Dawn of the Jedi had a brief that would sink most creators: invent the beginning. Not a prequel to a character, a prequel to the Force being a thing anyone had a word for. John Ostrander and Jan Duursema had already spent five years on Legacy proving they could build a corner of this setting nobody had drawn before, and they do it again here, harder.
The Je’daii
The central invention is good enough to carry the book. Tython has two moons — Ashla and Bogan, light and dark — and the Je’daii Order is built around balance as a literal, enforced, physical discipline: drift too far either way and you are exiled to the appropriate moon until you correct. It reframes the whole light-and-dark argument as a much older and much less settled question, and it does it in about six pages.
Duursema
Duursema is the reason to buy the single issues. Everything is designed from nothing — the Tho Yor pyramid ships, the Je’daii temples, the armour, the beasts — and none of it reads as Star Wars cosplay for an earlier date. The Force Storm #0 primer is a straight visual guide and is worth reading first, which is unusual for a preview issue.
What it does not do
It is the first third of a story. The arc introduces Xesh, the Rakatan Force Hound whose arrival breaks Tython open, and then stops. You need The Prisoner of Bogan and Force War to reach an ending, and even then the story clearly expected more room than the licence had left. Dark Horse’s Star Wars run finished eight months after Force War ended.
Legends, and permanently so — canon has since taken the deep past in an entirely different direction. Read it as the most ambitious world-building Dark Horse attempted in its final years.