FoxBat.6295

I can see the three orders stepping back from joint missions a bit. Basically they stop delegating full authority to the pact marshall until such time as they are convinced of a common mission. They can still keep Logan and some top pact people around to coordinate resources for these missions as they come up. Narratively I think Anet wants to keep their options open, but in general the pact should not be the major focus of our story again, unless they are going to do a really different take. That's basically how they have been treated since HoT though, put more in the background.

We don't have a full clear canon explanation but if we follow Aurene being the prismatic dragon, you shine white (mixed/all visible) light into a prism and a rainbow spectrum of colors comes out the other end. Likewise if you look at a rainbow, you see a curved circle of distinct color bars right on top of each other. I wonder whether "pure" ley lines might operate in a similar way, that it is separated magic traveling closely in parallel, so that the magic types can remain unmixed while still being on top of each other.

Lots of weird headcannon in here, but it's excusable because there have also been some EoD retcons that I think people are trying to reconcile that they shouldn't. According to Soo-Won, the elder dragons do bad things (like cyclically consume societies) because "it is their nature," because there were "made as just tools to combat the void." It is not because the void is driving them insane, if anything it's their obsession with their one, specific domain of magic, as Soo-Won noted as they matured and their family fell apart. As immortal beings created before mortals even existed, its not even strange that they are utterly insensitive to what look like ants to them. Even while living apart over the millenia, they mostly avoided attacking each other and encroaching on each other's turf. As noted Zhaitan could not even corrupt Mordremoth's Sylvari. Kralk even valued his dragonkin as family. They played the role they were meant to, holding up reality by keeping the magics separated and pure at any cost. There is an issue with corruption and insanity, but that is entirely about the mixing of magic types, which only came up in the current cycle. When Zhaitan died and his magic started seeping into the other dragons, that was corruption, not because Zhaitan magic is bad in and of itself, but because it was mixing of magic types that were not meant to mix, bringing us closer to void. Kralk was never a nice guy to mortals, but he was not "insane" in the way he became after drinking in Zhaitan and Mordremoth. Primordus and Jormag did not start fighting each other for territory until they drank in other dragon magics; in fact they didn't even feel like moving from their original turf until they got flooded with zhaitan/mordy magic in LS3. There's no hint of Soo-Won having any insanity issues until the current cycle, where she is flooded with mixed/void magics from the death of the other EDs. Aurene, as a Kralk-descendent egg, being bathed in Zhaitan and Mordremoth's magic, is supposed to be the catalyst for her developing prismatic abilities. That is the unique power Kralk talked about. A prism takes completely mixed light (white) and divides it up into the distinct colors of the spectrum. Similarly in EoD Aurene takes void magic (which is all-magic mixed together) and filters by dividing it up into separate types (probably the same six that correspond to the dragons.) In short the implication of EoD, is that corruption = void = mixed magic, purity = prism = separated magic. I know that this understanding conflicts with earlier information about the Forgotten who were able to "cleanse corruption" from Glint and Orrian chickens and such. But Soo-Won is suggesting that nothing was magically corrupt about Zhaitan. He and the others were built as flawed tools, who kept up their original job, until the civilizations of Tyria broke the current cycle by killing EDs and mixing the magic types. By chance we arrived at Aurene who is both a better tool (can separate all magic types by herself) and grew up alongside mortals, so will have some kinship and care for them. And also not single-mindedly obsessed with one domain as happened with the original EDs.