Rediviva Tribe
The Rediviva Tribe
The Rediviva are one of the forest centaur tribes of Thelemar - guardians of the wild who view civilization as a creeping blight, and who serve Pan through battle in defence of nature. They are a wandering people, raising temporary, well-hidden camps deep in the forest where no outsider ever comes.
Way of Life
The Rediviva are above all a tribe of archers. Their fighting strength is organized into front-line divisions and a reserve, supported by gatherers and warriors; duty is assigned by family lineage, and a child is trained in the trade of whichever parent is the more skilled, the better to realize the gifts Pan grants them. Archery is the most storied of these heritages, passed down through respected archer-families across generations.
Honour among the Rediviva is measured in deeds remembered. Each evening the tribe gathers around the campfire and embroiders the day’s battles into the legendary heroism of past generations - to live without serving Pan, they hold, is to have not truly lived at all. To fall in glorious battle in Pan’s name is the finest of ends; to fail the tribe is the deepest of shames.
Like all centaurs they speak Sylvan, the fey tongue in which one cannot knowingly lie, and their honesty runs to the point of bluntness with the wider world.
Naming
Rediviva centaurs are named for plants - Lunaria, Brownea, Erysimum, Peltaria, Sinapis - and the most honoured names are handed down to later generations in memory of the heroes who first bore them.
The Rite of Separation
When a centaur leaves the tribe for good, the parting is formal and held to be irreversible. The elders send their blessing and their grief together, with the bittersweet farewell:
“Beneath the shade of the eucalyptus, no flower can grow, however much it longs for the tree’s shade.”
- meaning that in the tribe’s own shadow an individual may never flourish, and must root elsewhere to bloom.
History
The Last Fire
The defining wound of the Rediviva is The Last Fire - a catastrophe some seven generations past, when too many came to covet the divine flower Brownea Gradiceps and the tribe slaughtered itself over the last blooms. The Rediviva have never since recovered even half their former numbers, and hold it a sacred duty never to forget that failure.
Legendary Ancestors
The campfire-tales of the Rediviva preserve their greatest heroes:
- Lunaria, “the Arrow” - an archer of such skill that she struck a burning bolt from the air before it could consume a rare tree. Later centaurs are named in her honour.
- Erysimum, “the Stag” - the tribe’s druid two generations before the Last Fire, ever at the front goring any who dared approach; famed for the battle of the Double-Tree Forest, where he trapped a band of poachers and slew them to the last.
- Peltaria, “the Mother” - the oldest chieftain in the tribe’s stories, who served Pan from the day of her birth to the day of her death without straying once from the path. To her, it is said, Pan himself appeared.
- Sinapis, the three-legged and one-armed - the sole surviving warrior of the Last Fire. Having lost a leg, he rose to command the tribe’s armies as its last veteran; he later cut away his own arm after a battle with a remorhaz in the Eagle’s Cliff Forest, and led on for years until he fell at last to a troll in the Rock-Flower Forest. The tribe has not seen his like since.
Relations
The Rediviva dwell among the sacred centaurs of the Theocracy, where Pan’s people are honoured rather than feared. They are kin in spirit to the other centaur tribes even across wildly different causes.