Aigua

Aigua is a jungle land of the East District, with the Atlantean Ocean to the south, the Acuan Gulf to the north, Paragua on its western side and Taracua on its eastern. As far back as scholars can tell, few humans have lived in or even visited it. It is a country of fierce beasts and impenetrable rain forest, including several smaller dinosaurs and mammals now mostly extinct elsewhere, and its birds may be the most colorful and varied in Tamoanchan; parrots are especially common, and Taracuans hunt them as pets.

Its one inhabited area is the central highlands of the Urag Mountains, where the Uragua live in caves and on sheltered ledges and herd domesticated rheas for eggs, meat and ornamental feathers. They make tools of stone, bone and wood, including stone axes and maces, wooden clubs, staves, bolas, slings and spears that are no more than fire-hardened sticks, never thrown though sometimes dropped from cliffs. Their only metalwork is crude lead boxes, dishes and bowls, and the lead has brought such high mortality that, though they breed quickly, they are slowly dying out.

A very strict code divides the sexes. Only men may make or use weapons and most tools other than cooking gear, but they never carry them; women carry them at all times, ready to hand over instantly, and a woman who uses, loses or breaks one is exiled. Only women may handle food: from the moment of a kill, only a woman may touch the meat, gather plants, or prepare, cook and serve, and a man who breaks this rule is also exiled. Women also lead worship in a shamanistic cult of Og centered on a great stone monolith at the highest point of their land, which only female shamans may guard.

The Uragua say they came long ago from elsewhere in Tamoanchan, fleeing pale-skinned seafarers who fought with metal. They are probably descended from Ulloan refugees who fled overland instead of into the underground world where the other Ulloans went. Their legends name no homeland and forget the Ulloans' fate, but recall entrances to a world below, and their story of the City of Darkness and the Woman of Stone points toward Ulloan ancestry. The outside world knows very little of them.