Jax Pavan Explores the Star Temple Ruins on Dathomir

Jax Pavan’s exploration of the Star Temple ruins on Dathomir turns a summons to seek communion into a personal encounter with grief and the possibility of another past. The journey is not simply an archaeological visit: the ruins’ unstable energies bring his memory of Laranth Tarak’s death into the present, while the Sith Holocron pulses amid the same forces that once drove the Infinity Gate.

The summons and the decision to go

Jax’s route to Dathomir begins before he reaches the planet. In the cockpit of the Aethersprite, he senses a powerful, unfamiliar Force presence pushing aside the recognizable consciousness of the Whiplash leader. The presence belongs to the Cephalons, whose communication arrives not as an ordinary spoken voice but as a clear, insistent directive. They urge him to seek communion and sisters, and warn that indecision and Yimmon’s separation threaten more than one person. Their words connect Jax’s immediate situation to a larger, still-unexplained concern about separation.

Jax interprets the appeal through his own losses. The word sisters brings Laranth to mind: she was a fellow Force-user, but she is dead and returns to him only in dreams and memories. For a moment he fears that she might be beside him in the cockpit. The summons therefore points outward, toward a community he has not yet sought, while pressing on the absence he cannot undo.

He makes the decision emotionally before his reason catches up. Dropping out of hyperspace at the edge of Bothan space, he resets the navigation controls for Dathomir. The chilling part of the choice is that the course is already laid in. His conscious decision follows a direction that, in some sense, he has already set; that small reversal gives the Cephalons’ warning about indecision an immediate, personal force.

Permission and the approach to the ruins

On Dathomir, Jax does not simply proceed to the ruin on his own authority. Clan Mother Augwynne Djo permits the visit on the condition that one of the Sisterhood accompany him. Jax accepts the condition and thanks her. The escort requirement makes the visit a negotiated crossing into a place governed by the local community, rather than an unaccompanied expedition by an outsider.

The landscape he enters is stark and exposed. Jax estimates the plateau to be about a dozen kilometers long and perhaps five across. To the west it seems to fall away at the edge of the world; to the east it meets a forest of smoke-colored trees. His escort heads toward that forest, moving lightly over the obstacles and performing a somersault before landing on a boulder. She has told Jax she will ward away rancors, but privately recognizes that they do not come onto the devastated plateau. Jax sees no signs of them and wonders why she has left him alone. He considers that he may have driven her away instinctively, much as he had set the course for Dathomir.

When he calls for his escort and receives no answer, Jax draws his lightsaber and steps into the shadow of the spires. The response is immediate: his senses fill with warm static, and he becomes disoriented and breathless. A touch seems to come from behind him, but nobody is there. In that instant he expects Laranth to be standing with him. The absence that follows is not abstract; the place has made her presence imaginable, then returned him to the fact of her loss.

The mirror of memory and choice

Jax turns back toward a twisted mirror and finds himself looking into the fore-and-aft passage of the dying Far Ranger. His lightsaber still hums, but the orange light comes from fires consuming the ship, not from the Sith Holocron. In the flickering scene, Laranth stands beneath the open weapons bay while Den Dhur struggles with the ladder beside her. Jax steps toward them, drawn into a scene that belongs to the past rather than the plateau around him.

The reflection changes. Laranth lies dying on the deck, a shard of metal in her neck; then she is standing again while her dead body lies at Jax’s feet. The images do not offer a clean escape from what happened. Instead, they place the outcome he remembers beside the outcome he believes might have followed if he had not hesitated. Jax understands them as two paths and two pasts: one made through his choices and indecision, another he might have made. His wish to take one more step and choose again cannot undo the loss. For a fraction of a second he seems able to do so, and steps forward crying Laranth’s name, but he stumbles and falls to his knees.

The physical consequences reassert themselves amid the vision. His lightsaber goes dark, the Holocron tumbles from his hand, and a shard of obsidian cuts his palm as he tries to break his fall. The cut and the dropped artifact mark the return from the imagined alternative to the bodily present. The experience has intensified, rather than resolved, his uncertainty about whether he has accepted Laranth’s death.

The temple’s energies and the Holocron

Reorienting himself, Jax realizes that he is kneeling on an artificial-looking slab of bedrock, perhaps part of a floor, an altar, or a control matrix. Nearby lie black stone fragments bearing apparent writing or drawings. One piece, about the length of his hand, has symbols and contours too regular to be natural. These details lead him to suspect that he has reached very near the heart of the Star Temple, where the energies may be unstable and time itself may not behave normally.

The Sith Holocron lies roughly half a meter away, pulsing with light across its facets and engraved surfaces. When Jax picks it up on his uninjured hand, its pulse deepens atop the stone slab, and he can feel the reverberations in the Force. The Star Temple is also teeming with energy: Jax recognizes it as the power that drove the Infinity Gate, energy bent to the service of the dark side. The artifact and the ruin are therefore linked not merely by proximity but by a shared response to forces active in the temple.

That response does not answer whether the Holocron is closer to opening. Jax concentrates his own energies on it and allows his Force sense to examine its texture, which he experiences through sharply opposed qualities: acid and oil, quicksilver and glass, fire and ice. The encounter ends not with a recovered history or a settled understanding of Laranth’s death, but with the artifact still resisting certainty. The ruins have brought Jax nearer to the temple’s center while leaving him inside the very questions that brought him there: how to act without being ruled by hesitation, and how to seek connection when loss has made separation feel final.