The Güli are a people of the giant, not a separate bloodline — their culture of patient memory and recited lineage sets them apart, not any divergence from giant flesh.
The Güli are mountain giants, the people of the high basins where the Gül Mountains close off the weather. They stand fifteen to twenty feet, gray-skinned and slow to anger, and they regard the lowland giants — the wandering Gorgers, the boulder-throwing hill giants — as poor relations who never learned to stay in one place. A Güli stays. The clan holds its grazing ground for as long as anyone can recite, and the reciting is the point. Their heartland is the Breidlheiss Basin, the sheltered valley they call the Broad Pasture, and Güli clans range more widely through the Giant Lands beyond it.
A clan runs to twenty or fifty giants under an elder, claiming traditional pasture it defends without much bloodshed. When two clans want the same meadow they rarely fight for it. They contest it: wrestling, stone-throwing, and the recitation of lineage, in which the giant who can name ancestors furthest back takes the prize. A long memory is wealth here. The Güli carry centuries of genealogy in their heads, and a clan that loses its reciters loses its claims.
They herd aurochs and mountain sheep, and they will not farm. Tilling soil is what small folk do, and the Güli hold small folk in the kind of contempt that does not trouble itself to be cruel — useful, occasionally amusing, beneath the effort of extermination until one gives offense. Then the long memory turns the other way, and the Güli have both long memories and long arms.
Above the clans sits a king, though the title carries less than it sounds. The Güli raise no temples. They honor their own dead and the spirits they say live in the peaks, and they mark both with standing stones: boundary stones, grave stones, and the processional avenues that ring the places where clans gather.
Count back. If you can name the giant who grazed this meadow before your grandfather's grandfather, the meadow is yours. If you cannot, it was never yours to lose. — a Güli reciter's formula, spoken before a lineage contest
Aspects
- Keeper of the long lineage
- Patient as the mountain