World Death

100 years ago, nearly all the gods unexpectedly died, and massive shockwaves swept across the planet from all their pent-up energy. These shockwaves bled psychic energy into the ground, which were absorbed by the corpses of the dead. Over the span of the next few days, massive hordes of undead rose up and began wandering the surface, coming to be known as the Risen Dead. The most immediate collapse of civilization came directly from the hordes of risen dead attacking every settlement, town, and city across the world. Urban areas with well-formed militias or presently-standing armies were able to beat back the risen dead in the short term, but anything town sized or smaller fell to massacre as the undead hunted down every living thing in the vicinity. Refugees retreated to the largest and best defended cities, each one becoming a small, isolated pocket of life in a world that now refused to support it.
Over the coming years, these cities developed magic and technology to help repel the undead, most notably radiant steel. The remaining cities built up great and mighty walls of the magical metal, taking on the term Citadel, and somehow managed to hold out. The existing rail networks were doped with radiant steel coatings to help avoid disruption and meddling by the undead and became the only viable transportation system between the citadels. If the rail connection gets disrupted or destroyed, the citadel becomes fully isolated from the rest of the world until it can be repaired.
While the world death itself was catastrophic for the mortals, it is not fully understand why nearly all gods suddenly died in short order. There are theories that put the human god Baxtri and his magical research at the center of the disaster, or that the gods were in some way or another working on some great plan they kept secret from the mortal species that worshipped them, but then that plan failed. What is clear is that every god, no matter where on the planet the god was, died within moments of each other. The only exception to this was Nalako, who was able to protect herself with a magical shield formed of her thousand tails. However, she has been in a coma since then, so is unable to answer any questions about what may have happened this day.
The gods being dead had an additional profound impact upon the mortal species that only gets stronger as the decades go by. Originally, mortals were formed by the gods and receive souls from that species' set of creator gods when they are born. However, without the gods, they are not receiving proper, fully-formed souls. It seems instead that babies are now siphoning off portions of their parents' souls, and then over the course of childhood manage to mostly grow into normal-sized souls. Unfortunately, each generation is being born with progressively weaker and weaker souls and diminuitive personalities in the children with weak souls. This is most pronounced in humans(species:ac1e5341-fa25-4aa5-9d27-6ba06d7a5211) who have now gone through approximately half a dozen generations since the world died, though dwarves are beginning to see it too after only two to three generations. These weak children have gotten the colloquial term @[Dulleyes, and humans are increasingly growing concerned over the viability of the next two generations. This phenomenon is similar to elves who are naturally born without souls and have to consume the souls of the dead to grow.
There are exceptions to this problem, though. Goblins never had creator gods for some whatever reason that was lost to time, so they are still born with souls as they always have been. Kitsune are also being born with full souls thanks to one of their gods surviving, even in her unconcious state. The Eyes of Nalako work very diligently to tend to Nalako's every need to keep her alive for the sake of their entire species.