[X]Intervene!
-[X] [Spirit][Pact] Self defense only applies to the spirits themselves, not their elements.
-[X] Having made your Pact with the spirits of the world, you have instructed them all that they may inflict violence upon your chosen people in the name of self-defence. This command filters through the back-doors of the minds of every spirit in the world, passed along in a chain of communication that is only sometimes misinterpreted. And that is why when the Spear Clan continues their aggressive mining operations to strip the steel off the surface of the filament in the bare patches along the beach, the steel spirits rise up and start murdering them. Their homes are under attack after all. This is the cause of great upheaval and the start of a prolonged conflict known as the Steel War. Hundreds, thousands, of Lek-kego die in the early days of it as steel spirits stalk the sands and rip people limb from limb. They don't have it all their way of course, as the fabric of their own essence form the Spear Clan's own shells, weapons and fortifications. The Spear Clan retreats to its domes and its forts, with dead and dying steel-spirits spiked out in front to ward off others. The outlying lands are lost and all communication with their newly formed colony on the other side of the beach is severed. Many proclaim this the darkest days and the end of Lek-kego civilisation, having practically forgotten that other Lek-kego once existed at all.
Alright, alright. Alright. That was a thing that happened. But it's okay, it's your first time, it was bound to go wrong at some point. What's important to remember is that it is never the end. There's no use crying over spilt milk or at least, not when you can
unspill it. You can't undo your initial Pact, that thing is frozen in time along with every Intervention you make. The world and History itself is a malleable thing but you are not. But you can work with it and brace the world against it.
And you'll do it after the Spear Clan get a bit of a scare and lose a few thousand people. The universe exists to humble people, after all. But now the Steel War will end and this timeline will fall to the cutting room floor.
The Age of Battle
- Having made your Pact with the spirits of the world, you have instructed them all that they may inflict violence upon your chosen people in the name of self-defence. This command filters through the back-doors of the minds of every spirit in the world, passed along in a chain of communication that is only sometimes misinterpreted. And that is why when the Spear Clan continues their aggressive mining operations to strip the steel off the surface of the filament in the bare patches along the beach, the steel spirits rise up and start murdering them. Their homes are under attack after all. This is the cause of great upheaval and the start of a prolonged conflict known as the Steel War. Hundreds, thousands, of Lek-kego die in the early days of it as steel spirits stalk the sands and rip people limb from limb. They don't have it all their way of course, as the fabric of their own essence form the Spear Clan's own shells, weapons and fortifications. The Spear Clan retreats to its domes and its forts, with dead and dying steel-spirits spiked out in front to ward off others. The outlying lands are lost and all communication with their newly formed colony on the other side of the beach is severed. Many proclaim this the darkest days and the end of Lek-kego civilisation, having practically forgotten that other Lek-kego once existed at all.
- INTERVENTION: You change the rules of the universe a little, vis a vis how spirits interact with your chosen people. You had been too hasty with that last one and even though you can't counteract it, you can refine it and make the spirits stop being such big babies about it. The previous self-defence clause now only applies to a spirit's corporate form, something that it has to voluntarily create in the first place. Threats to the things they embody no longer count, even when its destruction or transmutation alters the spirit itself. Sorry spirits, only threats of direct violence apply now, not threats of Ship-Of-Theseus-esque ego death! And if they don't like that they can go suck it. You're not happy with what they've done with your perfectly good Age.
- As a result of this, the tungsten spirits never bother to warn the Remnant Clans and the Knights about the new self-defence Pact. And since they don't need to do that, they never bother to incorporate and they never get attacked by the Knights. Mining and smithing is no longer a violation of them or, at least, not a violation that they possess the will or capacity to do anything about. Instead the Knights continue to use the excuse of the 'Spirit Hunt' to solidify their power over the other families. But with the absence of spirits presenting themselves to make easy targets, this sense of unity and shared paranoia doesn't last long. The maltheism still continues strong in their shared cultural heritage but the common people start to see less and less reason why they need the Knights if the gods aren't coming to crush them right now. Especially since, absent a massive spirit incursion that drives them all up into the island and enforces a massive economic gap between the Knights and the rest while also giving near-total control of the latter to the former, the tungsten mining is still continuing and more and more of the other families are figuring out this whole 'platemail' thing. This rising social unrest continues until a small sect of Knights, a secret to the other Knights as much as they are to the other families, delves into the forbidden arts of god-talking. They speak to the spirits not as supplicants, spiritualists or priests but as equals or even superiors. This is a marriage of necessity, not of pleasure. With the deal struck by these secret masters, a few tungsten spirits begin to incorporate and harass the outlying families with raids that withdraw whenever the Knights arrive. And most conveniently, these raids and disasters often happen in a way to increase the standing of members of the sect specifically. With their 'protection' backed up by a lie that most Knights aren't even aware of, their rule of the Remnant Clans continues.
- The Pact has no effect on the Spur Clan but they learn of it all the same through hazy dream-messages given by their patron earth spirits to their most sensitive spiritualists. They entreat the earth spirits for their permission to continue to mine and the expeditions to the Plateau continue. Though they have to climb to its metallic top, they waste no time in carving tunnels through the solid gemstone and crystal mix that makes up its bottom layers. Some of the gems quarried are kept in their original shapes to serve as crude baubles and are later carved/melted into clumsy but beautiful statues and monuments, with a spire of solid ruby being erected in the edge of the marsh where the Founding Heirophant was said to have first spoke to the spirits. But most of the gemstones are melted down to their composite minerals such as aluminium, beryl, carbon and a lot of trace elements, some of which have magnetic traces that wind up in their shells and colour them various bright shades. To bear these wavy bands of colour quickly becomes a sought-after status symbol. The spirits of the Plateau object to this and refuse communication but there is little they can do. Some of them take corporeal form an act threatening to bait an attack and this works in isolated incidents but to a Clan so learned in the ways of spirits, this approach has little effect. Indeed, this only leads to a few spirits of the Plateau being bonded into pacts and an increasing intermingling and relaxation of their sovereign territory.
- As generations pass, the hidden sect within the Knights becomes publicly known as The Scrawler's Order but only as a popular group for young Lek-kego in Knightly families to be inducted into and learn much of the murkier knowledge of things and generally have a good time. It is said that they stray into dangerously...theistic territory but their true purpose, of controlling the actions of spirits to ensure the power of the Knights, remains mostly unknown. And with their recruitment strategy, much of the upper strata of Knights are now associates with the Order. And there are a lot more Knights, much more than before. There has been a small boom in reproduction following the discovery of another small iron vein and, considering that tungsten platemail is essentially now an open secret that anyone with the resources can make (and those resources are abundant), a whole lot more of the other families have been uplifted to Knightly status to better maintain rule and taxation over the rest. They now maintain their control over a monopoly of education, martial training and their curious ability to be the only ones who can reliably force tungsten elementals to back off. Both the Knights and the non-Knightly families have diversified from the two relatively simple economic layers they had once been, with distinct strata in both and some of the uppermost of the latter eclipsing the lowermost of the former. Calling them Remnant Clans no longer seems appropriate but unlike the now discarded timeline, referring to them all as Knights wouldn't be correct. A common term that they use for themselves is synonymous with what they call the Shard they are on which itself is synonymous with their term for tungsten-carbide so...you can call them for the Tungsten Clan for now.
- The Steel War is still going somehow. Since the mining of the steel floor is so much more aggressive than the Remnant Clan's, the spirits are actually prompted to do something about it. And since the Spear Clan are not the Spur Clan and have suffered much in the beginning of the Steel War, steel-spirits incorporating themselves to bait an attack actually works. But since this means that the spirit's attacks must now be much more sporadic than in the previous timeline, the Spear Clan is much less effected and the attacks mostly claim the lives of the slave-folk that live outside of their perpetually expanding fortifications. The use of steel-shells against the steel spirits is still noted but without the need being anywhere near so pressing, the Chieftain doesn't force them into service but instead opts to reward those that do. The steel-shells become a martial subculture within an already martial culture, focused even more on winning glory and strength. Due to this, the steel-shells return to the old Spear Clan tradition of never taking a reproductive form and only use breeders from 'lesser' members of the high castes. The ideology that steel-shells are grander than those of more common iron still takes root as a result of this but it is much less based on being subversive towards the Spear Clan itself and as a result, quickly becomes common and accepted since it's easy to tie into the pre-existing Spear Clan concept of higher castes being 'forged better' than those of their enslaved underclass. Mining steel becomes even more important as a result.
- Due to the Steel War being on a lower scale, scattered contact between the Spear Clan and their far-beach colony remains. But without the threat of extinction to keep them clinging to tradition and group identity, the colony uses the unprecedented (and to their eyes, infinite) amount of steel to be found within the filament itself and multiplies continually at a rate even greater of their originators. They can mine so much more in this timeline! With this and with the contact with the old motherland being somewhat intermittent, the colony quickly decides to stop transporting any of their mined ore back home. When a message from the Spear Clan Chieftain arrives and asks what the deal is, the colonists send their first ore back home for a while: the molten remains of the messenger's corpse. The Spear Clan mobilises extremely quickly, gathering and organising its armies and sending them out for punishing treks across the vast expanse of black sand that separates them from the colony. But this time the Spear Clan are fighting themselves, Lek-kego with the same martial tradition, weapons and sense of military structure. Not to mention the logistical issues with supplying the armies while they're so far away from bulk of the Clan. It's a long way to try and project force, a barrier that the Lek-kego had never encountered before now. After a few skirmishes the futility of this dawns on the current Chieftain and they call the armies back, eager to find another way to bring the traitors to heel. This goes over extremely poorly with much of the soldiers, eager to claim the martial honor that their culture had conditioned them to expect from an unprecedented war such as this. That and the Chieftain's refusal to increase their pay for all of the useless marching results in one steel-shelled general marching his army to war...against the Spear Clan's central fort. The other armies fail to stop them or actively join in, resulting in what is the first siege in the history of the world. It doesn't last long. The Lek-kego cannot be starved out of a siege but they can see which way the wind is blowing and in the end the steel-shells inside the fort open the gates and give the general the Chieftain's head as they march in through. The general installs themselves as the new Chieftain and institutes a ferrocracy. Only those with a high percentage of visible steel in their shells should be Chieftain or lead armies or make any proper decisions regarding the Clan's future. The rest of the upper castes are best served as being their breeders and their support structure. This doesn't go over well but considering that the new Chieftain is literally occupying the centre of government with their army, it is met with little resistance.
- The Scrawler's Order has, at this point, wound up so woven into the fabric of the Knightly families in the Tungsten Clan that it is basically just another organ of governance. The nature of the spirit attacks has become common knowledge among the Knights and has filtered down into the populace even as they continue to expand. This leads to a string of revolts across the Clan's holdings but as long as the solitary island remains the only source of the Shard's water there is nowhere else to go. Even the fissures widening between the different Knight families can't get around this one basic fact. And forcing the current rulers of the Lake out will prove harder than it seems, with tungsten armour defeating tungsten weapons and making it so that entrenched defenders are very hard to move. This fractious state of efforts will continue for now but something's got to give.
- The Steel War is technically still going but it's really just an occasional issue for both the Spear Clan and their colony, which still sees itself as Spear Clan but obviously a better more traditional Spear Clan than the literal Spear Clan, especially after the coup. Since then the two have been passively aggressively jousting with one another, both protected by distance and the Steel War making travel across the beach intermittent. What the distance doesn't stop however are the refugees, wealthy upper castes slowly drifting away from the Spear Clan's new focus on a new caste system that doesn't elevate them personally. The colony is eager to take most of them in and is becoming common to derogatorily refer to the original Spear Clan as the 'Steel Clan' due to their ferrocracy. Meanwhile back in said ferrocracy, the Chieftain's following the victorious general have found themselves facing an unpleasant truth: All the other generals now know that they can try and be Chieftain whenever they want. It is coup after coup after coup, pausing only to continue its military pissing match with the colony. Eventually what it settles into is the Lek-kego's first electoral system but with only steel-shells of distinguished military service being able to vote. This way, ideally, the new Chieftain rules with the majority support of the armies and cannot simply be couped repeatedly as they had been in the past.
- The Spur Clan continues to expand into the Plateau and build further roads across the marsh. Gemstones and crystal are now a common building material, particular after expanding mining tunnels into the Spur itself discovered the mountain has a core of weird unshaped crystal of a kind never seen before. The chromium cap of the Plateau has caused some excitement for what it represents for steel-forging but due to not being magnetic, it cannot be added to their shells in the usual process. Some of the Lek-kego, generally the ones without the gaudy coloured shells, have taken to rolling around in it to come out looking shiny. The Spur Clan has increased in size dramatically and yet, it somehow keeps the communal Clan structure that only really suits a smaller Clan. The answer to this is spiritualism. The priesthood of the Spur, their holy mountain, has grown extremely adept at training spirits to proselytise to other spirits, sending them off in every direction to spread the word long before any explorers from the Spur Clan arrive. The spirits of the Plateau have been fully integrated. And most importantly, they have discovered that every Lek-kego bears a nascent spirit of their own. And so, using a sort of pseudo-bond with said spirits, they radiate artificial peace and bliss over most of the Clan.
- The situation in the Tungsten Clan finally breaks down. It all comes about with a normal Lek-kego, un-Knighted, unknown and with a heart full of despair. They happen across a corporeal tungsten elemental and, knowing what they did of the Order's methods, started attacking it. Being all but impervious to a single Lek-kego, the elemental permitted it to do this and then walked over and murdered a different Lek-kego than the one attacking it. The only reason the spirits had been going along with the Order's plans is because, even if it was all just a ploy to further their status, it still let the spirits kill Lek-kego. The one attacking the spirit quickly figured this out and, sick of the awful way of things, decided to keep doing it and together the two of them formed a roaming murder-duo with a perpetual license to kill. This by itself was just a single occurrence and both were dealt with by the Knights in short order. But there is a no shortage of either murderous tungsten elementals or anarchistic common-folk and now they both knew that such deals were possible. And with the Knight families fighting themselves as much as each other, still jockeying for position, there is little they can do to effectively stop the land from falling into chaos as would-be warlocks and their spirit companions just do whatever the fuck they want. All sense of Clan unity finally collapses and it stops being the Tungsten Clan and starts being a whole lot of individual Lek-kego and families thereof.
Well! They're all in much better shape now, aren't they? They're still fighting but through that fighting they're learning and making so many things. Democracy, coups, nihilist murder sprees, some sort of racism you guess, mind control...
When you put it like that, it could be better. But on the other hand, you didn't make them so they'd be nice to each other.
You have 4 Miracle Points remaining.
[ ]No more interventions, this Age is good now.
[ ]Intervene! Specify the form of the Intervention and the time where it takes place.
