By 25,792 BBY, the Rakatan invasion of the Tython system had become open war. The Infinite Empire had already struck Fury Station, seized the gas giants Obri and Mawr and their moons, failed to take Tython in its first assault, and captured the forest world Ska Gora. The Je'daii Order, once a spiritual and mediating institution, now stood at the center of a military coalition with the Settled Worlds. The war forced the Order to mobilize armies, field starfighters, command allied governments, manufacture dark-side weapons, and reconsider a prophet it had previously imprisoned as insane.
The source tradition
The decisive campaign is depicted in John Ostrander and Jan Duursema's Dawn of the Jedi: Force War #1–5, published by Dark Horse Comics in 2013 and 2014. The series follows the Je'daii and Settled Worlds coalition as it fights Rakatan forces under Predor Skal'nas.
The previous Force Storm and Prisoner of Bogan arcs establish the invasion's causes, Xesh's arrival, the rediscovery of Forcesaber technology, and Daegen Lok's disputed prophecy. Force War begins after those warnings have become battlefield reality.
The invasion begins before 25,792 BBY
The Rakatan campaign started in 25,793 BBY. Predor Skal'nas sought the Prime Infinity Gate rumored to exist somewhere on Tython, hoping ancient Kwa technology might help reverse the Rakata's declining connection to the Force.
The first major target was Fury Station, an outpost orbiting Furies Gate at the edge of the Tython system. The Rakata then took Obri and Mawr and their moons, giving them control over major portions of the outer system.
The chronology matters because the Je'daii did not suddenly wake to war in 25,792 BBY. By then they had already spent months watching Settled Worlds fall.
The first assault on Tython fails
After taking the outer system, the Rakata struck Tython. The Je'daii successfully repelled that initial assault.
This victory prevented an immediate conquest of the Order's sacred center, but it did not end the invasion. Skal'nas redirected his forces toward other Settled Worlds and established a new foothold.
A defensive victory can therefore be strategically incomplete. Tython survived while the surrounding system continued to collapse.
Ska Gora falls
The forest world Ska Gora became one of the war's most important losses. Rakatan forces captured the planet after their failure at Tython, killing many Je'daii and establishing a fortified command base in the Valley of Kraau.
The fall had another meaning: Daegen Lok and Hawk Ryo had seen this event seven years earlier in their Chasm vision. The image of dark warriors moving across Ska Gora with blades of fire was now historical fact.
Lok's warning had been incomplete and distorted, but its central military image was vindicated.
The Settled Worlds and Je'daii unite
Ska Gora's conquest helped force the Settled Worlds into a more unified defense. The Je'daii Order became part of a combined military structure rather than operating as an independent religious peacekeeping institution.
Master Rajivari served as senior commander of the allied war effort. Daegen Lok was recalled from imprisonment and again given the rank of general because his knowledge of Rakatan weapons, tactics, and the prophetic threat had become militarily useful.
The institution that had rejected Lok now needed him.
Rajivari and the militarization of the Order
Rajivari's role demonstrates how quickly the Je'daii adapted to conventional war. The Order operated fighters, coordinated with planetary governments, deployed ground troops, and used commanders with authority beyond ordinary temple life.
This militarization was not necessarily permanent at first. Institutions often tell themselves emergency powers are temporary.
But war creates expertise, hierarchy, equipment, habits, and expectations that remain after the immediate emergency ends.
Daegen Lok returns as General
Lok's return is one of the war's sharpest institutional reversals. The Je'daii had treated his obsession with the coming invasion as evidence of dangerous imbalance. Now that the invasion had arrived, they restored him to military leadership.
That decision did not mean the Council suddenly accepted everything Lok believed. It meant military necessity outweighed earlier concerns.
Emergency conditions can rehabilitate people whose methods an institution previously condemned, especially when those methods become useful.
The Je'daii adopt Forcesabers
The Order also crossed a technological and ethical boundary. Using knowledge derived from Xesh and Rakatan technology, Je'daii began manufacturing their own Forcesabers.
These weapons drew on dark-side energy. The Je'daii therefore adopted a technology associated with the enemy and with a side of the Force their balance philosophy treated as dangerous when used without restraint.
The choice was strategic: Rakatan weapons outclassed traditional forged blades. Refusing the technology could mean military defeat.
When an enemy weapon becomes necessary
Adopting an enemy's weapon is never purely technical. It changes training, doctrine, identity, supply chains, and ideas about acceptable violence.
The Forcesaber also blurred the distinction between Je'daii and Rakatan material culture. A future archaeologist finding one on a battlefield could not simply assume the wielder's allegiance.
War accelerates cultural borrowing because survival rewards rapid appropriation.
The battle of Shikaakwa
Rakatan forces under Sub-Predor Ceh'let attacked Shikaakwa, the same world that had been the political center of Hadiya's Despot War years earlier. This time former enemies within the system fought on the same side against the Infinite Empire.
Rajivari, Lok, and Baron Volnos Ryo coordinated the defense. Je'daii starfighters, including squadrons led by Hawk Ryo, struck Rakatan positions while allied ground forces resisted the invasion.
The war reorganized political memory. Shikaakwa had once fought the Je'daii. Now the Je'daii defended it.
Flesh Raiders
The Rakata used Flesh Raiders as assault troops and instruments of terror. In later Tython history the species would become deeply associated with the planet, but during this period they functioned within Rakatan military systems.
The use of subordinate or controlled populations in imperial warfare complicates simple ethnic descriptions of armies. “Rakatan forces” included people who were not Rakata and whose own relationship to imperial authority could involve coercion.
Empires often make conquered populations participate in further conquest.
Xesh tries to decapitate the invasion
Xesh proposed killing Predor Skal'nas and allowing the Rakatan command structure to fracture through succession rivalry. He understood that Predors competed for power and that the death of a dominant leader could trigger internal conflict.
Using his Force Hound abilities, he helped locate Skal'nas's base on Ska Gora.
The plan relied on a social weakness inside the Infinite Empire: intense hierarchy without secure collective loyalty.
The trap on Ska Gora
The Je'daii attack on the Rakatan base did not go as planned. Skal'nas anticipated the assault and trapped the attackers.
Many Je'daii were captured and placed in containment systems beneath the fortress. Xesh himself was taken, giving Skal'nas access to the former Force Hound whose defection had become a major threat.
The episode demonstrates the danger of intelligence depending too heavily on one insider's knowledge. Xesh understood the Rakata deeply, but Skal'nas understood him too.
Captivity and imperial extraction
Rakatan prisoners were not merely held. The Infinite Empire had long treated Force-sensitive beings as resources. Captured Je'daii represented bodies, knowledge, and Force potential that could be studied or exploited.
This is consistent with the larger structure of Rakatan rule, which treated sentient populations as labor pools and technological inputs.
Captivity therefore extended imperial extraction from worlds to persons.
The assault reaches Ashla
As the war escalated, Rakatan forces struck Ashla, Tython's light-side moon, and decimated Settled Worlds defenses there. The attack carried symbolic as well as military weight because Ashla was foundational to Je'daii cosmology.
For the Je'daii, war had now entered sacred geography. The enemy was not simply occupying distant colonies. It was attacking places through which the Order understood the Force itself.
The second battle of Tython
The decisive confrontation brought Skal'nas back to Tython. His objective remained the Prime Infinity Gate believed to lie within the Chasm.
Rakatan forces attacked while Skal'nas and Xesh descended toward the ancient structure. Daegen Lok and Shae Koda pursued them. Elsewhere, Sek'nos Rath escaped Rakatan captivity and rallied freed slaves into the fighting.
The battle therefore united Je'daii, Settled Worlds soldiers, defectors, and liberated imperial subjects against the invasion.
Freed slaves become combatants
Sek'nos's role is significant because liberation did not leave former slaves outside the political struggle. Freed captives fought against the system that had held them.
This changes the meaning of the coalition. It was no longer only a defense of local worlds. It also became a revolt by people inside the Rakatan imperial order.
Imperial collapse often accelerates when external resistance and internal rebellion reinforce one another.
The death of Skal'nas
The campaign ended with the defeat and death of Predor Skal'nas. Once his authority collapsed, many Rakatan forces turned against one another or fled.
Xesh's earlier prediction about Predor rivalry proved broadly correct: the command structure was highly personalized and vulnerable to decapitation.
The Tython system survived the invasion, but the institutions and technologies of the Je'daii had been transformed by the effort required to win.
Victory does not restore the old Je'daii world
The Je'daii had defeated the Rakatan invasion, but they could not simply return to the society that existed before Xesh arrived. They had embraced Forcesabers, organized armies, experienced mass occupation, watched sacred worlds become battlefields, and absorbed people shaped by Rakatan slavery.
Balance had become harder to understand after practitioners on both sides had used the Force as a weapon on an enormous scale.
This tension leads into the broader Force Wars that eventually divide followers of Ashla and Bogan and produce the transition toward the Jedi Order.
War as institutional transformation
The Force War shows that institutions are transformed not only by ideology but by practical necessity. The Je'daii did things during the invasion that would previously have been difficult to reconcile with their identity: mobilizing armies, adopting dark-side weapons, recalling a dangerous exile, and exercising authority across planetary governments.
Each decision could be justified as temporary. Together, they created a new institutional reality.
War also rearranged political relationships. Former enemies became allies. Slaves became soldiers. Prophets became generals. Foreign technology became local technology. Sacred geography became strategic terrain.
Victory preserved the Je'daii population while destabilizing the form of Je'daii life that existed before the war.
Force War versus Force Wars
Canon versus Legends
Where the Force War fits
Sources and further reading
- John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, Dawn of the Jedi: Force War #1–5, Dark Horse Comics, 2013–2014.
- John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, Dawn of the Jedi: The Prisoner of Bogan #1–5, Dark Horse Comics, 2012–2013.
- Tim Lebbon, Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void, Del Rey, 2013.
- Dawn of the Jedi: Force War #1, Dark Horse
- Invasion of the Tython system, Wookieepedia
- Second battle of Tython, Wookieepedia
- Force Wars, Wookieepedia