The world
Voidfall
Most characters and stories unfold on the main supercontinent, a landmass spanning half the globe. Empires, river cities, Spirewoods, and people stubborn enough to live among them.
Ferox
The Feroxian Empire stretches from the Ashland Wastes to the Voidwind Coast, and from the barren Varin Highlands to the plentiful Hitam Islands; an unthinkable number of cultures and people are bound by the Sovereign Mandate. Tributary states are governed by High Generals, installed by the Emperor.
Dantáin is a Ferox Pyromancer and High General: strategic, loyal to the Mandate, ruthless in battle. One of Kio's closest friends from the Monastery. His uncle Cúrtao, the Bulwark of Ferox, still keeps counsel with Cardom Calvados from the Twin Cities, from when things between their countries weren't so tense. Most of the core population of Ferox are mild Pyromancers. They forge with it. They light their weapons with it. The rare ones make the rest of the continent nervous.
The Twin Cities
Hyraxia and Hynora weren't always so united. Separated by a great river, the two nations learned to coexist, and each raised a Skyspire in the wake of that unification: towers named after, and rivalling in height, the ancient Crown Trees of the Spirewoods. Places of governance, culture, and commerce.
Cardom Calvados is the longest-standing member of the High Council. Beneath it move the Blackhounds, the Cities' unofficial secret police, led by the Lightseer Reivas Houndrel, with a success rate people quote at ninety-nine point nine. Chernus, inventor and Animancer, has spent his life making what the Cities live by. His latest is a Voidmech. People already call him the Techno-Mancer.
Livingwood
Livingwood is a venerable Spirewood. Rumours say that when people are buried there, their souls tangle with the trees. Recent studies suggest the entire forest is a single, sentient entity. Nobody really enters without a good reason. Those who do meet strange occurrences and an air thick with the departed. The woods even make mimic creatures of leaf and bark: Spriglings.
Dymestal is the first and only known Human Sprigling, born from the forest floor when Livingwood stopped a hunter mid-draw. The hunter bolted home with stories of a wooden boy. Years later Dymestal walked into the village as a young man: Livingwood's first attempt to bridge forest and human world. He can perform Bloomancy. He talks to trees. He is gentler than the place that made him.
Ashlands
The Ashlands are what remains when a Crown Tree at the heart of a Spirewood is destroyed. Grey ash. Sparse life. Deadskins in the wastes. In the centre, a semi-active volcano spews raw void energy. Upon hitting the atmosphere, clouds form and rain down as ash. Think of iridescent snow made of pure energy. It's surprisingly pretty, though its effects are not well documented.
Heartseeds are glowing orbs of almost pure energy, giant pearls formed in Crown Tree cavities over centuries, the way oysters make pearls. Exceedingly rare. Highly sought. Capable of reshaping the map.
Mancers
Elemental Mancers are woven into daily life: Pyromancers at the forge, Hydromancers over the fields, Terramancers raising walls that take a lifetime to learn and longer to finish. Then the rare ones. Chronomancers who tug at time. Céleste is the first known in generations. Phantomancers, deeply mistrusted. Animancers, who handle life force and soul, and are often treated as unnatural for it.
Voidmancers manipulate the core essence of the universe. Kio Calvados, born in the Twin Cities, is the only one known. Cardom sent her to the Monastery to keep political enemies from using his family as leverage. She learned to pull weapons from the air in the shape of Shards. A Heartseed detonation obliterated her physical form, and she came back as the Voidwalker: able to traverse vast distances and glimpse other people's memories. As of the early Third Age she roams as a spectral guardian, with only rumours of the Ghost of Hyraxia hinting at her existence... for now.