Struggling with a major factor in my story.

Ok, Merry Christmas first of all.

I'm having difficulty with one of my major plot factors. There is a group known as the Guardians who originally fought against the End-Lords. They defeated them in a battle which saw magic destroyed and allowing the world to progress in technology, because without magic people are forced to invent.

I'm stuck with what they do with their main reason for existing being gone. I've got them struggling for relevancy within this new world. They rent themselves out as bodyguards to the very rich and wealthy and act sort of like UN in that they only get involved in wars when there is the risk of genocide or some similar incident, and otherwise remain outside of politics. They also, on occasion, venture out to execute someone who has been found to have the blood of an End-Lord, even though magic no longer exists and it's pretty much exploited by some people to get rid of enemies or rivals.

So I guess they would sort of be like the magical police in a way.

But I'm struggling to get them involved in the actual story. They appear for the first book but near enough vanish by the second and third, despite there being reason for them to be around. Their reputation is damaged by them being led into an illegal war. They're kind of just there and not there, which is bad because two of the main cast used to be and are a Guardian. They surround a village because they think a child has been born which will herald magic's return, and then get involved in a fight with a rebel group and then nothing. They hunt down a group but fail to capture which murders an entire royal family and then nothing.

They then get slaughtered by the big bad of the outline and then obviously nothing.

I tried factoring in how to make them relevant or more relevant and ended up with something like Final Fantasy 10, where they lied to the world and had a group of people every 10 or 20 years travelling to a city where they get murdered while the Guardians tell everyone they saved the world, eventually leading to them being found out and disbanded/hunted down in time for the big bad to get about without any worries. Right now, I'm, like I don't want to do this either as the characters all seem too close to FFX except no one is dead all along.

If you're struggling to include them in any meaningful way, do they really need to exist in the story? It sounds like they are the primary antagonists of book 1, why not have their defeat at the end be permanent, i.e they're lead into the illegal war and due to political ramifications end up disbanded? Any individual characters in that organisation who are still important can still play a role as independent agents.

If you're struggling to keep them relevant, maybe they're not the big plot factor you thought they were to begin with? You can write them off gradually as other aspects of the story gain in importance. They sound like they were important in the past as an organization, but I don't see why they HAVE to be at the center of the story now. If you still want them in it, maybe you can turn it around and take their fall from grace/relevance as a plot point to explore in itself (think the movie Logan, as a perfect example). Show the aftermath, and how the remaining Guardians cope with this loss in power and influence. I don't know how to tie it into the plot, but personal relationships seem like the simplest way to do it. Maybe one of the ex-Guardians wants to reclaim their glory days and goes about rebuilding the organization? There could be some nice conflict there, and themes concerning soul-searching, loss, and identity issues.

I would say that if they spent so much effort to defeat magic and to insist on invention they must have a plan.

Right now they lack agency.

However it's likely their plan is two-fold. They are going to open a global patent office for all the new inventions. This is purely mercenary in that respect; however it has a seedy underbelly of the agency that keeps track of and monitors all inventions and inventors to be certain that none are using magic. And of course there will be competing inventors that are turning the competition in as unfairly and illegally using magic for their inventions. This then is misused when bribes are accepted to squash a competitor.

If the invention is advanced enough it probably looks like magic and we can make that stick.

Some of your independent Guardians might be those who are aware of this collusion and corruption and are trying in various ways to correct the problem by establishing the lack of magic before the patent office steps in.

Has magic really gone? To make it work you need to look at what you already have, so the guardians need to have some involvement in tech - the group presumably would have evolved in order to survive. From what you've said, it suggests that they think magic may return, but if this isn't going to happen, then I would question why you need the guardians at all, and why they are looking for magic (because you set up a reader expectation here which you need to fulfil).

If magic has gone, then the guardians can go too, as you don't need them. They may be a darling you need to kill off. A good way to work through this is to write a synopsis for your story that includes all your turning points and motivations because it will let you have a good look at your plot and see if that's where the problem lies.

Have some Guardians turn to magic because with the End-Lords gone, they opened the path to something they hadn't known about and can only be defeated/destroyed by magic and technology isn't advanced enough to delay, let alone stop the new something, and maybe the something are improving themselves with technology?

If you're struggling to make them relevant...perhaps they're not? Or at least not anymore.

In some SFF series, characters and themes come and go as the plot moves on. If two of the main characters are ex-Guardians, the fact that their backstory has been addressed in book 1 may be sufficient.

I might be wrong, but it seems that you might be trying to shoe-horn them into later volumes - perhaps because you like the concept, or are hanging onto the time you've invested in creating them - but if they don't 'fit', they should probably not be there.

The real world is full of revolutionaries who struggle to find purpose once their goals are achieved (or, alternatively, they fail). One common result is corruption and/or criminal activity (happened to some factions on both sides of the Northern Ireland Troubles, for example). Another common result is a proliferation of splinter groups, calving like ideological icebergs off the glacier of their former glory to litter the sea-lanes of the world. With an obvious purpose gone, groups split as members search for new roles.

So, why have just one group of Guardians? Why not have multiple factions, some criminal, some not, some at odds with each other. You obviously don't want to confuse the plot too much but, if the reader is already familiar with the Guardians from book 1, it shouldn't be too confusing to mix up the Guardians in later books.