It is painfully obvious that Douglass did not do her world-building before she started writing, except in fairly basic stuff like the peoples and the map. The rest of the time she's just throwing things in on the fly to suit herself, which is why there's so much random bizarre stuff that comes right out of nowhere and doesn't fit into any sort of coherent setting - not just the special abilities, but the hopelessly mismatched character names, among other things.