Editing Sigil:Gholibin (section)

== The Broken Songs ==

For the Gholibin, mass death carried a consequence unlike the destruction of a library but no less permanent. Their civilization stored much of its accumulated knowledge in living people. When a memorist died, other singers might preserve what that person knew. When a single Hearth was destroyed, relatives elsewhere might still carry its songs. But when whole communities vanished together, portions of the past vanished with them.

Modern memory-songs bear these scars. Some refer to older songs no living memorist possesses. Genealogies occasionally reach a survivor and then stop, although the surviving structure makes clear that something once preceded the passage. Refrains remain whose explanations have been lost. Names appear without stories. Old instrumental signals survive after their precise battlefield meanings have vanished. A children's rhyme may contain words nobody can translate because the instructional song from which it descended disappeared during the Wrath.

The Gholibin know these are absences.

Their tradition therefore contains not merely memory, but the memory of having forgotten.

Some memorists call such fragments '''broken songs'''. They are not discarded because they are incomplete. Their incompleteness is itself part of the inheritance. A missing verse can say something terrible about the history that removed it.

This is one reason memory carries such weight among the Gholibin. A song is not precious merely because it is old. It may contain something that exists nowhere else in the world because generations of living people repeatedly chose not to let it disappear.