Sith

The Sith appear in this account less as a fully described institution than as a force that endures through its adepts, alliances, and perilous remains. Darth Vader embodies its living power and its intimate connection to Jax Pavan’s past; Sith weapons and holocrons make that power tangible, drawing the Jedi survivor into choices about trust, restraint, and the cost of seeking forbidden knowledge.

Identity and Living Legacy

Darth Vader is identified as a Sith and as a being who exceeds ordinary categories: Jax regards him as at once less and more than human, and less and more than a Jedi. Jax’s understanding is personal as well as political. He suspects, and believes he knows through the Force, that Vader was once Anakin Skywalker, the friend with whom he had sparred and hoped to become a Jedi Master. In their last encounter, Vader confirmed the connection with a slip of the tongue that may have been deliberate. The Sith identity therefore does not erase the former friend; it makes that friendship part of the danger Jax must face.

After Haninum Tyk Rhinann’s attempted assassination, Jax cannot accept Vader’s presumed death. Under the influence of a drug that unpredictably heightened his Force abilities, Vader lashed out, and the resulting energy vaporized Rhinann. Both men fell a great distance; Rhinann died, but Vader vanished. Jax knows that a normal human or even a normal Jedi might be presumed dead after such a fall, yet he cannot apply that measure to Vader. His description of Vader as the man who would not die gives the Sith adept a continuing presence even in absence: disappearance offers no proof that the threat has ended.

Alliances and Historical Conflict

The Sith also appear through their relationship with Dathomir’s outcast orders. In the years leading up to the Clone Wars, the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers allied themselves with the Sith. The account distinguishes those orders from the wider community of Dathomiri Witches: the allied groups were outcasts from existing tribes, and many Nightsisters and Nightbrothers were human–Zabrak hybrids. Their alliance places the Sith within a history of cooperation with groups beyond the Jedi’s more regimented world, though the evidence does not describe the alliance’s command structure or the terms of its operation.

That history is marked by an earlier assault on Coruscant. Before their alliance with the Sith, the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers used the chance discovery of the Infinity Gate in an effort to destroy the Republic’s capital. The Jedi defeated them and destroyed the Star Temple on Dathomir that contained the portal. Thirteen years later, Dathomir remained all but quarantined. The episode establishes a conflict between the Jedi and the Sith’s eventual allies, but it does not identify the Sith as participants in the attack itself. Keeping that distinction matters: the history links the Sith to the outcast orders without collapsing every action of those orders into a Sith operation.

Weapons and Dangerous Knowledge

Sith power reaches Jax not only through Vader but through objects that carry its threat forward. Before constructing a new lightsaber with Laranth, Jax had been using a Sith blade. Once he and Laranth had built the new weapon, he was relieved to carry a Jedi weapon instead when confronting the Emperor’s enemies; he had left the Sith blade aboard the Laranth. He doubted he could have talked his way out of appearing with a Sith weapon in hand. The contrast shows how an object can shape the interpretation of its bearer: Jax’s allegiance might be genuine, but the blade could make him appear aligned with the darkness he opposes.

A Sith Holocron presents a more inward and lasting danger. Jax received one from Haninum Tyk Rhinann, and its contents were said to disclose the secret for calling forth the power of the pyronium Anakin had entrusted to him. Jax’s father, Lorn Pavan, had once tried to acquire the Holocron. Yet Jax has not attempted to activate it. Sith Holocrons are rare and powerful, and are reputed to disturb the Force and seduce unprepared Jedi through their store of dark knowledge. Jax can feel the artifact’s subtle pull when he is near it. His fractured concentration makes him doubt that he could engage with it safely, so the threat is not merely the Holocron’s reputation: it is also the state of the person who might open it.

Jax keeps both the Holocron and the pyronium concealed close at hand, in a small trove behind a shelf in his quarters. He is tempted to entomb them somewhere and be free of the burden, but fears that Vader might find them if they fell into other hands. He therefore holds on to them in the hope that a legitimate use may someday emerge. The objects create a double bind: keeping them preserves the possibility of useful knowledge while maintaining a dangerous connection to Sith power; abandoning them might simply leave that power available to Vader.

Darth Ramage’s Holocron and the Price of Access

The danger becomes physical when Jax encounters Darth Ramage’s Holocron. Ramage was a Sith, and a particularly ruthless one; his science centered on the destructive use of power and was steeped in darkness. The Holocron is sealed with blood and rests on a black stone slab in pulsing crimson light. Jax’s own blood, from a hastily bandaged hand, opens only one corner closure slightly. That limited response suggests that the artifact demands a substantial quantity, not a token wound.

The mechanism makes access a moral test as well as a technical one. Jax infers that the required blood must belong to a sentient, most likely a Force-user. Supplying enough of his own blood would cripple the person trying to draw out Ramage’s secrets, impairing the very ability to use the Force to probe the Holocron’s locks. Jax concludes that the key must join spirit and matter: Ramage intended the seeker to commit a dark act by sacrificing another Force-user’s blood, perhaps enough to kill. The inference is Jax’s, but the design he observes supports his fear that the Holocron was made to resist use by someone of the light side.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Sith influence persists through unequal forms of survival. Vader disappears but cannot be safely counted dead; the Nightsisters’ failed assault remains legible in Dathomir’s isolation; and ancient knowledge waits inside artifacts that still exert a pull on the living. The Sith are thus not represented only by allegiance or battle. Their power also lies in what remains behind and in the difficult decisions those remnants impose on their opponents.

Jax’s responses define the conflict without making it simple. He leaves the Sith blade behind when he can, refuses to open the first Holocron while his concentration is fractured, and keeps dangerous objects from falling into Vader’s hands. Faced with Ramage’s blood-sealed device, he recognizes that its intended means of access could demand precisely the kind of act that would compromise its seeker. The struggle is therefore not just to defeat a Sith adept or acquire forbidden knowledge; it is to prevent the pursuit of power from reproducing the darkness embedded in the knowledge itself.