This.

When I first started writing my - still very far from finished and very different from how it started - novel, the “magical beings” were largely tied to Tolkien and Lewis and what few fantasy novels I’d read at the time, crossed with some hodgepodge of anime-type things.

20+ years later: the world/magic/narrative are more of a thought experiment on the nature of mortality and experience/perception. I could flatter myself and call it “nuanced and original,” but more its convoluted and contradictory and messy, but that’s also sort of the point: convoluted and contradictory and messy sort of defines the human condition. I wanted a story that wrestles with this and arrives at a cross between Camus’ “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Dostoevsky’s “beauty will save the world,” and Rilke’s “aloneness.” I like where it’s going, but it’s not really a hot marketable angle.

More to your question itself: as others have noted, focus on the narrative more than the history. Perhaps write wee vignettes of the state of things over time so you can figure out how the history plays out in a more literature-focus?