The people of Pern have regressed since its settlement by colonists from Earth and have already lost the knowledge and equipment to handle such a bio-medical crisis.

In Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983) and Nerilka's Story (1985), Anne McCaffrey had featured a plague that decimates humans and apparently passes among mammals.

There (or then) the elderly Wind Blossom, a geneticist and daughter[c] of the legendary Kitti Ping, is bemoaning the gradual loss of manufactured items and the technology to create them.

About 400 years later, at the beginning of the 3rd Pass of the Red Star, a talented young sketch artist and amateur healer Lorana is hitching a ride across the ocean to the newly built Half-Circle seahold.

In a desperate attempt to save her two fire-lizards Grenn and Garth during a storm at sea, she orders them to leave her and believes they are dead.

She is found washed up on the beach by dragonriders from Benden Weyr and recovers just in time to impress Arith, a gold dragon.

Lorana's dragon Arith goes between and dies when a combination of the disease and an injection of watch-wher genetic material wreak havoc with her system.

Despite the tragedy of losing Arith and the added burden of over a thousand dragon deaths, Lorana successfully learns how to use such items as a microscope and a genetic sampler to find the disease and create a cure.

She can only make a single dose which she injects into the pregnant gold Minith, in hopes that the cure will be passed onto future dragon generations.

Wind Blossom was resistant to this idea, but it still played through as her daughter Emorra marries Tieran – it is strongly implied that Lorana is their descendant.