The Revenants [REVENANTS] - Organizations

History

Centuries ago, a penal colony on some forgotten desert world was abandoned by its wardens, the inmates left on the sun-scorched dunes with nothing but their wits to survive. Most of the survivors perished within the first week alone, but those who braved the sands discovered ways to survive. They found native life burrowed in the clay beneath the sand, and small oases amongst the dunes. But the desert was ever-fickle, and consumed these patches of sustenance as often as it revealed them; only by wandering far and wide, and learning the patterns of the sea of sands, could those dwellers of this punishing land survive. And so were the first Revenant tribes formed.

They survived this way for centuries, traveling the land, avoiding the devouring sandstorms that threatened their everyday lives, when a passing Banu craft discovered the roving bands of desert savages—and brought them to the stars to be sold as slaves. But the Revenants are a hardened, clever people, and saw their incarceration as only a minor challenge compared to the rest of their lives. It was only a few months later that several Banu craft fled into human space, piloted by the Revenant clans, their shackles broken.

Not much else is known about Revenant history, outside of these particular strokes. Their stories are traditionally told via oral tradition, passed from storyteller to storyteller with each adding her own flair to the legend. As a consequence, their oldest stories are filled with ancient demons and prophetic visions and creation myths and promised lands and other such mystical talk that obscures the fine truths of their past. No record of this alleged penal colony has ever been found by academics, nor has any sign of Revenant society been found in any of the deserts located in UEE or Banu space.

Linguistics

Some of what we know about the history of Revenant society comes not from their written or oral traditions, but from the language itself. Reveni traces its roots back at least three centuries to an earlier form, called Old Reveni, which appears to have been a creole composed primarily of Croshaw-era English, Japanese, and Indo-Martian, as well as a smattering of other tongues.

The dominant theory is that the original Revenant tribe lacked a common tongue between them, and they were forced to form a pidgin to communicate. However, this claim cannot be substantiated, as there are no written records from that era, and no Croshaw-era penal colonies were ever known to house prisoners with that particular mix of languages.

In spite of their exposure to the rest of the UEE’s culture, Reveni continues to be widely spoken by Revenants today, and it is considered the primary language in the majority of Revenant families. However, most Revenants can also speak English, especially those who travel closer to the heart of UEE space.

Revenants Today

Revenants embrace the familiar freedoms and challenges that a starship brings: they travel wherever they want, sometimes aboard individual family ships, sometimes as larger migrant fleets. They see the dangers of open space as a continuation of the challenges the desert brought, and use it to test the strength of their spirits.

Generally, Revenants prefer to keep to themselves and their kind, staying close to the nearest migrant fleet and typically gathering scrap from debris fields to both maintain their ships and to trade for supplies. This has given them the nickname of “sifters” and “scrappers” in many systems. In systems where their presence has brought theft, smuggling, or piracy, they’re known by far less charitable terms.

Outsiders often perceive Revenants as xenophobic at best, beggars and thieves at worst. When a migrant fleet of enters the system, locals often expect them to start flooding comms with offers to sell scrap metal and garbage, argue about food prices, and harass or outright pirate merchant shipping traffic until the local militia is forced to chase the whole fleet away. But the truth is that the Revenants are not one single organized body: there is no leader, no central direction. To blame the group for the actions of individuals is akin to blaming every Terran for the actions of one Terran criminal. The chaos and disorder the Revenants bring with their fleets is, unfortunately, the product of rowdy individuals and impoverished families.

Actually, many Revenants are not at all xenophobic. While it’s true that the migrant fleets prefer to avoid contact with outsiders and rely only on themselves, many Revenants leave the fleets to get jobs amongst outsiders, and have no problem with the rest of humanity. It’s simply the case that Revenants who travel in packs and avoid society are far more visible than those who quietly integrate into the UEE and keep their religious and cultural views to themselves.

Manifesto

The form that Revenant culture has taken—its migrant nature, its focus on spirituality, and the way it encourages its youth to explore life almost recklessly—all trace back to their history on their desert world. The information here should serve as a quick primer for those completely unfamiliar with their culture.

Worldview

Revenants believe that all non-human entities—plants, animals, inanimate objects, natural phenomena, and so on—all possess a spiritual essence, and that human spirits are on equal footing with these non-human spirits. As a consequence, respect must be given to these spirits, for they can become angered and vengeful if treated poorly. It is not uncommon for Revenants to talk to or give small offerings to their ships, on whose cooperation they depend.

It is also believed that when a human dies, her spirit moves on to inhabit her surroundings, becoming one of these non-human spirits. Revenant shamans are believed to be able to commune with the departed, and Revenant families often give offerings to these spirits in order to aid them with their afterlives, and to encourage those spirits to provide guidance and protection to their still-living kin.

If a human spirit became enlightened in life (achieving a state called sien), it is believed that she will be reborn in the body of one of her direct descendants to continue her life’s ambitions where they left off when she died. Sien requires a high level of emotional, physical, and spiritual achievement, as well as a high level of professional renown. A child believed to be born from the spirit of an ancestor is assigned to a special caste, the ayothi, where she will live a life of privilege, but have no freedom to pursue goals outside of her ancestor’s life goals.

The Ayothi

Revenant society is largely egalitarian—your merit, and nothing else, is what defines you to your fellows. However, children who carry the spirit of an ancestor are declared a part of the sacred ayothi, or the “ancestral caste”, where they operate under different rules from the rest of society. The ayothi are not allowed to explore life’s many options, not allowed to choose their own ambitions: instead, whatever ambitions and accomplishments that ayothi had in their prior incarnation become their life’s work. However, they are treated with the highest esteem and support: their extended family scrape together every credit they can find to give that ayothi a proper education, a ship of their own, and anything else they could possibly need, and non-family Revenants pay that ayothi great respect for their natural-born wisdom.

There is no notion of good or evil when it comes to achieving sien; even a criminal can achieve it so long as their lives were ambitious, their spirits strong and their deeds were great. This can seem like a contradiction to outsiders, who treat criminal behavior as anything but great or respectable, but to a Revenant, these behaviors might be the actions of a free spirit, a liberator, a freedom fighter, or even a great leader. So long as these actions did not harm other spirits or bring shame to other Revenants, of course.

Matriarchy

What little structure Revenant society has also exhibits a strong gender bias toward women. Young girls are more likely to be declared ayothi, rise to position as a seer, or be acknowledged as having achieved sien. Their language commonly regards the feminine as the default gender, and they trace their lineage through the mother’s side of the family. Most notably however, Revenant society treats the woman as the head of a household, and she may be simultaneously married to as many men as she wishes. Men are not granted the same right of polygamy, as they must be faithful to a single wife. According to Revenant tradition, each husband contributes equally to a child’s conception, and a child inherits all of their fathers’ bloodlines. This tradition is upheld even today, with an education in genetics simply forcing Revenant society to acknowledge the relationship as symbolic and spiritual, rather than literally genetic. Rarely does a child learn which one of their fathers provided their genes, as the notion of a biological father is not considered an important aspect of a Revenant child’s life.

This marriage law may well have served Revenant society during their desert days: without access to even basic medicine, death during childbirth would have skewed the tribe’s gender ratio until the men vastly outnumbered the women. A system of polyandry would save the small gene pool from becoming unviable after the first few generations. Some anthropologists hypothesize that the original prisoners may have included some biologists capable of forming this marriage tradition intentionally; others suggest that it happened simply as a byproduct of the skewed gender ratios.

This tradition has not translated well into a modern society, however: modern medicine has forced the ratio of males to females to even out, leaving many Revenant women unmarried or forced to marry to only one partner. Marriage to outsiders has become more and more acceptable—though outsiders are often unwilling to convert and accept a polyandrous marriage. Anthropologists have noted that there is a certain amount of elitism and social class forming around these altered marriage traditions: Revenants with prestigious bloodlines, such as the ayothi or seers, tend to have many partners who are almost entirely Revenant, while poor families, or ones which lack powerful ancestral spirits, often just pair up one woman and one man, with one of the two often being an outsider.

Nomadic Life

The ideal Revenant life is wandering amongst the stars. Many Revenants view their endless journey through space as simply an extension of their life on the desert world: a life of constant danger, where only the toughest and smartest will survive. A crucible to harden their bodies and purify their spirits. Starvation, pirate attacks, engine failure—these are all ways for Revenants to test themselves and one another, and achieve sien.

In the end, that’s what concerns Revenants most—whether or not they will be reborn in a new life. The result is a very tough, space-savvy people who survive more tough situations on a weekly basis than most explorers will face in a lifetime.

Charter

Outsiders often think of Revenant fleets as organized, likened to military fleets or the Church of the Journey missionary convoys, but this is actually the wrong view to take. They are far closer to neighborhoods, filled with individuals who either were born near each other or travel with each other out of coincidence and convenience. There is rarely any loyalty to a particular migrant fleet: Revenants are constantly departing to wander the stars on their own, or forming new fleets, or switching fleets, or even attaching themselves to non-Revenant convoys. When two of these fleets happen to enter the same star system, they will often merge into one body, and split back apart when a large enough number of Revenants feel like departing.

All of their society is this fluid and lacking in structure. This includes their legal code and hierarchy, which are effectively nonexistent. However, Revenant tradition still keeps a few rules a priority, even if individual interpretation of these rules sometimes varies. Most Revenants attempt to adhere to these rules, if only to avoid being shunned out of Revenant society by their peers.

Act With Respect

All of Revenant life is about treating others with respect: not only other Revenants, but other humans, aliens, even inanimate objects and natural phenomena are given a certain level of veneration. It is believed that the spirits of these things can seek vengeance against an irreverent Revenant, and in any case a Revenant living a life without respect almost certainly can never achieve sien.

Likewise, acting in a way that brings shame to all Revenants is forbidden. Revenants who choose to mock others for their own religious choices, or their physical appearance, or their gender, or any other distinguishing markers—they quickly find themselves disavowed by Revenant society, and forbidden from joining with any of their fleets.

Finally, Revenants are forbidden from antagonizing any of the major ship manufacturers, such as Roberts Space Industries: Revenants are so dependent on the replacement parts those companies can provide, that behaving in a verbally OR physically aggressive manner toward them is grounds for immediate exile.

Joining Outsiders

There is no restriction against associating with outsiders, even though most Revenants prefer not to. In fact, Revenant society encourages their young to explore all aspects of life before finding their passion, and so many young Revenants wind up employed with outsiders, at least temporarily. Additionally, it’s considered a great boon to a family to have a child entered into the UEE Navy, since having veteran combat pilots in the migrant fleets has always proven to be useful.

If a Revenant does join another organization, she is encouraged to follow that organization’s rules thoroughly. However, if while flying under another flag the Revenant encounters other Revenants, she is not to attack them, even under orders—likewise, Revenants within the culture are encouraged to show at least neutral attitudes towards groups flying with Revenants in their midst, even if that group is normally considered distasteful or hostile.

Justice

Unless a crime affects the whole of Revenant society, justice amongst Revenants operates purely on the revenge system. Of course, seeking revenge against another Revenant might just tarnish their reputation and keep them from sien… but if their cause is legitimate, and the punishment is not too severe for the crime, the rest of the society may just look the other way.

Spiritual Ascension

Outsiders may join Revenant culture freely, learning about their ways until they are prepared and knowledgeable enough to take the necessary rites of adulthood. Except for the ayothi, all Revenants are part of the common caste, called the bouwi. The highest level of spiritual growth a Revenant can hope for is becoming a seer—a state which is more esteemed than even an ayothi sien, as they are able to directly communicate with the spirits around them.

These titles grant you no particular authority over other Revenants, though the ayothi, sien, and seers are often consulted by other Revenants seeking wisdom. These titles are instead simply ways of understanding the state of one’s spirit, as each Revenant must discover their own path to sien.

The Rite of Rebirth

Every Revenant child (and outsider) undergoes a series of rites and rituals at a certain age to determine if they should be declared adults. Usually, this process starts at age 14, though a family may delay this ascension if they choose until age 18. If a child somehow fails these rites, they must wait another year before attempting again.

One of the final rites, and perhaps the most important single event in a Revenant’s life, is the huu ne zalermo, or Rite of Rebirth. The child meditates in a sealed cabin aboard a ship, surrounded by sacred artifacts of their ancestors while kneeling over a small fire. They must brew the heavy leaves of a lethe plant into a tea, drinking it while enduring the building heat of the cabin. Lethe leaves contain a chemical which induces a form of amnesia when ingested, and is highly restricted in UEE space—with special exceptions for religious ceremonies. Most children will succumb to the effects of the lethe root, and become temporarily amnesiac. However, rarely—for about one in twelve children—that child will have visions of her past lives, remembering memories that are not her own. Either way, the child will be declared a full adult, and if she had the visions, she will be named one of the ayothi, and a seer will work with the family to determine which ancestral spirit the child possesses and what life goals she must pursue.

Sharing The Culture

If a Revenant wishes to integrate their culture into another organization, they are free to do so; likewise, if other organizations discover that they have Revenant roots in their history, they are free to canonize those facts publicly. The only restriction is that this core of Revenant society is the ultimate source of canonical information: if two pieces of data directly conflict between outside groups and the information Revenant society upholds, it is Revenant society that is correct.

On a more personal level, Revenants are neither encouraged nor discouraged from sharing their culture with outsiders. However, if an outsider approaches a Revenant about joining their society, that outsider is usually directed to a vekri, a word which means “teacher” and refers to a specific type of seer. Most Revenants believe, however, that accepting outsiders into their numbers is a dangerous route that risks sullying their traditions with outsider perspectives.

The Revenants / REVENANTS