Dragonflight

F’lar leads the battle against the Threads over the rainforests of Tillek, which is near Lord Vincet’s Nerat Hold. The young troops are confident and well-organized from their training. Parasitic in nature, the non-sentient Threads seek any greenery to burrow into the ground, eat, and then die: “Slanting across the sea, like an ever-thickening mist, Threads were falling, silent, beautiful, treacherous. Silvery gray were those space-traversing spores” (199). Even one spore could destroy the entire area. The riders feed their dragons firestone, which enables them to spew the fire that will kill the Threads. F’lar is wounded by dragonfire in the attack, but successfully repels the Threads, at least for now.

While the battle took over two hours in the past, F’lar, Mnementh, and the rest return to Lessa and the present only a few minutes later. Lessa spots Kylara tending to F’lar’s wounds and chases her off to help him herself. She notes that their numbers are too few. She sends the elderly Weyrsinger C’gan and his blue dragon Tagath on a mission to deliver more firestone to F’nor: “She hadn’t thought to send [C’gan] anywhere, yet he had lived his life in training for this emergency. He shouldn’t be deprived of a chance at it” (205). However, both dragon and rider soon return from between mortally wounded; they were brave, but too old to succeed. Lessa deeply mourns their passing. Mentally, she fully assumes her role as Weyrwoman and is determined to help her people: “Living was struggling to do something impossible—to succeed, or die, knowing you had tried!” (208).

The Thread attack ends six hours after its start, just as F’lar predicted it would. While the rest of the Weyr recuperates, Lessa and F’lar research deep into the night. Both acknowledge the grim reality: In the past, there were six fully functional Weyrs to combat the Threads, but now only Benden Weyr is active, and it is severely understaffed. There simply are not enough dragons and riders to win, and they lack the technology (i.e. flamethrowers) the ancient Pernese used to destroy Threads once they had burrowed into the ground.

F’lar has a breakthrough: They could send F’nor, Kylara, and Kylara’s dragon Pridith 10 years into the past to amass a bigger army for the present. He and Lessa choose the long-abandoned Southern Reaches as the site for the project; the Reaches are hypothetically well suited for dragons, and the lack of human habitation for more than 400 years means time travel there will not interfere with the normal course of history. Lessa will take F’nor on a scouting journey there while F’lar turns his attention to the Craftmasters (local Pernese artisans) to solve the burrowing problem.

Before F’lar and Lessa can finalize their plans, an unexpected figure interrupts them: F’nor, but much tanner than they know him. He has a warning for F’lar. While a good number of dragons have been raised from the past, the plan ultimately will not work: “You can’t be alive in two times at once!” (215). Kylara is a disastrous ruler too, he adds, saying her ”egomania will destroy [them] all” (216); she constantly travels around in time to watch herself. This version of F’nor flees as Lessa observes, with shock, that they had not even sent him into the past yet.