Why is there Magic Here?
Blame it on the Fey
The simple answer is that the Orbis is a place much more contaminated with Fey influence than most other game worlds, and far more than our boring old modern Earth. One of the three progenitor races, the Aeldvolk, were literally an infusion of the Feywild in physical form, the Feywild itself playing with the idea of consciousness, distributed across thousands or millions of individual self-contained nodes - each one was a fragment of the plane itself.
The Gazaf race also comes from a magical place, but of elemental rather than Fey origin. The third race, the Hyinchneumen, were only partially resident on the material plane at all.
So this means that all the races, and indeed all the sentient creatures, no matter how base and mundane they might appear, are made up of magic-infused planestuff. Magic is thus a natural and, in their own logical construct, a scientific extension of those origins.
God-Powered vs. Powered Gods
What about Divine magic, compared to Arcane? D&D draws a sharp line of delineation between spells granted by a deity, and spells granted by the magical 'weave' or some other non-religious, purely transctional source. However it's important to note that Arcane magic is, in its way, even more weird than Divine; the Divine can grant a spell to a Cleric, Druid or Paladin that, once cast, is lost - because it came from the deity in the first place. That makes sense, right? But in the case of the Wizard, he has memorized a spell, often one he has cast dozens of hundreds of times in the past - occasionally the same spell in all particulars as the one the Cleric, Druid or Paladin are casting; and yet, once that spell is cast and/or the slots available are consumed, that spell is truly gone from the caster's mind, and the wizard must memorize it all over again.
Besides which, are the gods unable to grant certain arcane spells? Are Wizards unable to learn certain divine spells? Most classes that have any spellcasters have those variants that get a few of the other type, as cantrips or 'flavor spells', but the lists are separated by class and moreover there are a few spells specific to only one sort of divine or arcane caster - Druids and Clerics have a lot of spells that don't overlap, as do wizards and warlocks, for instance.
Of course, this is the metagame; the result of five layers of imperfect revisions to an imperfect magic game system which was never entirely comfortable inside of the larger DND game as a whole - and it's only gotten more cumbersome in trying to balance some reality with some playability. But it's much too late and too ingrained now to revise, and what would you take away that could improve it? The concept of losing spells once cast, the highly specific ranges, durations, casting times, casting components, and the intersection with the idea of skill saves are all more of an action economy thing than any attempt to mimic what we see in fantasy fiction.
So the mystery of how all this functionally works is a deeply interesting debate for high-level clerics and wizards of the Orbis; Clearly all manner of beings are able to grant spells. Even the heretical gods followed by defrocked priests grant their death cult leaders all manner of spells, and sometimes more power beyond spells. At the same time, mighty wizards following arcane magics to their highest expression of power are completely cut off from even the simplest of many clerical magics. They might bring down a meteor swarm but they can't cure light wounds (but a Bard can)!
Dozens of theories exist, but it is interesting to note that the second Elven war, which ended in the near-destruction of the planet by the Cacogen Elves on the moon, marked the origins of Arcane magic on the Orbis as a separate concept, as such; before then all magic that was, was divine magic, or at least, so its practitioners claimed. The Cacogens pursued godless magics and were exiled and cut off for it, and sought refuge on the moon to conduct their experiments in peace, finally retaliating with what they no doubt hoped would be a planet-killing event, the comet they pulled out of orbit.
They did not kill the planet, but no gods came out of the heavens to save the world, either. The Yuan Ti claim it was their pooled magic that held the gutshot world together long enough to knit its wounds, else its pieces would be whizzing around where the planet once was; lucky for the rest of us, the Yuan-ti like this place and wanted to stay.
For what it's worth, the origin of the Celestials is tied up in that very fact - that the old Gods had deserted the world and their loyal Solar followers could no longer stand idly by; accepting the prayers of the faithful, they were granted the powers of the old Gods by the Unknowable Creator.
The original arcane spells were lost with the Cacogens, though a few dusty wizards do lay claim to having rediscovered a few of them; nevertheless the idea of arcane magic not only persisted but exploded into the world with the rise of true Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks even as the dust cloud of the impact was still blowing around the cracked and burning world. Those were the wild and dark days where larger civilization ceased and the survival of sentience was centered on what we would consider monsters, mighty wizards in towers and rogue demons who had left their home plane to walk the burning world, collecting and protecting villages of farmers and other workers from enemy wizards and the many horrific monsters of that age.
Cumae rose to prominence while parts of the world were still cooling. Arcane magic reached a pinnacle under such wizards as Tenser, Mordenkainen and Bigby who were able to support the growth of the Old Empire through wild lands and feral populations, restoring civilization and stability to a world that had nearly gone out like a guttering candle down to its last wick. That empire flourished, bringing stability and recognizable cultures, national borders and major cities to the Orbis. But over time, even with great magic, such a world-spanning Empire could not stand without a cohesive language and unifying culture to hold it together; regions were lost, and the Cumaean empire began to slowly contract; contraction accelerated over time, with some places asserting a civilized independence while others were lost into shadow that persists to this day. It was into that context that the Celestials, and their rejuvenated Divine magic, arrived.
About 2,000 years before the collapse of the remnants of the Cumean Empire, the 72 Celestials visited the Orbis physically at various now-holy sites around the world, as the Khazigiri were rising from the ashes of the old Empire in the eastern portion of the world. And in that faith, all magic is in fact, divine, and an offshoot of the Celestials in aggregate, while Divine magic is sourced to a particular Angel. This neatly explains why some spells are accessible to both types, but only certain classes, and others are fairly unique.
The difference, it's said, is that individual Angels require loyalty and attention for specific spells, while the inherently magical nature of the plane and the interaction of that magic with all the descendants of Aeld, Gazaf and Hyinch gives almost anyone access to some magic, as long as they study and apply themselves - and in the case of warlocks and sorcerors, even the study isn't a necessity; people may simply be born with a gift of a few spells, and with practice acquire more, and get better at using them.
In all events, clearly the spells are dependent more on the caster than the source; otherwise, how would the same spells become more powerful as the caster gains experience?
Magic Items in the Orbis
Magic Spells and magic items are obviously closely related, but in more than a few cases, one might find magic items with abilities that no specific spell can reproduce. Something as simple and mostly useless as a shield engraved on one side with a huge face that changes expression seems like a harmless lark, except it's not an illusion - the shield is really changing its expression.
The simple explanation is that those effects come from spells older than the arcane and divine spells known in the world right now. They could be Arcane Cacogen spells from the ages before the the rebirth of Arcane magic - and while they could pull comets out of their orbit, they might have also been able to shape metal in such a way as to imbue it with a sort of false life, or other trinket magic - the true meaning of a cantrip. Likewise there are Divine spells from the days of the Old Gods, and before that, Divine Spells of the Lin Elves, to say nothing of the Yuan Ti or the Drow or any of a dozen other sentient casters around in those days; the Divine Spells used today are generally from the time after the coming of the Celestials, so magic items with divine magical effects might be dated more easily by whether or not the spell effects are known or unknown.
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