Following the disappearance of the Gods and with them the driving purpose of countless individuals and societies alike, the kingdoms of the land were thrown into chaos. Though few would now say that the abrupt removal of what had been a fundamental driving force for so many lives wasn't ultimately for the benefit of everyone, not a soul would claim that it was an easy transition. Across the lands battles still raged, now aimlessly, a habit more than a necessity. Coups were staged as the greedy sought to fill the vacuum of power, cities and homes splintered without the ties of their purpose to bind them, and it seemed at first despite the God's absence little would change in the fate of this war-torn world. The, the storms came.
It began slowly, with scattered endless rains and biting winds but quickly the storms grew into something that could only be described as apocalyptic. No place was left untouched by the waters as, across the world, lakes and rivers flooded from the torrential rains, ripped further from their beds by the winds so strong as to create raging waves in even the stillest waters. Huddled in whatever shelters they could find from the storms, people watched as the waters rose higher and higher, as the winds beat against their homes, and in that cacophony of sounds another came to be heard. Cracking.
At first, delicate like shattering glass, unheard by most amidst that raging storm, but quickly the cracking grew in volume and violence until even the storm was drowned out by it's sounds. As it grew, so too did the trembling brought with it and quickly it seemed as if the whole world threatened to tear itself asunder. Then, as the storms and quakes reached such a strength that it seemed impossible to bear, a single bolt of lightning struck, it's flash seen by all across the world who still had the ability to watch, and with it, a peal of thunder clear as a bell. As the lightning struck, the earth and skies quieted. Flood waters retreated impossibly fast and soon the survivors began to emerge from their shelters, shaken, but alive. But the world that they emerged into was not the one which they had left.
The world around them had been changed irrevocably. Lands had shifted, cities had been sundered and rearranged, ecosystems severed and stitched back together in sometimes nonsensical ways. Strangest of all though, it appeared at first the vast swathes of the world had simply disappeared and that what remained had been closed off in some fashion, becoming a looping landscape where before it had been simply a piece of a greater whole. And so it was that the Realms were born, though it would be some years before those who lived inside of them would come to understand them as such.