Great War

The known records available to the revolution do not identify the exact weapon or method that ended the venin threat during the Great War. Brennan treats that missing method as the key to the current war effort, with forged daggers serving as a survival measure while the revolution searches for the older solution.

One known Great War-era combination involved a shadow wielder and a lightning wielder fighting side by side. Emetterio says the last pair with those signets drove venin back into the Barrens for a few hundred years, making Violet and Xaden apparently the first simultaneous pair since that era.

Gryphon life-bonding is credited as part of the Great War's victory. Cat says gryphons' sacrifice helped win the war and helped preserve Poromiel through the centuries that followed.

The revolution uses Great War history as a search field for a way to defeat venin again. Its leaders are not studying the war only as old history; they are looking for the practical method that ended the earlier venin threat.

Xaden uses the Great War as a political accusation against Navarre when he tells Melgren to call on the allies who helped win it. His point rests on Navarre's decision to cut off contact with those allies centuries ago.

Some surviving Great War material is incomplete or simplified. The Unabridged History of the First Six preserves battle experience and interpersonal history, but it presents the enemy as General Daramor and the allies as the isle kingdoms rather than giving Violet the practical answers she needs.

The Journey of the First Six is another limited source on the Great War. Violet describes it as mostly scribe-centered war stories and heavily redacted, useful for context but not for the ward knowledge she is seeking.

One book Tecarus sends Violet appears to concern the first emergence of venin after the Great War, but its exact value remains uncertain because it is in Krovlish and Violet is not confident in that language.

The irids do not provide the missing Great War solution when Andarna asks how venin or dark wielders were defeated. The female irid answers that they apparently were not defeated if Andarna is asking, leaving no operational cure or historical instruction from them.

The Great War serves as a cutoff point in dragon geography around Cordyn. Violet recalls that blue dragon hatching grounds were no longer near Cordyn after the war.

Thareux's successful bond is placed in the Great War period. He is identified as the first black dragon to successfully bond, adding black-dragon bonding history to the war's dragon-and-venin background.

Navarre and Poromiel agreed to call their shared land the Continent only after the Great War. Aaric's explanation makes the name a postwar political convention rather than an older neutral term.

General Daramor is one of the war's named historical figures, and his memory is abandoned with the Barrens in the postwar settlement.

The First Six are closely linked to the Great War era because their bonds began when dragons chose human partners to defend hatching grounds from venin.

The isle kingdoms appear in The Unabridged History of the First Six as allies in the Great War.

Xaden later points to the allies who helped win the Great War when challenging Navarre's isolation, noting that Navarre cut off contact with them centuries ago.