This is primarily for people on rainbowfic, I'm doing a post like this for each of the four worlds I'll be working in...just basic information.

Feredar is the name of one of the largest cities on this as-yet-unnamed continent/planet. There are eight major...not regions, exactly, but sort of...groups of nations, would be the best way to put it, with similar customs. Two of them have a lot of overlap, four of them are basically individual nations, and the other two are very small and/or scattered groups. The eight cultures (is that the right world?) are built up around eight different magecrafts (water, fire, sound, air, earth, metal, lightning/magnetism, and blood). i've developed some of the histories/cultures more thoroughly than others; you can pm me if you want to know more. But a brief overview:

Water--Merchant clans living on an island archipelago. Each clan has a head, the heads elect from among themselves a leader for the whole confederation every twenty years. Basic water elemental magic.
Fire--In the desert, centered on a city made of glass. Monarchy. Basic fire elemental magic, and rare instances of foresight.
Sound--Largely nomadic on the plans, intermingled a lot with earth. Able to control sound in a lot of ways, from manipulating emotions and perceptions to reaching a wide area to understanding principles of acoustics intuitively and helping with architectural designs that need it.
Air--Small tribes in the high mountains, but serving as couriers to the rest of the world. Basic air elemental magic.
Earth--Mostly farmers and builders, with the largest cities of the world. They have the most varied systems of government of all the overall cultures. Intermingled a lot with sound mages. Basic earth elemental magic.
Metal--Living in low hills, miners and craftsmen. Also largely collected in small villages, with a couple larger towns as trading outposts. Extremely insular people--not quite as much as the last two, but still very mistrusting of strangers. Similar to earth elemental magic, only working with metals instead of stone.
Lightning/Magnetism--Living at the poles. Weather-working and navigation are their primary powers. The least tolerant of outsiders of all the cultures. Not much is known about how they live, but they're generally viewed as barbarians by the rest of the world.
Blood--They live in a forest at the center of the world. Their magic involves healing, and also...well, there are a lot of horrible and imaginative ways a blood-mage trained in combat can kill you. They're generally avoided and widely feared, but don't exclude outsiders as such. They have seven cities, which each have their own ruling lines with a fairly complicated system that I won't go into too much detail about here, but those lines rule all of this culture.

The biggest city in the world, as I said earlier, is Feredar. It's an earth city, and over the past several centuries has been building on systematic paranoia about and oppression of mages, and is now enslaving them. The rest of the world, even those parts that aren't ruled by mages, depend on them to some extent for their continued survival, so decide this is Not On. The primary narrative deals with the research into and eventual stopping of this practice.

My four principle characters are a watermage merchant captan, Taz Hantree, the lightningmage who assigned himself to her ship (and is now her lover), Dallu, a prince from the City of Glass, Isshiri, and another water-mage named Mel Artwick.