Yaocapact

“They’re all so serious! It’s the lack of sunlight, I think. Oh, but I am fond of them. I’ve seen so many generations of them come and go that—you mustn’t laugh—that I almost feel as though, in a way, they’re my children. Yes, well, I see your point, but you know what they say: spare the rod…”

— Ironmother

The sunless depths of Caverndeep, with their cold black waters and monster-infested tunnels, might seem hostile to life. And, indeed, Caverndeep’s human population is smaller than that of many other splinters—but it is not zero. It is a testament to the adaptability of humanity that, even in that subterranean darkness, it has quite literally carved out a space for itself.
The city of Yaocapact is a triumph of stonework, famous throughout the world for its breathtaking architecture of stone and luminescent crystal. It is a stalactite city, hanging suspended from the ceiling of a vast cavern, its inverted towers like great drips of petrified wax. On the still lake beneath it, blind priests pole flat-bottomed boats and tend the fossilized remains of dead saints.
The people of Yaocapact are serious, diligent, austere, and polite, renowned for their stonework and their bureaucracy alike. Caverndeep is a treacherous place, full of dangers; the Yao face these dangers with the same sober, methodical focus that they afford any other project.

Living Stone

A deep affinity for stone and earth is baked into Yao culture. There’s no distinction between a stoneworker and a geomancer; the city’s unparalleled stonemasons and architects do not only carve stone, but use magic to sculpt and animate it. Many earth genasi, which are common in Yaocapact, have a natural facility for this discipline.
Constructs of living stone clamber across the city’s architecture, doing repairs and making improvements. Some of these constructs are automatons, while others, the ones who perform more delicate tasks, are piloted by geomancers. Some Yao geomancers even go so far as to fuse themselves into their constructs, blurring the line between man and machine.
Ossilyatai, a city-sized automaton built to allow for safe transport across the Radiant Waste, was created by Yao geomancers in collaboration with Oroscan engineers. Though it has recently become a free city, independent of its mother city’s control, Ossilyatai remains the proudest accomplishment of Yao geomancy.

Papers, Please

The Yao are an insular and secretive people who, as a rule, are not particularly welcoming to outsiders. The topmost level of Yaocapact, the visitors’ ward, is riddled with bureaucrats whose job it is to bog down new arrivals in red tape. It is very difficult to enter the city without the proper permits.
Once one has cleared this hurdle, one finds a city lit almost exclusively with candles, paper lanterns, and the faint luminescence of magical crystal. Its inhabitants breed pale, blind cave-fish in the dark pools, or tend lightless orchards that produce bitter fruit. Many outsiders find Yaocapact uncomfortably dim; its citizens, most of whom have never have never seen the sun, find bright light uncomfortable or even painful.
The stratified and formal culture of Yaocapact places extreme importance upon lineage and tradition. The city’s deified ruler, the Amaranth King, personifies this preoccupation; His spirit is said to be reborn in a new body whenever the old one dies, and in His bloated, extravagant court, roles and even identities are hereditary.

The Factory

It is not unusual for a Yao person to spend their entire life continuing the work of an ancestor, or nursing an ancient grudge. One city-wide, centuries-old grudge of special note is that which the people of Yaocapact bear for Ironmother.
In the depths of Caverndeep, outside of Yao territory, there is a city-sized facility, a labyrinthine complex of tubes and corridors sunk deep into the stony earth. This facility, which turns living creatures into undead amalgamations of flesh and metal, is known simply as the Factory.
The Factory most likely predates the Shattering, although it has not been in operation all that time. It was discovered centuries ago, silent and inoperative, by a party of Yao explorers. They delved into its depths; they saw the massive sphere of metal at its heart; they heard the sound of something massive shifting within. They became the first people to be absorbed into Ironmother’s zombie collective.
Yaocapact has been at war with Ironmother ever since.

The Mother of Mind Flayers

Ironmother is an ancient consciousness that resides in the Factory. Her origins, as well as the Factory’s, are shrouded in mystery. Ironmother herself is certainly not telling—if she even knows.
Ironmother seems to have no physical body of her own; instead, through an unknown process, she absorbs living creatures into a hivemind of mechanized zombies. These zombies, recognizable by the mechanical tentacles bolted to their faces, are called illithids, or, more disparagingly, mind flayers.
Although illithids are aware and articulate, they are not the people they were in life; they are all Ironmother, who sees through their eyes and speaks through their mouths. There is a very limited number of them—only a few hundred—and although each individual illithid is very powerful, Yaocapact’s troops utnumber them a hundred to one. Even so, Ironmother makes up for this through her intelligence, her skills as a warrior and a technomancer, and the frankly unfair coordination of her troops.

Down in the Sacred Dark

Many Yao people venerate not only the king, but also the elements that make up their home splinter: the weight of darkness, the weight of stone, lakes like mirrors in silent caverns. For most people, these things are the subjects of superstitions and rote rituals. For a few, they are a lifestyle.
There are monastic orders whose members put out their own eyes so they will live in perpetual darkness, or who gradually petrify their flesh until all that remains of them are pillars of stone. Most people look at such zealots with some degree of embarrassment—but those same people also speak of the lake underneath Yaocapact, which is dotted with tombs and the rock-formation remains of saints, in a superstitious whisper.
On one side of the cavern, the waters of this lake drain into a pit, spilling ever downwards into bottomless darkness. A common funeral practice in Yao is to anoint the body and let it drift into this pit, thus commending it to the Black Lake, the mythical body of water at the bottom of Caverndeep. As the Yao saying has it: only the dead know the way to the Black Lake.

YAOCAPACT

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Head of state: The Amaranth King, Ilyen XIX
Languages: Yao
Currency: Yao kanak

The Yao language, with its flowing diphthongs and hard, clipped consonants, evokes the natural shapes of stone.
Example names: Anduyar, Atai, Caract, Chei, Hallinoct, Halya, Kayina, Kuori, Lao, Marei, Neya, Nezai, Ondil, Otec, Senego, Teng, Toren, Yan, Yarit, Yutan.