[Kyinnlen sighs.] It depends on the dragon, but with armies as a rule. We killed Zhaitan with airships--it took the whole Pact fleet. With Mordremoth... [His voice trails off slightly, and it's perhaps not too hard to tell that he bears a personal stake in the battles he's recounting.

And since Vrenille knows precisely why this topic remains an open wound for the sylvari, he picks up where Kyinnlen left off.] Mordemoth ripped the Pact fleet right out of the sky, but it corrupted the minds of a lot of sylvari too, turned them against their allies and then re-grew the dead into blighted copies of themselves. You hear "dragon" and you probably think, y'know, a beast with a body and a head and wings and a tail. But fighting Mordemoth was like trying to fight the jungle itself, and knowing it wanted to take over their minds the whole time. [He gives a glance to Kyinnlen and Sesyria here. After what they all went through in the jungle he knows he'll never take them for granted, but the scariest thing he's ever had to do in his life was shoulder the responsibility for shielding their minds with his magic.]

In the end what really killed Mordemoth was a battle inside its consciousness--I mean that's what they say at least. Could have killed that serpentine maw it had a hundred times over, but it just would've kept coming back.

Only it turns out that killing the elder dragons seems to be kind of a flawed strategy.