#but I couldn't help but think that sapient creatures who need novelty and change to survive

[razzek]

Absolutely horrible Pern thought of the day I woke up with but which I’ve had in mind for awhile:

Every dragon dies alone and separated from their rider.

We all know that when a dragon loses their rider they go between forever. If they’re lucky, they go with their rider on their back. If their rider dies and they jump between in horrible grief. That’s sad enough. But it gets worse.

At the absolute max, humans can survive without oxygen for maybe five minutes. Most people will be unconscious in about three. We learned in All the Weyrs of Pern that a dragon can hold their breath for about ten minutes, sometimes more.

Ergo, even if the rider goes with them, the dragon will be alone for at least five very crushing minutes before they finally lose consciousness. If the rider has died before they went between, they have ten minutes to deal with it and be in mental and emotional anguish.

(Don’t get me started on Beyond Between. That story makes no sense and was almost certainly written because Anne herself was thinking about her own mortality. If a person could just get stuck between like that there is no reason it wouldn’t be common knowledge among the dragons at the very least. And if you got stuck there after being fatally wounded, that’s not any kind of heaven, that’s what we would call hell.)