Welcome to Gaia! ::

[EDIT: I've tried to streamline this without too much confusion. Hopefully it's less daunting now.]

The island on which the story takes place was conquered centuries pre-story by the armies of a faraway continent. The “home” continent was already full of highly trained mages, so many young magic users would join the army to wait out the time until they could get good jobs at home. Once the island was conquered, however, many of the mages in the army decided to stay and develop the new lands and eventually declared independence from the mother country. The island's (non-magical) natives mostly became slaves, but could raise their status to second-class citizenship by entering the Church and teaching their fellow "savages" to practice the new religion.

Even after slavery was abolished, the upper posts of the clergy were retained for a while by the mages, but even those jobs slowly changed hands. Finally, a full-blooded native rose to the top of the Church and even succeeded in fusing the institutions through marriage. He slowly expanded his people's freedoms while restricting the freedoms of the mages. His goal was to bring his people to a level field (laws and so forth) with the mages and to protect non-magic users more fully against the threat of magic abuse.

Magic still wasn't all-pervasive (there was always an imbalance of manpower in favor of the natives), but the growing number of mages were highly sought after because of their abilities in shaping iron, running fuel-free machinery... basically creating and running all the technology in the country (it was just easier to get a low-level mage in to help here and there than to contract a high-level mage to make all the tools needed to do the jobs without magic, so no one was really making tools).

The next king managed to continue the consolidation of the powers of Church and State, but began to vigorously suppress the minority mages. Several highly-ranked mages went missing or wound up dead, and the entire population of mages was eventually forced into exile. Once the mages disappeared, all the intricate technologies they had helped to create and run broke down. The huge country fell into an economic depression, and was divided between several army generals upon the king’s assassination.

Another hundred or so years pass. By this time, the several countries are constantly warring for cropland and what very little technology is left. The few mages who survived are in hiding pretty much anywhere they can survive where “regular people” don't deign to travel. They mostly try to survive subsistence-style, but there are some things they have to get from town, so they make frequent forays into nearby villages, trading off every few years to keep villagers from noticing their slow aging. The mages have, mostly through glamers, earned the misnomer of "elves" and generally loathe their "human" counterparts, but they don't--and probably never will, considering their low birthrate--have the numbers to retaliate, even if they were to gather all their scattered numbers together, which has never happened to date.

Unbeknownst to the "elves," underground culture and (more conservatively) the teachings of the Church have recently begun to condone small magic acts and experimentation with magic. Popular attitudes toward magic and mages are shifting in response to the never-ending wars and the possibility of magic being the key to ending the struggles over food and technology. Technology itself is starting to boom again after the recent discovery of old mages' manuals and diaries in several royal libraries previously restricted to public perusal. A technological race is on the horizon. The “elves” don't know it, but the new generation and much of the lower class, if not the ruling class, are ready for their return.

Yanno... despite the wall o' text... I read all of it at one point. I just can't remember what I was gonna say... sweatdrop