What Happened To The Gods?

“I remember when the gods meant everything. We believed in them, fought and died for their causes, dedicated our entire lives to their ideals. We fought their wars for them, here on the material plane; I don’t think any of us realized why. That when the gods themselves go to war, it’s us who suffer. They did, though, and the strongest of us joined, armed with weapons to kill gods, weapons they gave us. A war between the so-called ‘good’ and ‘evil’ gods. I’m not even sure those words meant anything to them, other than a way to pick sides for their fights. When the dust of the Gods’ War finally settled, most of them were dead, and the material plane had been trampled over in the fighting. We hadn’t realized, as we fought, just how much destruction the gods had laid upon our world as they struggled to kill each other, but we saw now. Saw all the pain and loss they’d caused, that we’d caused fighting for them. Do you want to know why the war was fought? Why so much hurt was cast upon the world? I asked, when I realized what we’d wrought. It was chess. Not even a metaphor, a literal game of chess. The Storm King played against the Corrupter, and accused her of cheating when he lost, and lines were drawn in the sand, armies assembled, children crushed by the uncaring machine of war over this one fucking game of chess. Us mortals, we couldn’t believe what we were hearing when the gods told us this. Could you? In our grief and anguish over what we’d done, our hatred of such a foolish cause, we turned on the gods we’d once worshipped and killed them too. When the last of them fell, and there were no more gods to plague us with their squabbles, so little of our home was left. It was our fault, in a way, that so much of our world was destroyed. That’s why we became the forces that sustained it, and worked so hard to keep the peace between the remaining races. Pray you do not lose that peace, once we are gone.”
-Amari Tieris to her apprentice Nitis Culessa, a year before she retired as the Archmage of Sun and passed her title down