Not gonna happen. For a trade deal this big, there needs to be a substantial level of reputational trust between the seller and the Eonir. There's no trader other than Mathilde who's got the rep necessary except for Thorek or a Forestborn; Thorek ain't trading, and no Forestborn has the capital or the contacts that'd let them buy all that ithilmar.
For an ongoing trade deal I'd agree, but this doesn't really need any trust to achieve. If someone buys a great deal of Ithilmar across the Empire, rolls up to Middenland and says to the Eonir "Hey, I've got a pile of Ithilmar here, bring a bunch of gold to the capital city of the new allies you're already staking your survival on if you want it" then I daresay there'll very shortly be an extremely heavily-defended baggage train of gold charging up our new magical trade route.
To be fair, we *proposed* a new, easily accessible trade route to Laurelorn. They haven't built it yet.
Granted, but that's probably not going to take more than a turn for them to set up.
One of our EIC options is gonna be to spend time helping them build it faster.
I thought that was for the EIC setting up a trade route and not the actual magical infrastructure, but I see now that that would be a more natural reading.
To my understanding, there is one Ithilmar mine, and the Asur are very careful with how the magic metal is distributed. Yes, Laurelorn could theoretically buy Gromril from Ulthuan.
If I remember my Asrai lore, forest dragons have become part of the forest, not unlike forest spirits. So I guess the would-be dragon riders would have to prove to the forest that they are worthy.
Egrimm is not the only Chaos Champion riding Chais Dragons. Those are a mount option for a generic Chaos Lord.
I think you're under a misapprehension on how familiars work. You can't pick any animal off the street and raise them as a familiar. It's a very, very rare quality, on the level of or rarer than Wizard candidacy in humans. We took Hubert to the shrine as part of a social action; it was a way of casually engaging with him and his interests, not because of any expectation that the choughs were inherently magical. And, unsurprisingly, they weren't. It's been long enough that there's a new generation of birds now, but they're still no more likely to be familiar material than any other random nest, and Eike isn't Ranaldite to get a divine finger on the scales.
Druchii probably need all of the Ithilmar they have for their own uses since the Asur control the only source, and even assuming the Asur would be willing to sell I recall Boney saying something about how the Eonir are wary of trading with Ulthuan because they're afraid of their own craftsmen being outcompeted and driven out of the market by Caledorian artisan-smiths.
She´s a little baby engineer, i don´t think tinkering with a machine that moves at high speeds in the air while we are in it is something we want her to do when its already working reliably enough to dwarf standard.
