If you’re still hoping for some thoughts on your ideas vis-a-vis your Choice of Relics, I have a pathological inability to not give my opinion so hold on to ya butts.
I actually think that there is the kernel of a really great idea here, but it could use a little refining. Opening premise of a world where magical… stuff used to be common but isn’t any longer, so far so normal, right? Okay but there are a limited number of ‘relics’ left behind that are capable of amazing feats of… stuff, and it’s down to our fairly normal human society to find uses for them.
That’s the good bit, that’s the interesting bit here.
Firstly, you need to think about what ‘magic’ means in your story. What are its rules, what are its limitations. Too many people just add in magic as a sprinkling of handwavium that bends the laws of nature so utterly that it means the character using it no longer has to be clever.
Take the old Dragonball cartoons as a prime example of this. Those guys throw energy balls at each other and have punches that happen so fast that they almost look like the studio stopped paying the animators halfway through production. That’s basically magic. They can call it whatever they want but it doesn’t exist in our world and has no scientific explanation so its magic. Done.
The problem is that now any character that uses that magic only has one tool to approach every problem with. They don’t need to outthink or outmaneuver or anything. Ever. All they need to do is have more magic. To the point where the episode can simply be a readout of ever higher numbers until one character decides he can’t arbitrarily raise his number any higher and he dies.
So for any decent fantasy story, magic cannot be a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card for your plot. It still has to make sense. It has to be for something, and it has to serve only that purpose.
So to come back to your relics. What would an ancient Magister or Hedge Wizard or whoever-the-hell made these things use them for? They would be used to run their society, right? Build a relic that turns wheels, grinding grain or powering cities because no matter how much pressure you put on the relic, it doesn’t slow down or stop. That would be a damn useful tool for modern people to have, wouldn’t it? Hook it up to Hoover Dam and you’ve got free energy for the whole planet.
But you need someone to physically activate it, and that’s the problem. Not just anybody is magically active. Maybe one in a million? One in Ten Million? A Hundred Million? However rare these magically active people are, they are worth their weight in Californium because without them the world stops.
What would it be like to be one of these people? One of these ‘lucky’ souls? Sure you can live in a fancy palace, but you have to spend the rest of your life hooked up to this ancient thingummy that supposedly provides enough food to feed the third world. No travel, no life, no agency.
Sounds pretty rough to me.
Now you had an idea of there being a great many inert or dead relics that can be visited in museums (supposedly starting your protagonist’s journey). While I would recommend thinking very hard about precisely what starts your journey off, your protagonist reveals themselves capable of ‘reactivating’ inert relics, unlocking their powers for his/her own use.
What would this imply vis-a-vis the protagonist’s heritage? Their importance? What will happen to their life if they are forced into perpetual servitude? Crowned a hero of the people yet kept in chains? Why have the relics chosen this time and place to begin reactivating, and what does that mean for the world? Are the creators of these arcane mysteries returning from whatever dark place they have resided? Can they be reasoned with? Bargained with?
Can they be stopped?
There’s your story.
Good luck with it though!