The cataclysm did not end the dying — it began it. The first two centuries after the Deity's Sacrifice are remembered as the Years of Ash: the long, grey, godless collapse in which more of Kworgale's children died than in all its wars combined.
"The gods did not abandon us in a day. They abandoned us slowly, while we watched."
The Withdrawing of the Gods
Three Elders had survived the Conflagration: the Ruby, the Warden, and the Hammer. But they were broken powers, grieving and diminished, and they could not mend what had been done. One by one, across some two hundred years, they withdrew from the material world — retreating from the sight of mortals into silence, exile, and hidden places. The age in which gods walked among their children, taught in their cities, and marched in their wars was simply, quietly, over. No mortal living today has ever seen an Elder.
The Long Dark
Without the gods, the order they had built came apart. Cross-continental trade collapsed. Famine and plague stalked the ruined provinces. Cities emptied; roads were lost; whole bodies of knowledge vanished with the scholars who carried them. The proud peoples of the Fivefold Fleets were thrown back into isolation and want, each branch left to survive alone amid the wreckage of a golden age it could barely remember.
It was, the chroniclers agree, the lowest the world has ever fallen. And yet a people that has lost everything will always, in time, reach for something to believe in again. Out of the ash and grief of these centuries, the great new faiths of the world were born — and the Age of Faiths began.