During the era known as the Republic Dark Age, Kerra Holt, a Human Jedi Knight, had a younger relative within her family. This child was the offspring of Aron Holt, a skin diver, and his spouse Mercia. Both parents were researchers at the University of Sanbra, engaged in a project to locate the Helm of Ieldis, an ancient Sith artifact crafted by the Sith Lord Ieldis before the Great Hyperspace War. By the year 1032 BBY, Kerra's personal mission to locate her parents and younger relative led her to the Odionate, the territory controlled by the Sith Lord Odion. Although she successfully determined the fate of her parents, she could not find her sibling. It was presumed they had been integrated into Odion's network of cloisters, which were planet-sized orphanages. After Odion's defeat at the Battle of Vanahame, Kerra adopted the belief that all children within Odion's cloisters were like her own siblings.
It was known that Kerra Holt's mother, Mercia, was carrying the child during the invasion of Aquilaris Minor in 1032 BBY. During the conflict, Mercia and her husband Aron were captured by the Sith Lord Odion, who had discovered their research regarding the Helm of Ieldis during a raid on Sanbra. Driven by his nihilistic ambition to dominate the galaxy, Odion initiated Project Pandemonium with the intention of acquiring the Helm for his own use. At some point before their second expedition to Sarrassia in 1039 BBY, Mercia gave birth to this child, who was then forcibly taken from her by Odion's subordinates. The child was brought up in an Odionate cloister, a planet-sized orphanage where children from across the Odionate were subjected to indoctrination and conditioning through solitary confinement, turning them into workers and soldiers for Odion's war efforts.
Before their deaths on Skarpos in 1038 BBY, Mercia Holt expressed her sorrow in a holorecording that this sibling was a child that she and her husband would never get to know. She also voiced her hope that Kerra had somehow survived the events on Aquilaris. In 1032 BBY, Kerra Holt, the child's older sibling, infiltrated the Odionate disguised as a Novitiate and learned about the existence of the cloisters. She believed that her younger sibling was imprisoned there, but understood that reuniting with them would be difficult because of an Odionate policy of not keeping written records of the inmates.
After obtaining the Helm of Ieldis on Skarpos and successfully testing it on three entire armies with devastating results, Odion returned to the spaceport moon of Vanahame, where one cloister was located. There, Odion intended to use the negative emotions of the thousands of child inmates and convert them into dark side energy. Odion planned to use this energy to drive all the inhabitants of the Grumani sector into a murderous rage. However, his plans were foiled by Kerra and his second-in-command, General Beld Yulan, who turned the lights back on in the cloister and then freed the children. This created a surge of positive emotions such as joy and relief, which caused the Helm to overload, burning Odion to death.
With his territory already collapsing due to attacks from his Sith relatives, Odion tried to bargain with Kerra for his life. He offered to help her find her younger sibling if she saved him. However, Kerra had by then come to believe that all the children in the cloisters throughout the Odionate were her brothers and sisters, regardless of their species or gender. She refused and left Odion to die. Due to the lack of documentation, Kerra realized that it would be very difficult to find family members who had been processed into the cloister system. The sibling would have grown up without knowing the identity of its parents or its relationship to Kerra.
After the Battle of Vanahame, Kerra and Yulan evacuated the orphans at the Vanahame cloister into Republic Space. They managed to free a few other cloisters, but the others had been captured by the other Sith Lords, especially Odion's estranged younger brother Daiman, who had taken over the largest part of the former Odionate. Kerra then made it her mission to free the children and their parents from Sith rule.