Editing Sigil:The Gholibin (section)

== The Great Wrath ==

The Gholibin fought on the side of the Dragha during the [[Sigil:Great Wrath|Great Wrath]], and they did so in enormous numbers. Seylandri accounts remembered vast Gholibin hosts emerging from forest, hill, and mountain as seemingly inexhaustible enemies. The image survived because it reflected something real: the scattered Gholibin population of the Sigil Lands was immense, and a society accustomed to rotating people through the necessary tasks of communal life could mobilize astonishing numbers when war demanded it.

Temporary Hollowholds became military camps. Existing systems for moving food, people, tools, and supplies supported armies on a scale that enemies who dismissed the Gholibin as primitive found difficult to comprehend. Music helped make such mobilization possible. Drums and bakka sounded across camps and battlefields. Songs transmitted orders and routines. Rhythms organized movement and labor. Different calls could identify units or intentions where smoke, trees, darkness, terrain, and sheer numbers made visual communication unreliable.

To the Seylandri facing them, the result could appear terrifying: innumerable small figures advancing amid drums, horns, rattling percussion, shouted refrains, and the immense sound of thousands of voices. The phrase '''Numberless Horde''' preserved that experience.

It also concealed something.

Those innumerable figures were not interchangeable soldiers produced for battle. They came from Hearths and Hollowholds. They had parents, children, companions, trades, songs, jokes, obligations, animals, favorite foods, old arguments, and places to which they expected to return.

Many never did.

The Great Wrath consumed Gholibin populations on a terrible scale. Entire warbands disappeared. Hollowholds were destroyed or emptied. Communities fled country their ancestors had inhabited for generations. The devastation fell not only upon those who fought but upon the society behind them as the war spread and the Great Workings of Seylandri and Dragha ceased to distinguish reliably between battlefield and homeland.

The Gholibin were participants in the catastrophe, not innocent spectators to it. Their warriors killed Seylandri, helped destroy Seylandri settlements, and supported the Dragha even as the conflict became monstrous. Their own memory does not require that this be forgotten in order to remember what was done to them.

The Great Wrath was terrible precisely because there were people worth mourning on more than one side.