Alright, now you're starting to run into a few issues. And while you're a little inclined to just let it pass without comment, you can't stay your intervenin' hand just yet. First of all, the Spur Clan are continuing in their complacency. Hopefully this can be fixed by doing more stuff for them!
In all seriousness though, you're going to put the big fancy rock a bit into the marsh to try and force them to leave the damn mountain. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But hopefully it'll spark something.
Now what about spirits? Couldn't you use them to shake up the Remnant Clans up a little? As entertaining as their maltheism is when it can't possibly hurt you, they shouldn't just be able to mutilate the spirits whenever they manage to find one. And you suppose the spirits technically count as your servants in the sense that they unknowingly serve your Will but not in the sense that you really know or care about them. But even so, you should free their hands just a little. It'll make things interesting.
The start of the Age is a time for readjustments and new beginning for all your scattered chosen peoples. Each of them is faced with a new world in the wake of the Earthsplitter's passage. As for how they adapt to this? It varies. The Spear Clan start off in a bad way, with their underground tunnels collapsed due to the changing river and the disturbed sand. Their domes and their fort still stands but there is not enough room in them to shelter everyone from the migrant-birds. The fliers will soon leave this section of the Web behind forever, finding new roosts in their migratory paths but until then, the weapons of the Spear Clan is not enough to save everyone. They are adopting a dualistic belief system with the Earthsplitter near the center, the vile ruler and breaker of earth who is opposed by the spirits of the bird-things that punish them so greatly even now. The world is a battleground between forces that are evil and forces that must be respected, the priests say, desperate to stay atop the changing society. Meanwhile for the Spur Clan, hiding away atop their mountain in their newfound marsh fed from a waterfall right off the edge of the Central Face itself, they are unsure how to take this newfound bounty. They did not know of the Spear Clan's plans for them but they see a land of plenty and most importantly, the absence of both the bird-worshippers and the birds. As if suspecting some sort of trap, they start to tentatively expand outside of their mines and re-settle parts of the mountain's surface, though they are yet to leave the Spur. But even so, their gratitude towards the Earthsplitter gives rise to a new belief system enshrining it as some sort of patron deity. It delivered them from evil, scourged their enemies and cleared the skies. They already possessed a rudimentary belief system populating the world with gods (and fairly accurately so) but they place the Earthsplitter above all others as their own. And then meanwhile once more, gaze upon the Remnant Clans in their new home. It doesn't take them long for them to recognise the bounty of the tungsten-carbide beneath their feet and though eating it provides them little in the way of magnetic minerals to pull into their shell, its quality as a metal for crafting is quickly noticed by these living forges. Before long, they are beginning to replicate the weapons they witnessed from the Spear Clan but in far greater quality. This only strengthens their faith in this Promised Land, won for them by their parents from the jaws of certain death at the hands of the gods. But they must be ready, lest the gods come again. You gain the experiential Aspect, Faith, for future use. The following Mood is instituted but only for the Spear Clan: Dualism (this world is a battle between good and evil!). The Following Mood is instituted but only for the Spur Clan: Henotheism (There may be many gods but there is one who favours us and to which we owe a great debt of gratitude. The Following Mood is instituted but only for the Remnant Clans: Maltheism (There are divine forces out there and they are our enemy. We will need to fend them off!). The following Mood, Death From Above, is no longer occurring.
The Remnant Clans are quick to copy what they saw from the Spear Clan, forging spears and lighter weapons from tungsten. Though there is no way to compare, these new weapons put the frightening contraptions of the Spear Clan to shame. But once again, the existence of weapons capable of bypassing a shell means that it is now actually practical for Lek-kego to easily kill Lek-kego. Feuds and arguments between the disparate family groups and splinter-clans with these new weapons leads to rising bloodshed. They don't have to fight over mining spots just yet but the water of the solitary island in this ocean of tungsten...now that is valuable. In order to forge tungsten the Lek-kego must become even more vulnerable to overheating themselves to death and the only source of water is an incredibly precious resource. The shield is invented, a small piece of metal harder than anything in a Lek-kego shell that is carried in either a fore-pincer to ward off spear jousts or in one of the side-legs to protect against flanking.
The Spear Clan, already unbalanced and poised to fall, causes the first real war between Lek-kego. A civil war. It's nothing special or unique really, just a rising force consisting of the outer fringes, the disenfranchised, the unsheltered and some of the slaves. The war is brief but bloody and the Spear Clan retains control, the rebels unable to contest their domes while having no safe ground of their own. The empty shells of rebel leaders joins the bird skull in the middle of the great fort. But even so, this prompts a reordering of the Spear Clan as they take massive amounts of slaves from the defeated splinters, propping up their failing slave economy with enough slaves from their own people that they now actually have a breeding population of slaves, slaves from birth. A proper underclass now forms and with the resulting stigma, some select members of the 'higher caste' Clanners start taking reproductive forms of their own will. Using only the slaves as breeders now feels distasteful now that they are dogmatically lesser. This dilutes the martial culture somewhat.
Explorers sent out by the Spear Clan discover some of the bare patches in the ruined beach, where the Earthsplitter had thrown so much sand aside that the bare steel skin of the filament beneath is exposed. They don't know what this motherlode of steel beneath the sand is or what it implies but this, along the continued absence of the migrant-birds, seems to be a boon from the Bird Gods! As an iron-alloy, steel directly contributes to breeding, shell repair and those that ingest it have much harder shells than their iron cousins. It quickly becomes a mark of status to have personally consumed so much steel to have its visible gleam in the outer layers of your shell and many would-be social climbers quickly find that it can be faked through a powdering of metallic dust. Having been hammered by the effects of the civil war, the Spear Clan is now back and better than ever before! With the first of the flightless titans being brought down by steel caltrops laid in the ground before them and then sliced apart while it bellows on the ground, a new golden age is surely here for the children of the Spear! A second fort is built, this time around a collection of the butchered beast's massive skeleton. The following Mood is instituted for the Spear Clan: Rising Tide (The more steel we have, the more children we can make. The more children we make, the more we can rule.)
The Spur Clan spends a lot of its ensuing generations procrastinating. Well, they wouldn't see it that way. But their population is exactly the right size for the minerals they are still extracting from within the mountain, so why go any further? Reports from scouts that confirm that the marsh, while mineral-rich, is filled with serpentine and insectoid dangers so it seems that their choice is the right one. Without further expansion of minerals, they won't breed faster and so their population remains at a happy (and somewhat stagnant) equilibrium. Instead they focus on thought and art and religion. And eventually, during their strange searches in the depths of their mines for any sign of the Earthsplitter, they entice a small pebble-spirit into being! They have as of yet no way to speak to them or tame them but glimpses of these creatures inspire new thought and the idea of 'servitors', lesser things that might serve their patron deity. The pantheon is expanded and offerings of scrap metal are left for particular unique spirits and spirit-sightings, many of the Lek-kego giving them names and stories.
As inter-family violence continues to rise in the duels over water for the Remnant Clans, a lone smith finally devises a means to protect oneself from their deadly weapons. A second shell, one crafted from tungsten, that you can wear over your old one! This is not a new idea but before now, nobody had been able to figure out how to forge continuous plate. The smith is immediately killed by the first Lek-kego they share this information with. Some time later, that Lek-kego and their immediate family rides out in gleaming tungsten plate-mail and, wrapped in their invincibility, claims control of the island on the edge of the roaming Shard. If the other families want water, they must do what this family says and in addition, will have to pay them a regular tithe of raw ore in exchange for not being murdered. And as long as they do that, they will be left mostly to their own devices, despite technically all being subordinate to the armour-plated Lek-kego. This also prompts the Remnant Clans to figure out mathematics enough to qualify percentages and weights for tithe-related purposes.
The big ol' flightless idiots of the beach are now, as far as you can tell, entirely extinct. The Spear Clan killed them and those they didn't kill, they pushed further and further from their hunting ground until there was nothing for them to eat. The Spear Clan is still surging thanks to their influx of steel and no bottom has been found to their steel-patches yet! In an effort to stop social dissolution in the face of no outside enemy, it is deemed necessary to put down uprisings from the underclass and to manufacture them when they do not come of their own accord. They have formed what could be a called an actual organised military system and, along with it as a sort of side-effect, an attempt at a centrally regulated and defined written language and number system. Such things are necessary for their newfound size and organisation.
An exile pushed from Spur Clan holdings finds their way down to the hostile marsh in a spiritual quest to find the Earthsplitter. They don't. Instead however, they find a puddle spirit that the exile actually manages to hold communion with! The first spirit pact of a sort is made in response to the exile's life being threatened by a marsh serpent. With puddle in tow, the exile returns to the Spur and is welcomed back both in awe and fear. The old priests either voluntarily retire or are put to death and the former exile becomes both their new high priest and the founding figure of a new religious movement. It is possible not just to venerate the spirits but to use them.
- INTERVENTION: Right as the Spur Clan faces potential religious upheaval, a sign from the Earthsplitter appears! One morning the earth shakes as something sets the entire Shard to shivering. The people of the Spur emerge from their mountain fastnesses once it has faded and see a massive cap of gleaming metal and colourful crystal plainly visible over the swamp vegetation. A massive plateau at least a kilometer in a diameter has erupted from the middle of the marsh and while the bulk of it seems to be, from a distance, made from gemstones and crystal, the top is pure chromium. Not that the Spur Clan knows what chromium is of course, they just see shiny rocks and metals. You worked hard to make this thing look beautiful so they better feel tempted! And indeed, it doesn't take much for their new high priest to connect the dots and claim this as a new gift from the Earthsplitter. Venturing forth to claim it will involve trials but they will surely be successful! The first expeditions leave relatively quickly, protected by the Spur Clan's newfound art of spirit-pacts.
The rule of the Remnant 'knights', a name you'd given them from an old memory, is starting to feel a little shaky. They couldn't keep the secrets of armour plating for more than a generation but thanks to their massive mineral advantage as a result of their tithes, none of their vassal families can make platemail as good or in the same amounts as they can. Still, it's been several generations since then and the people are starting to get rowdier and rowdier. By sheer luck however, a pair of knights find a wandering puff-of-air spirit incorporating itself and, after some work, eviscerate it since spirits are bound by your will to not harm your chosen people. They cart the remains back to the island as proof of what they'd been taught to fear for generations: The gods were invading once more! And suddenly those tithes paid aren't just in exchange for the water, it's also in exchange for protection from the evil spirits that are definitely out there.
- INTERVENTION: You will give them the fight with their 'gods' that they seem to want so badly. From now on, all spirits in all the world may slay your chosen people in self-defence! Boy, you sure hope that doesn't get taken out of context! The effects of this are long-reaching and not immediately visible. Only time will tell.
The Spear Clan, somewhat winding down from their boom, receive reports from their scouts who have taken advantage of the now tame beach to travel to the furthest expanse of the sands and back. They bring wild tales of a place where the black sand ends and in its place is an endless plain of steel. They have found the filament itself. This inspires a few revelations in the Spear Clan. Firstly, it is now apparent to them that this world is a made thing. Something put this there. The steel is worked. Were there Lek-kego before them? Was it the Bird Gods, despite them having nothing to do with steel before? Secondly, news of this faraway bounty only increases its economic rise and large expeditions are sent forth as a form of immigration and as a societal pressure valve, the Clan eager to send as many members of its ever-swelling populace far away to this metal wonderland that is, for now, too distant for the main bulk of the Clan to mine regularly. They will not be Clan but they will be of the Clan and they will surely stay loyal. Another golden age is declared but someone in the Spear Clan does this every generation no matter what happens and so it is ignored.
