Dragon's Dawn

1985

When Mankind came to the Rukbat system, they found that the third planet was habitable by men, women, their off-spring and animals with minimal terraforming. So, weary of the travelling between the stars and the fighting they had endured in their previous lives, they took no notice of an adopted brother planet following a long cometary orbit and settled on lush Pern. At first they settled in the balmy South where the living was easy but this proved to be prone to an increasingly violent series of seismic activities as Pern's adopted brother planet grew ever redder in their skies.

One day, the skies were filled with a silvery thread like organism that ate everything organic that got in it's way. At first, the desperate colonists used the increasingly decrepit flitters to burn Thread from the sky but it was clear that this was simply a stop gap measure. A genetic scientist was able to use the example of a native lifeform that was able to teleport from here to there to breed a creature that would be able to bear a man (or a woman) in a similar fashion, and thus were born the dragons of Pern.

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