Chapter Title: Dragons Must Fly/Or Pern Will Die
Prompt: Bubble, also written for fan_flashwork's safe, flight, and fight prompts
TW: Death, suicide (both canon typical and non-graphic)
Summary: Dragons do not remember. This is known. But there are truths that they know.
The title is a riff on the line 'Dragons must fly when threads are in the sky' from the Duty Song. It rather got stuck in my head.
Dragons are not meant for a life of security. That is not the purpose for which they were made. They know this as completely in their shells as when they leap aloft, riders strapped tight and firestone bubbling gas in their gut. They are to fight Thread, and Thread is not safe.
Thread is the enemy, to be faced a-wing, to be pursued and charred from the skies. It is a glad duty they take, cleansing the skies of Pern, wing stacked on wing, flaming and falling and diving in turn.
But they mourn, oh how they mourn, when the hated Thread burns back. Dragons are fine, noble creatures, strong-limbed and clad in thick scale. They are made for this field of battle, though it may be their end. But their riders are small, fragile creatures - wonderful and smart and capable as none other with sand on itch, but fragile - and Thread caches them too.
He jumps between to above and dives, chars the deadly clump of grey matter. But when the sky is empty, so too is his mind.
He leaps with keening to the final cold. Here his rider rests. Here, he too will rest.