The Fae God
Magic, when discovered, came in the form of tokens of faith. They had been around for quite some time before their powers were discovered; the magic had been practiced for centuries without being named. These tokens were mined from the heart of the earth, and it was believed that it was their source of their power came from this practice.
But it was discovered, or perhaps noticed; and the eyes of man turned towards this grave new power, in which, if you sacrificed your tokens of faith, and followed a precise series of steps, the power could cause strange new things to happen.
You could summon food - or destroy it. The power could raise and destroy armies. Wars were fought using, and over, these tokens of faith; to gather them up, to cast strange new spells.
After many years, a great empire sailed across a sea, and, finding a new people with tokens of faith, broke that people and took home their tokens. And thus the world saw its first glimpse of the fae god who answered their prayers - for the empire ruined itself. It was not the tokens themselves which held power, but the faith invested in them - and taken far away from their people, the source of that faith, these vast influx of tokens merely reduced the faith available in the tokens already there.
Thus the arts of this fae god began to be catalogued and reported on; the nature and physics of the spells were identified, which permitted greater and more powerful yet subtler spells - but which had stranger and stranger side effects, corrosive to the unity of empire. Empires began falling, slowly at first, but then much faster. Some empires began to add blood rituals to the spells - although it added nothing, only subtracted.
A man, seeing the chaos and confusion brought by this fae god, sat and studied the rituals and diagrams. He thought he saw a way to use the faith in this god to banish the god. He died, but others continued his work.
A great war commenced, and in the ashes, a devoted caste of magicians tried the banishment spell. It seemed to work, for a time, in their empire; but in the place of the fae god, a dark hooded figure rose; and their spells didn’t work so well as before, and had stranger and darker new side-effects; the blood rituals they had sought to banish became widespread, as fearful magicians added sacrifices in a vain hope that their spells might work so well as they had before.
Elsewhere, the spells and diagrams had improved; gradually, most magicians realized the blood rituals did nothing, and eliminated them. The chaos and confusion continued, but it settled also into a strange kind of orderliness. The magicians refined and improved their spells; new kinds of empire, more resistant to the corrosive side-effects of the magics, rose. Tokens mined from the heart of the earth were replaced with new tokens, formed from elaborate spells from harvested crops - for it was the faith of the people that had ever granted them value, and the magicians learned of these secrets, and found spells that could enable such simple tokens to carry faith; and thus they gathered up the old tokens of faith, and spent their power on these spells, until they needed the power of the heart of the earth no longer.
A kingdom thought to make more tokens of faith, burning all their faith to create more tokens - forgetting in a moment of critical need that it was the faith that granted them power. The fae god laughed. The kingdom fell, and arose a dark and shambling thing, and brought ruin wherever its corrupted hand reached - until it reached for the empire of the hooded god, and ruin met ruin, terrible and complete.
The empire of the hooded god struggled, but survived; and its corruption spread, bringing ruin to countless kingdoms. The magicians worked as hard as they could, and yet their spells still worked not as well as before. And as they labored and cast and sacrificed, the hooded figure laughed, and their empire fell into chaos and rebellion, and the fae god threw off his hood.
The odd orderly chaos spread. The fae god laughed, as the chaos wrought chaos, and yet people were fed and clothed, and ruin begot ruin, and yet things improved with each new destruction. The spells that had brought food grew powerful - and many of the magicians who created food found themselves ruined. The spells that had brought clothing grew powerful - and the magicians who created clothing found themselves ruined. And yet the spells grew more powerful still, fueled by a faith that grew only stronger. The last of the old empires crumbled and fell; the new empires flourished.
The fae god laughed, as guild after guild of magician brought ruin to themselves. Yet the faith in the face of miracles only grew. And a new spell was drawn up, by a secretive and powerful cult of mages - a spell that would draw new spells.
The fae god laughed.