AC - Compendium: The Outlands

=== Overview ===

The Outlands consist of all land, sea and sky that exists outside of the Castles. It is covered with an eternal, unchanging and impenetrable darkness, and has been for longer than recorded history knows. It is populated by the Dreaded Ones, a catch-all term encompassing large categories of powerful, unfeeling monsters whose only weakness seems to be the light of the Castles. They show a virulent hatred of the Castles and the peoples within, and seek only the Castles' total annihilation.

Much of the Outlands remains unmapped, save for a few routes that the Warriors take when traveling from one Castle to another. A few Locations of Interest (LoI) are known and have been explored to varying extents, but the Outlands by and large remain a vast, dark mystery.

=== Locations of Interest ===

-None discovered yet

=== The Aya ===

Shrouded in rumor and legend are the clans of the Aya -- roving bands of mutants who live beyond the shelter of the Castles, deep in the Outlands. Little is known about them for sure, except that every one of them is a mutant. In the Castles, a popular punishment for mutants who turn to crime is to exile them into the Outlands, often with the mocking admonishment that they seek out the Aya for shelter. In truth, the Aya do take in many of these exiled mutants, so long as they prove that they can adapt to the ways and customs already set out by the Aya's native-born mutants.

Their name is the same name of their patron deity and mythical progenitor (for clarity, the clans distinguish between "the Aya" as in the clans, and "Mother-Aya" as in the goddess). The clans believe Mother-Aya to be a sixth child born of Nydfara. Initially weak and frail, she was disdained by the five haughty gods, who were enamored with their own might, and fell in narcissistic love with their own designs. When they wrought the world from Nydfara's corpse, they left nothing for Mother-Aya to fashion with, and so she was left with snatching up what scraps of creation that she could pilfer from the other gods. Imperfect things, broken things, things that the proud gods in their arrogance would overlook as they gazed, transfixed, at their objects of fascination. Thus, Mother-Aya took patronage of all that was outcast, misshapen, disdained and unloved, and made the darkness her cloak of holy protection.

Though the Aya take pride in that imperfection, they do not in turn embrace weakness. Rather, they deplore it, harboring a warlike culture and outlook. They occasionally may may meet and trade with the Warriors of the Castles, but in general they look down upon those weaklings who require the light of the Castles to survive.

It is said that the Aya make their home in Uma Tullu, the "place of the skull," and their leader is Yupanqui.