Ashai live on a gigantic tree with living space around that of a modern middle-sized European city. The tree gives them everything they need, partly due to incorporating necessary biological structures from submitted plants of the forest: shelter, food, water, several ashai-specific nutrients, tool and weapon material and so on. Ashai themselves are naturally nimble, since to gather the food they have to balance on thin branches on the edges of the tree.

Cyriord live in a grey desert which is made up partly of ash which their bodies adapted as very dense natural armor (living in a place where everything is out to kill you will do that to you). To be precise, they live in a gigantic city-state in the middle of the desert; the city has been built around the tallest thin tower of unknown origin, which the cyriord people worship as the vessel of the spirits.

The imperial men have had the institute of Heroes - people who dedicate their lives to helping others in any way they see fit, which usually ends up being either fighting or talking - for hundreds of years. So trusted they were that when the highest circle blamed them for the assassination of the latest ruler, most people outright disbelieved and are quietly helping stranded Heroes with finding jobs and establishing their lives anew. The reason it's the interesting part is because somewhat like the USSR at the end of its existence, the Third Rule (which fell apart due to the assassination) became crime-ridden, either by street-level thugs or high-level authorities as everyone with a piece of power strived to gather more at the expense of others.

Magi of a different world use their very-painfully-established connection to the irrationality - a field outside of our perceived reality - to bend the world around them. The connection is established through a ritual dubbed "the ignition", whereby a child at the start of puberty with the potential connection is being chanelled irrationality at by either their relatives (the closer the blood, the better) or a trusted mage until the barrier in their mind brakes. The process is extremely painful, and the amount of pain received rises as the potential mage ages, so the younger they are, the better the chances of them surviving; people over fifty have barely any chance of establishing a connection without dying. The cost of a luxury of reality-bending is that their brains have to adapt to the irrationality to process it efficiently enough, which means that with usage of it magi slowly go madder. Active magi don't live to see their fiftieth birthday.

A personal point of interest of mine - I'm not sure how important it might seem to an outside observer - is the fact that in the superhero-inspired world of mine there's no explanation to give to how people with powers violate various laws without lifting a finger. People often try to explain such things with magic or "genetics" or other such nonsense; I went the other way: the strangest, weirdest event - the Shift, named as such because of the perceived "shift" of physical reality (which blew a lot of people's minds and made quite a few go mad because of sheer weirdness) - happened, and afterwards, random people got to live with limited reality-warping capabilities. Why? How? Hell if I know. It doesn't matter. What matters is how people are going to live with it, because it's not your typical superheroverse: I went along the lines of Heroes and Alphas, minus the "saving the world" and "a team which the reader follows" parts.