Go-Back

The Go-Backs are a tribe of elves in the comic series Elfquest. They named themselves from their goal to return to the Palace of the High Ones. They are hunters (probably gatherers, too) and, above all, warriors. Most of them care neither for the past nor for the future. They are the only known tribe that scorns magic - especially healing magic, since knowing that a healer is around makes warriors 'soft'. Their most notable tradition is dancing for their death.

In the series Kahvi it is revealed that the Go-Backs were originally a splinter group of the Wolfriders, who had lost their wolf blood "because of Willowgreen's trickery." What exactly that looked like, or how exactly the Go-Backs became stag-riders and searchers for the palace, are yet untold stories. (A prose story about the healer Willowgreen and her "trickery" was to appear in the book "Hunter's Dawn" in the mid-1990s, but that volume was repeatedly delayed, then canceled.)

When the Go-Backs tried to return to the Palace, they were stopped by the Ice Trolls, who assumed that once the elves were reinstalled in the Palace they would enslave the trolls as their ancestors had. War ensued between the two groups and was underway when the Go-Backs rescued the Wolfriders and forged an alliance with them.

After the Palace is won, the Go-Backs stay near it, but not for long. When trolls captured Ekuar, Rayek blamed the Go-Backs, and banished them by creating a gorge which prevented them from crossing into the mountains. Kahvi became separated from the rest of her tribe, and goes to look for the palace Rayek spirited away, to take revenge. She stays with the Wolfriders for some years.

When she finally returns to the Go-Backs, Zey is their new chief. She suggests raiding the Sun Village with a small party to steal the Little Palace. After this is a failure, Zey carries all-out war to Sorrow's End. Kahvi realizes that war is not a way to regain honor. She kills Zey, and leads the Go-Backs back to the Frozen Mountains, even without the Little Palace. In the following, the Go-Backs return to their ways (minus the Palace-searching). Kahvi stays chief, but often leaves the tribe to her second-in-command Mardu, once to Blue Mountain trying to get a new trophy instead of the Palace for the tribe, discovering her own past, and once trying to find Cutter to bear his child.

There are several thousand years completely unmapped, but the most recent bits revealed seem like Kahvi one day just did not come back from one of her expeditions, and the Go-Backs split, some staying in the Frozen Mountains, others settling the New Land - Teir's people. The Go-Backs who stayed in the Frozen Mountains joined the other elves in the Palace after its second restoration; many of them joined Venka in her search for Kahvi.