Zekk is a human orphan from the colony world Ennth, introduced in Young Jedi Knights: The Lost Ones (1995), the third book of the Legends series by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta. He grows up scavenging on Coruscant, friendly with Jacen and Jaina Solo and conscious that they have futures and he does not.
That is what the Shadow Academy exploits. The Nightsister Tamith Kai and the fallen Jedi Brakiss take him, train him, tell him he is exceptional — the thing nobody else has told him — and turn him out as their Darkest Knight. The series is unusually clear-eyed about the recruitment: it works because the Jedi never looked twice at him.
His return from it takes books rather than a scene, and it is not clean. He is one of the young cast the New Jedi Order novels carried forward, into the Yuuzhan Vong war and the strange collective consciousness of the Dark Nest trilogy, still not entirely sure the Order wants him.
He is Legends, and he is the best thing the Young Jedi Knights line produced: a study of why a bright, capable, unnoticed adolescent is exactly who the dark side recruits.
