Of course, the most important and relevant wars are the First Wizard War (FWW) and the Second Wizard War (SWW). However, as one is mentioned, and the other occurs in the course of the story, I won’t say much about them here.
I would, however, like to talk a bit about how these wars get named. As it is with our wars, usually during the course of the war it’s just called “the war” or “the war in…”. Only after are they given names. On the land of Emris, war is essentially considered a crime against each race’s right to peace. And as war usually involves the entirety of a race involved, the entire race will hence forth bear the stigma of a warring race. It is for these reasons that A) very few races get involved in the wars that inevitable spring up, and B) the wars are named for the major or instigating race. In the instance of the Wizard Wars, the wizard’s self-proclaimed dominance and consistent abuse of power is what started both wars, so both are named after them. After that, the wars usually given chronological names, like first and second, to differentiate them.
One notable exception is the Dragon race. I’ll tell you about the Dragon wars in a second, but on point, the final war fought by the race of Dragons against the races of wizards and elves (including their branch races) was named The Last Dragon War, because the Dragons disappeared near the end. Because there were no more dragons, there could be no more dragon wars, so the name just sort of came into being.
Now about the Dragon wars: There were actually three dragon wars. See, at Emris’s conception, there was originally three sentient races, the Dragons, the Elves, and the Fawns. From these three came all the other races. Because of this, it was originally thought that the World would be split into three parts, with the parent races ruling and guiding the younger ones.
This plan, however, was met with a lot of resistance for multiple reasons. First, both the Elves and the Fawns had no desire to rule over their perspective branch races.
The Fawns in particular had spawned races with wild natures and unruly temperaments, and the Fawns were mild-mannered and lack the physical make up to use force. They, wild in nature as well, longed for nothing more than to dance in their forests and race through the tree and cared not what the others did so long as it did not impede their pleasure filled lives. The races of the Fawn and his sons were free-spirited and peace loving. Rules and rulers would only make them irritable.
The Elves, possessing vast amounts of foresight, knew setting such rigid borders over the face of Emris would cause more problems than it solved and anyway, they desired above all else intermingling and community with the other races. They believed in self-regulation, at both individual and racial levels, and were stringently against the idea of world powers.
But the Dragons knew that if there were no borders or rulers to control their branch races, their branch races would wreak havoc.
It was over this dispute that the First Dragon War was fought. It ended when all three parent races realized the damage the war was doing their races and their world. They sat and made peace by arranging not segments of land to be ruled, but individual cities ruled by decided races, where such lofty goals as order and structure, accountability and coexistence, could meet.
The second Dragon war was fought against its own branch races. Man, his elder brother the Dwarves, and his younger cousin the Wizards banded together to take all the cities for themselves, because that year had seen a terrible drought, and the sons of the dragons had seen that the ruling races of the cities had taken to feeding themselves and not their peoples. In a righteous rage they rose up and set themselves against pretty much everyone else. The dragons, seeing their branch races do exactly as they’d feared, felt responsible and took it upon themselves to beat the three races back down. The dragons won that war, but it took three long Emris years, and it came at the cost of many, many lives.
The Last Dragon War began not 10 year later and almost entirely due to the Second Dragon War. The Dragons had proven themselves ruthless, and hot enmity now burned in the hearts of the dragon’s branch races against their parent. The Wizards in particular, proud as they were of their strength and success as a race, deeply desired to pit themselves against the dragons and this time prove themselves greater.
They made plans and set up stratagems the world had never seen before. They fought smart and they fought hard, and soon the dragons found themselves hard pressed to defend themselves. In fear that their race would fail, the dragons ran and disappeared from the face of the earth. Later in the story we find out that the dragon race didn’t fail, but merely stepped back into the shadows.