Dominion The Heart of the Force (The Jedi Order | High Republic Dominion of Moonus Mandel)

[Pillar of Reflection]

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MOONUS MANDEL​

The Temple of The Heart
The Undying Garden​

Mist pooled in the hollows and valleys like trapped clouds of silver. From the ridges of Moonus Mandel, the ancient Jedi Enclave that sat within its steep confines seemed less a structure than a living continuation of the mountain itself; its roofs were sloped like the wings of mountain birds amidst carved bridges draped in moss. Its walls carried the scars and embrace of the roots of old silverleaf trees whose leaves were mixed with instruments that chimed softly in the wind. Throughout the temple water carried the sound of life between the terraces, feeding small bamboo fountains that clacked rhythmically meeting the distant call of an unseen bird and the whisper of the Jedi within sweeping dew from the stones before sunrise.

Every day at the Temple of the Heart began this way, since the beginning of time it had always been so.

The world beyond these mountains, with its wars, its empires, its debts; it all might as well have been legend. The people of the Enclave spoke of it the way one might speak of winter when surrounded by perpetual spring, a thing not of their concern. They had chosen to live here, among the moss and the guardianship of the heart.

A narrow path wound from the meditation cloisters down toward the orchard terraces. Along it walked a young Jedi in plain robes, she wore no weapon at her belt and her eyes reflected the pale gold of dawn that had cast itself beautifully across the mountain range. Beside her strode a droid, impossibly old, its once-gleaming plating worn to the colour of riverstone. Its voice, when it spoke, came through a trembling vocoder that sounded almost human.

"Your step is lighter than yesterday, Master Teyra. The healers will be pleased."

She smiled without looking up. "It's the morning air. Even the ache of age yields to it."

The droid tilted its head with a faint click. "I was not aware you were capable of age."

She laughed softly, at the droid's confusion before pausing beneath an archway of flowering vines, where they could watch a group of initiates feed the pond's crystal fish. The youngest bowed when they noticed her, hands still damp from the water. Teyra returned the bow in kind.

The Enclave was a place of small courtesies. No commands, no salutes. Only rhythm and respect and duty.

They continued down the path to where the orchards began, it was a place where rows of ancient fruit trees had been grown across millenia, their trunks wrapped with prayer ribbons of all variety of colours, making it look like a festival of joy as they fluttered like soft flames in the wind. The droid knelt stiffly beside a sapling, its joints creaking, and began to replace the mulch with careful motions.

"You remember," it said after a moment, "when the Republic surveyors came. They wished to catalogue the temple's records. I asked you then if they would return."

Teyra brushed a fallen blossom from her sleeve. "They did not."

"And do you regret that?"

"No." She looked out over the terraces, where fog drifted in slow rivers between the trees. "Peace doesn't survive being measured. It must be lived, or it dies."

The droid turned its photoreceptors toward her, blue light dimming and brightening like a contemplative breath.

"The galaxy beyond has forgotten such wisdom."

"That is why we remember for them."

For a while, there was only the hum of insects and the soft percussion of water trickling from the irrigation spouts. The scent of plum blossoms in the air mingled with that of the rich soil. Somewhere in the distance, a soft chime tolled, and a procession of robed figures began to cross the bridge to the library. One carried an armful of scrolls bound in reed paper; another a bundle of herbs. Their lives were simple and deliberate, guard the heart and live a life of contemplation.

A breeze passed through the valley. The chimes under every eave sang in harmony, and the mist peeled away to reveal the temple rooftops glinting in sunlight. For an instant, the Enclave seemed eternal.

Then the light began to change.

At first, it was so gradual no one noticed; the sunlight dimming to a dull copper, shadows stretching longer than they should. The chimes stilled. The wind died. Even the insects fell quiet.

The droid's sensors whirred. "Strange atmospheric fluctuation detected."

Teyra frowned. "Storms don't come from the north this season."

They both looked up.

Beyond the highest ridge, the clouds were not forming; they were folding. Layers of grey pressing inwards, rotating like kneaded bread. A faint vibration ran through the soil beneath their feet causing the water in the pond below quivered as though something vast and unseen had stirred beneath it.

Across the terraces, Jedi paused in their work. Nearby a child-padawan pointed skyward. The sound that followed was low at first, a resonance that hummed in your bones and breath alike before it deepened into a vast, dissonant chord.

The mountain itself seemed to recoil. Birds exploded from the treetops in black clouds.

"Master Teyra," the droid whispered, its voice cracking with static, "what is…"

She raised her hand to silence him. The Force trembled through her veins, alive and terrified. Something was wrong beyond comprehension. The air tasted of iron.

"Get them to the Grand Hall," she said.

But the sky tore before she could finish.

A stream of light ripped through the clouds, not lightning, not fire, but something violent. The sound was everywhere at once: the roar of an ocean crashing against invisible cliffs, the shattering of glass, the shriek of the atmosphere itself being unmade.

Teyra turned toward the temple just as the first scream echoed through the valley. It was followed by another, and another until the Enclave, once so silent, was filled with the sound of mortal terror.

The droid reached for her arm, but she was already moving, robes whipping in the rising wind. The mist returned, not gentle this time but racing, alive, thick with ash and dust.

Above the orchard, the prayer ribbons snapped free, spiralling into the storm.

The last thing she saw before the darkness swallowed everything was the reflection of the sky burning in the pond below.

And then, the shadows began to fall and the Jedi of the Temple of the Heart would be no more.

BOTHAN SPACE
UNDERGROUND TRANSMISSION STATION C-467​

A soft chime cut through the hum of the transmittors and scanning devices.
Within the monitoring room aboard the Transmission station the air shifted from calm to electric. A red holographic light flickered to life in the monitoring pit, painting the utilitarian walls in urgent colour.

The attending archivist froze, then turned toward the transmission pit where the beacon's origin began scrolling across the interface: MOONUS MANDEL // PRIORITY DISTRESS.

Within moments, more observers swept into the chamber. Jedi gathered around the holographic table as the flickering signal steadied into a fractured map, alive with static.

"It's an enclave frequency," someone murmured. "Ancient… I didn't think anyone still held watch there."

Another leaned closer. "It's repeating. Three intervals. Emergency pattern."

The holo sputtered once more, briefly resolving into the fractured images followed by silence. The archivist drew in a slow breath. "Send word to the Council," he said quietly. "And prepare a ship."

The signal continued to pulse faint yet stubborn against the noise of many other transmissions the station was now ignoring, all their attention on a distress signal for an Enclave that shouldn't exist.

THEME 1: ASHFALL​

An ancient Jedi Enclave hidden in the mountains, self-sustaining, untouched by the wars that had scarred a thousand other worlds. Simply forgotten. Now, a distress beacon flares across the HoloNet, an old code, Jedi origin, repeating endlessly in the void.

The rescue party descend through the storm belt, and find the planet's once-lush valleys drowned in grey ash. The forests are gone and the air heavy with static and the metallic tang of burned ozone. Landing at what had been the Enclave's outer walls the only sound they can here is a corrupted voice saying the same words again and again:

The Jedi are Screaming, The Jedi are Screaming, The Jedi are Screaming

Theme 2: THE FOREST FEEDS

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While the distress beacon drew most to the Enclave itself, others were sent to trace its echo; to follow the pulse of the Force through the wilds that surrounded the temple. There, in the shadow of the mountains, the land had begun to turn against the living.

A sanctuary where apprentices once meditated beneath silver-barked trees that glowed faintly with bioluminescent spores has fast turned sickly green. The air feels thick, swollen with life that had grown too much, as though the planet itself was bleeding out across the wound of the enclave.

Plants crawled across stone walls and split open the remains of old watchtowers. Creatures twisted by strange growths wandered half-blind, drawn by some unseen instinct to rip and tear. Some say you can hear a heartbeat in the soil, some say the creeping vines whisper your name.

The small detachment of Jedi and explorers must protect the perimeter, to understand what has taken root. But with every passing hour, the forest creeps closer to the ruins of the Enclave; its vines wrapping around temple stones as if reclaiming its dead.

The forest is listening, It wants to know what you fear. It feeds on it.​

 

[Aiden Porte]

Objective: 1
Tags: Open
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The descent was silent.

Even with the hum of the ship around him, Aiden could hear it the emptiness beneath the noise. The way the storm screamed without a voice, how the ash moved like breath across the viewport. It wasn't natural. It wasn't dead, either. The Force here was heavy, thick as smoke, and every inhalation felt like swallowing grief.

The coordinates an old Jedi frequency were repeated to him over and over again. He could hear them so very clearly, very old.

The ship broke through the cloud ceiling.

Lightning flickered through the grey, veins of light tracing the bones of mountains below. Valleys once green were drowned in soot, rivers turned to glass. Even the sun seemed tired, its warmth lost to the choking haze.

When the landing struts touched down, he felt the vibration through his boots—an old, sick pulse, like a heartbeat beneath rubble. He closed his eyes.

Reached out., and heard it.

Not sound. Not really.

But something like it, shredded emotion carried through the Force, an echo of terror that refused to die. It burned at the edge of thought, distorted and raw, until it found words.

The Jedi are screaming.

Aiden's eyes snapped open.

The words came again, in various intervals, metallic, looping, the distress beacon repeating endlessly across dead channels.
He looked toward the ruins through the viewport, where the Enclave's outer wall stood half-swallowed by ash. Towers broken like bones. Courtyards where no life stirred.

He could feel others behind him, silent, like him trying to find some sort of clarity here.

He drew a slow breath, steadying himself against the hum of the storm. There had been peace here once.

"Stay together." he said quietly. "The Force is... fractured here. Something awful happened here."

He stepped down the ramp into the ash. The air was heavy, electric. Each breath filled his lungs with the taste of old metal and rain that would never fall. His boots sank into the grey earth as the wind carried whispers through the valley.

And beneath it all, the signal still pulsed through the air, faint and endless.

And what he felt wasn't death.

It was memory.

Thousands of them.

All still calling out to be heard.

 

[Bastila Sal-Soren]

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The ramp hissed open into a wall of silence. Not the quietness of peace, it was the silence of a place that was being smothered.
Ash drifted on the wind like delicate snowfall clinging to Bastila’s boots before she’d even stepped off the ship. The air that met the Jedi hit into her like a charge: It was metallic, stinking of burnt ozone, the scent of something long-dead still clinging to memory.

She took one step down, and the Force howled.
Not aloud, but through her. It was a cold pressure that struck her gut and throat all at once creating a crushing surge of agony that wasn’t her own. It was like every heartbeat, every breath that had been in the valley, had cried out in pain, imprinting on this place and all of it slammed into her mind at once.

Her knees buckled. She caught the ramp rail, gagging, before turning sharply and vomited over the edge, body convulsing under the invisible weight. For a moment she couldn’t even breathe. There was no sound but her own ragged gasps and the steady hiss of the storm wind.

When she finally lifted her head, her eyes were wet, the wind blowing strands of hair across her face. The taste of copper lingered on her tongue.

“The Jedi are screaming… The Jedi are screaming…”

The words came through the comms again, fractured by static but she didn’t need the transmission to hear them anymore. The Force was still screaming, loud enough to rattle her teeth, an unending chorus of anguish that seemed to come from beneath the ground itself.

She steadied her breath, wiped her mouth with the back of her glove, and forced herself to look ahead. The ruins waited in the ash like open graves; spires split down the middle, statues weeping soot. Lightning flashed overhead, and for a heartbeat she thought she saw silhouettes moving in the distance; Jedi robes, flickering, dissolving into smoke.

“What is this place…” she rasped. Her voice cracked on the last word. “The Force is…wrong.”

The wind shifted. The ash swirled upward, whispering through her hair like fingers. And the voice, clearer now, carried through the storm not from the commlink, but from everywhere at once:

The Jedi are screaming.

OUTFIT: XoXo | TAG: Aiden Porte | open EQUIPMENT:

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[Kaia Starchaser]

Objective 2

Digging around the galaxy was now what she did. With her father providing her some of the secrets of the Selabite, at least the ones on Kattada, she had found herself a passion project. The type that had her digging through ruins, and streaming massive amounts of data through her computing systems aboard the Wandering Star and borrowing from the Oasis. It lead her to the most back alley points in the galaxy.

And now, of all places, Bothan space? A bit more of her brother’s turf, a place that’s primary export was secrets? Still, a Jedi base that was locked away? That was exactly where she needed to go.

Her ship uncloaked and she made her way drifting in. The High Republic was alright, but like the Starchaser family, while they stood in the Light, they did so in their own way. Slowly coasting and letting her exploration craft land.

Truth be told, without the broadcast, she wouldn’t have found this place. She could have called her father, or Jared. But, it was Jedi, she had her skills. She was going to be fine. Saber on her hip, and functional protective spacer gear, and her droid. But that was when the Force called out.

The explorer in her knew what had to happen. The history would have to wait.

 

[Ahmia Reza]

OBJECTIVE 1: ASHFALL​

Once the first set foot on Moonus Mandel, the Force swelled and gathered at a single point at the gate of the outer walls. A crystalline shape snapped into being with a lone Togruta inside frozen in flight from an unseen threat. An ornament befitting a padawan declared her rank while her clothes were of an older style. The only visible possessions on her person was the lightsaber attached to her hip, and the clothes on her back.

A smaller version of the crystal hung in the air before the snared young woman. It pulsed with energy awaiting someone to release the one inside with a touch. A simple mechanism fit to its purpose, or what might later be surmised to be its purpose as a lifeboat. Capable of withstanding a cataclysm that left an entire world tortured and ruined, lost only to be later found troubled by its past. Enduring, but not perhaps perfect; a noticeable crack had formed in the crystalline structure, but otherwise it remain intact, solid, and waiting.

If released, the smaller crystal would vanish only to reappear in the Togruta's outstretched hand as the larger lattice evalorated and left the young, dark woman to collapse toward the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

Aiden Porte | Bastila Sal-Soren | Open​

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