Karly's Website - Pern - Town High Weyr

    Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, and one stray that it had attracted and held in recent millennia. Its third planet was enveloped by air man could breathe, boasted water he could drink, and possessed a gravity that permitted man to walk comfortably erect. Men discovered it and promptly colonized it.
     When men first settled on Rukbat's third world and named it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger-planet, swinging around its adopted primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit.
     When the aspects were harmonious and the conjunction with its sister planet close enough, as it often was, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and hospitable planet.
     It was during the frantic struggle to combat this menace dropping through Pern's skies like silver threads that Pern's tenuous contact with the mother planet was broken.
     To forestall the incursions of the dreadful Threads, the Pernese, with the ingeuity of their Terran forebears, developed a highly specialized variety of a life-form indigenous to their adopted planet. Such humans as had a high empathy rating and some innate telepathic ability were trained to use and preserve this unusual animal whose ability to teleport was of great value in the fierce struggle to keep Pern bare of Threads.
     The winged, tailed, and fiery-breathed dragons (named for the Earth legend they resembled), their dragonmen, a breed apart, and the menace they battled, created a whole new group of legends and myths.

    The eggs lay on the hot sands of the Hatching Grounds as the dragons began their ritualistic shrill keen. The onlookers grew tense as the volume elevated to that which could shatter glass.
CRACK!
It was not glass, instead it was the sound of a dragonet shattering its shell and venturing into the world. It was a bronze. A slight, almost inaudible sigh of relief escaped the lips of everyone seated aorund the Hatching Grounds at Benden Weyr. It would be a good clutch, despite the fact that Ramoth was well past her prime age for clutching.
     The hatchling pushed aside the shards of its prison and stumbled across the hot sands, eyes whirling purple with confusion and teal with curiosity. He wandered close to the candidate from Ruatha, nearly falling into the boy's arms, and Impression was made.
     "I told you Ruatha always impresses first," Betrard impudently bragged.
     "But he's only 12!" argued Kollan as he reluctantly handed over the marks Betrard had just won. There go my bubbly pies at the next Gather, he thought.
     "His name is Tarlenth," Ralcum said proudly, bringing Kollan back to the present. A cheer rose from the audience as the dragons warbled a welcome to the pair. As he proudly hugged his new friend, Ralcum suddenly felt enlightened by the "completeness" that enveloped him. This magical experience was known only to R'lcum and the dragon who now shared his every thought. Everyone else's focus was on the colourful shaking eggs inside the semi-circle of candidates.