Just a lore idea:
The game alludes to eventual dire consequences when defeating the elder dragons and disrupting the harmony of balance in Tyria.
What if Tyria was a dumping ground for the failed creations of greater gods? These creatures festered and became so grotesque and powerful that they destroyed their original creators with the exception of 6.
The six greater creators became the elder dragons and erected a web of ley energy to keep their failed creations sealed within the heart of Tyria.
Each elder dragon would consume the corruption of these sealed entities and returning it to the web of Ley energy to ensure that these creatures would remain imprisoned and that the rest of the universe would remain safe. An example would be Mordremoth consuming the corrupt energy of plants and minds coming from the heart of Tyria, then return it to the Ley prison.
All was good until lesser races started building empires in Tyria. These races eventually began to draw upon the Ley energy of the prison for magic. To ensure that the prison’s energy wouldn’t be depleted, the Elder Dragons began destroying lesser races.
This worked until the Seers came and messed everything up by creating the bloodstones and finding a way to phase to another plane when the dragons would come. The bloodstones allowed the Seers to cheat the system by drawing out ley energy and keeping it stored during the times where the Elder Dragons would rise and destroy the lesser races. The Seers would then phase back in and retrieved stored energy from the blood stones, becoming stronger with each cycle.
The Seer’s master plan was to eventually become more powerful of the dragons by siphoning power into the bloodstones little by little. But then the Mursaat screwed the Seers over by stealing their phasing artifact, leaving the Seers stranded in Tyria to become destroyed by the dragons while the Mursaat survived to take their place as magical overlords.
After that, the human gods came to Tyria and found the bloodstones charged with energy. Abaddon then gave the power of the bloodstones to the humans, which proved much more than they could handle. This is when the Guild Wars occurred. During the Guild Wars, the Gods discovered the evil in the heart of Tyria and discovered that the human misuse of magic was weakening the prison.
They also discovered that their very presence in Tyria as lesser gods was drawing huge amounts of Ley energy away from the prison. The human gods attempted to balance this by retreating to their own realms and using avatars to advise their subjects, but eventually they had to retreat from the realm all together to buy the humans more time and prevent the dragons from rising early.
In the current age the dragons have already rose. Eventually as more dragons die, the prison will weaken and an even greater threat will start to rise up from Tyria’s core.
The Asura mistake the whole system as the “Eternal Alchemy.” In reality the Eternal Alchemy is a giant prison system for keeping Lovecraftian horrors sleeping at the core. While the dragons were once noble creatures, thousands of years of soaking up corrupt ley energy from the sleeping evil and returning it to the prison has turned them into the very thing that they labor to protect the rest of the mists from.
Prophets like Glint opposed the system because she had faith that the lesser races would eventually be able to rise up not only to destroy the dragons and system, but defeat the horrors that lie within.
