On Aleyi, the original creation held one kind, but magic has inheritable costs inverse to the spell cast. Spells for light decrease one's need for it. Healing spells wreck the health of if not kill the caster... Spells to take another's life increase your own.
The Creator gave a binding Crystal to the four main "kinds" that developed from these costs, so each group as a whole would be affected, changing much more slowly and consistently than occurred with different people casting spells individually. The Crystal-kinds are the humans, elves, dwarves, and faeries.
As far as anyone knows, the humans are the closest to first kind created, but from the milennia that have passed, none can be certain. Faeries came from those who cast conjuring and time-manipulative spells, lessening their ability to be on the normal plane of existence. Elves and dwarves possess superior night vision, but the stocky dwarves draw energy from stone; a willowy elf lacking plants might waste away.
Other kinds like mermaids also exist, though on a much smaller scale. Perhaps the largest minority group are the magekeepers, produced when a mage casts a spell outside his ability. That mage can be controlled by whoever masters the spell that miscast spell that now binds him... as can his descendants.
Each of the Crystal-kinds eventually rid themselves of their Crystal, for a powerful mage who controlled the Crystal could control the kind. Humans and dwarves lost theirs to history; faeries shoved it into a plane none could reach. Elves alone chose to rebind it to a single kingdom, so that kingdom only would be affected if someone took control of it, enabling the others to come to its assitance.
The time of need came the year Evonalé's mother was born. Over a score years have passed since that day. ...Where are the elves?
PERSPECTIVE
My hope is to someday turn this into a series of novels in Aleyi. As things currently stand, I'm working on a second draft of Evonalé (possibly to be retitled or subtitled something else, but I'm not sure yet), greatly expanding and revising the original roughdraft. I'm also developing second character, an unfortunately ugly human-dwarf hybrid, for her own work.
I won't give too many details on Evonalé, because part of my goal is to make some things obvious despite the first person, present tense. Suffice to say that she's not quite accurate in her perceptions of royalty, and her ancestry is messed up enough to give her good reason for that.
Some elements of the story are cliché, I'll readily admit. Everything's at least a little cliché; my goal is to turn the clichés into something to be laughed at while using them to further the story. We'll see how well I did once I'm done enough to seek an agent.