continuity#

This is Legends, not current canon. The duel comes from the short story Resurrection in Star Wars Tales 9, part of the old Expanded Universe that Disney set aside in 2014. Its writer, Ron Marz, later confirmed the Maul in that story was meant to be genuinely the real Maul rather than a clone or an illusion, on the grounds that he had made it up in the first place.

Current canon takes Maul somewhere else entirely. He survives Naboo, rebuilds himself, and dies on Tatooine at Obi-Wan Kenobi's hand in 2 BBY without ever meeting Vader as an equal. The Legends version, where the two most feared duelists in the galaxy actually cross blades and one of them wins by stabbing himself, only exists in the old continuity. It is worth reading anyway.