.
The transformation to Greatness
When any being has enough essences inside of them, they have the potential to become greater. But just having an enormous amount of raw power is never enough to achieve it, the body and the mind need to change and adapt for it. And the greater the pool of essences inside oneself is, the more one needs to transform.
That transformation however, can not happen naturally, or only over the span of hundreds if not thousands of cycles. So the few who had the knowledge, time and resources to look at that problem concluded time and time again a being needs outside help.
Only the elite of the dragon civilization experimented and played with the essences in hope of a breakthrough, but progress was slow and they often had to hide their operations. Despite the faith their kind had in Ankonalmirh, there was nothing left to guide them toward Greatness, and there was little that could justify such sacrifices, such failures and the existence of dragons stuck pitifully in their butchered metamorphosis.
It was the sight of these abominations that had gotten many ambitious and curious ones killed, such mockeries of the essences and the First Dragon's children could not be tolerated and neither could their creator. With that dangerous climate, it seemed greatness would not come faster no matter how much some wished for it with all of their heart and soul.
So times flowed continuously and steadily, and dragonkind knew little when it came to use vast amount of the precious power… Of course, the prosperity of their civilization did speed up their research, but they stayed so far away from Greatness. Maybe, if the Disease had not hit them at all or at least a thousand cycles later, they could have succeeded, or be on the verge of it, but fate decided against that.
In the end, only the five survivors, now alone if not for the corpses of all the others, had a real chance to become greater, having all the time before them in their dead world...