The first of many revolutionary inventions was sustained fire. Because, apparently, the elder wyrms had managed to quite thoroughly annihilate any chance of societal progress under the immense girth of their own hubris. It wasn't particularly easy, either- the draconic home planet was a mix of barren wasteland and a gas giant's empty atmosphere. Incimal to most life, but they managed.
One of the younger dragons, Illa'ean, was particularly interested in the processes, a good stepping stone to further progress. She worked diligently, inquisitively looked into why things were happening, and was incredibly dull to the standards of any race that had moved beyond such abstract concepts as: wheel. Or, perhaps conservatively- stick.
At least her mental process wasn't the elder's: "why do we need to do this? We're dragons-" absolutely insufferable logic. One day those wyrms were going to tautology themselves out of existence.
Years passed, ages for a human but mere moments in the eye of the wyrms. Who slept a lot, because they were lazy, and absolutely had no desire to interact productively with society. The small orchard of hardy trees they'd grown in sheltered locations grew into wild, massive forests whose roots tore into the earth and branches drank a blasted world's sunlight. From there his next critical innovation was agriculture.
It took almost five years to convince Illa'ean that growing crops was a good idea. Needless to say, he was confident that the older dragons wouldn't be working in the fields any time soon. They didn't need nor want for basic sustenance, but a few luxury crops from the mountains of discarded loot they'd pillaged over the eons were hardy enough to grow on the islands.
Seriously, the restriction not to fabricate anything too technologically advanced had quickly come back to bite him. Kitsune… for as much as she loved her orbital bombardment, he was going to bring planets down on her head.
A few more years passed before the third, transformative, incredible technological development. This one wasn't even made by him- Illa'ean managed to independently create the several basic tools. Or, at least, extrapolate that wheels and levers were somehow important in blowing things up.
Honestly, dragons.
………
"Hand me the lever, would you?"
"Huh?" Sighing, Ajinan had to- not for the first time and certainly not for the last- forcibly stifle the overwhelming desire to go blow up a mountain or two. Or a mountain sized wyrm. "I'm… Illa'ean just told me to come here today. I don't know what I'm doing."
"Of for-" eyes glinted silver bright and impossibly deep, and then a thirty foot long spar of wood dropped into his hands as he neatly slotted it into the mechanism Illa'ean had convinced him to build, and he wholeheartedly approved. It would make a nice mill, even if she hadn't quite realized that perhaps wind power would help on a world perpetually blasted by strong winds. "Can you at least listen when I explain what's happening? It doesn't take a genius to understand that pushing moves this wheel in a circle!"
"The elder wyrms tell me-"
"The elder wyrms are idiotic. Traditionalist, reactionary, and absolutely foolish. Infantile, even, for how much they hold themselves back. You'd think with minds honed to genius and their immense strength they'd do something other than sleep."
"It's meditation!" The younger dragon pouted as if insulted, but there was an edge of humor to it so hard to come by in such a stunted society. “Yeah, you should have seen Elder Akeon, always complaining about stiff joints. A dragon his size shouldn’t have stiff anything.”
Ajinan parsed the statement, then decided to unparse it. What’s a fundamental force of the multiverse really have to focus about when it came to- the draconic equivalent of- teenagers? “You don’t have to follow everything they say. Just because they’re powerful doesn't mean they’re right.”
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“I know.” He looked wistful for a moment, staring up into the dun sky and its streaked bands of color impossibly wide. “I once saw above the clouds. Akeon took me up, wrapped in his magic like some new hatchling until we reached the infinite dark and its dusting of celestial lights. He told me that one day I’d be able to fly through the infinite and fight things beyond my comprehension.” A soft chuckle, hesitant- “I use the shattered paths, but I am one of the foremost raiders of my generation. I should be out there fighting, not… this.”
“How, perchance, do you think they make the things that you take?” He snorted softly at the revelation that dawned on the young dragon’s face, as if he’d told him light illuminated, or fire burnt. Or not, actually, because he had told them the second of those.
The next innovation was again almost entirely without his input. A gaggle of young dragons came to him a few years later with a spear fashioned out of scavenged material, unbalanced and frankly near uselessly heavy even for them. They’d made the hilt out of solid steel, twice as long as a dragon their age. Maybe if they flew really high…
He turned away from thoughts of stone age orbital bombardment, and started to give out some metallurgy tips. Things were finally looking up.
………
The first time Elder Akeon woke from his long slumber, the once barren lands were lush, and a thriving iron age civilization had sprung up in its place. It had been barely two hundred years since he’d first seen the spear his disciple had prodded him awake to show, but this… a dragoness flew past the entrance to his grand tower, an anklet inscribed in silver inset runes gleaming in the sunlight.
Nevermind. Clearly, he was still too tired to deal with whatever was going on.
The second time he woke, three hundred and fifty odd years later, gleaming metal and glass had replaced most of the buildings, balloons holding up massive platforms chained to the ground, a single large tower in the distance spearing the sky. Making a snap decision, he decided he was still too tired for this.
The third time he woke, it was to one of his fellow elders banging on the immense stone doors to his inner sanctum with an almost tactless urgency. “Akeon! Your disciple- quick! They’re tearing down the mountains!” He blinked at that, even as he pulled himself out of his tower. Anyone he’d taught in the last ten millenia still had a lot of growing to do before casual landscape rearrangement was on the table. Harsh sunlight greeted his eyes and he saw a vast destruction. A thing of steel that chewed up the very stones of the earth, slicing into the underpinnings of their ancestral home, separating something and sending it into the sky.
Nope. This was just a… dream. Right, a meditative fever dream, because such things totally happened when a wyrm was meditating on a very specific, not at all like what was happening, concept.
His most recent disciple alighted on the ground in front of them, still barely reaching to their ankles. “Honored elder Akeon.” He inclined his head respectfully to him, then again to the other elder. “Lord sleepyhead.”
“You heretic-”
A second dragon, one he didn’t recognize for all he should have, landed next to his disciple with an agile nimbleness that seemed far too great for its age. Deep silver eyes stared into his, and for a moment he- one of the greatest amongst the wyrms, sensed the indistinct impression of superiority, utter and complete. “Elder Akeon. I’ve heard well of you- follow me to low planetary orbit. Lord Wvorn, you are to remain here. Failure to comply will result in generalized apprehension under fox protocols.”
Wvorn sneered. “Fox protocols? How so? To nip at my heels like those base-”
The silver-eyed dragon locked gazes with the wyrm evenly. “Guided orbital bombardment.”
Wisely, Wvorn decided to shut up.
With a thunderous beat of his wings Akeon swept himself into the sky, weaving a dense web of magic around himself to create breathable air around him, followed quickly by the silver eyed dragon. As they broke above the swirling clouds and saw the vastness of the void above them, he couldn’t help but compare him to the darkness of the sky- black scales, eyes like stars…
His thoughts trailed off into nothing as he beheld the behemoth slowly being pieced together above the home of dragonkind. Swarms of gleaming drones rose from complex constructions dotting the cloudscapes beneath them, all converging on an immense span of metal and glass and things he could not put words to, a sweeping dart over a hundred kilometers long- and it was one of many.
Beside him, those eyes twinkled like stars. “The new home of dragonkind. Or- the home of the Draconic Technocratic Imperium. Long live the dragons of the stars.”
Akeon just… stared for a long moment- and, as the gravity of the situation, the brilliant magnificence of the possibility began to sink in… he smiled.