Although sad, there are occasionally small dragon eggs that fail to hatch, but Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold manages to save one after sneaking into the Hatching Grounds. He assists this small dragonet as it tries to break open the shell and Impression is made. Ruth is small and the only white dragon ever seen, but both Ruth and Jaxom are convinced they should be able to fight thread together. While they're sneaking around practicing flying and breathing fire, the situation with the Oldtimers finally hits the breaking point. They do the unthinkable in a desperate bid to regain power; they steal a queen egg. Can Jaxom and Ruth find and return the egg before the dragonriders go to war when everyone else has failed? They make some amazing discoveries along the way that will reveal Pern's past and change its future.

F'lar and Lessa were vindicated when the deadly Thread returned as the records predicted and Lessa used her discovery that dragons could move between time to go back four hundred years and persuade the dragonriders of the past to come to her time. F'lar was mostly relieved to have someone experienced at fighting Thread step forward and help with the crisis, but the solution came with a lot of new problems. A few months later and the disagreements between the "Oldtimer" dragonriders and civilian holders are growing, and F'lar himself is losing patience with their arrogance. This means that for the first time ever, dragonriders are threatening to use the dragons as weapons against civilians, and the Lords Holder of Pern are looking to F'lar for another miracle.

Pern was world poor in metals so the colonists were prepared to abandon most technology and focus on an agrarian society. What the survey probes failed to report was that a planet with an erratic elliptical orbit would pass close enough for the it's voracious "threads" to cross over to Pern where they would devour any organic life they fell on. The colonists were too far from Earth for a message to summon help in time and the ships that brought them to Pern lacked enough fuel to take them somewhere else so they had to improvise. They began carving out massive caves for shelter while their geneticists worked with the native flying fire-breathing lizards to enlarge them and enhance their telepathic ability. The dragonriders of Pern were born and their lives revolved around burning the threads from the sky before they could reach the ground and caring for the dragons they bonded with. Every few hundred years the planet they called the Red Star would be out of range for four hundred years. During one of these long breaks the people hoped the Red Star wouldn't return and they neglected the tithes of necessary goods that supported the dragonriders and Holds warred with each other. Where there had once been several volcanic weyrs of dragonriders there was only one and it's only queen dragon died after laying her last clutch of eggs. The only hope for those who remembered their duty was the golden egg of a queen and the hope that they could find a strong willed woman worthy of bonding that queen. Without a queen there would be no more dragons and the Red Star is growing brighter in the morning sky.