So airships are very prevalent, a form of almost parallel technological evolution throughout the scattered island nations, and while their form and function vary to a degree, they are everywhere.
But why did I not discuss flying mounts? Surely there are lots of flying mounts in fantasy worlds, from wyvern to griffons, pegasus to perytons, the list goes on and on. And while I'm sure there are many places that use them, they don't hold the same impact as airships, for several reasons:
1. Transport Size: A flying mount can only carry a few people, airships can be made to be massive, transporting soldiers, passengers, and cargo across the skies.
2. Safety: Floating Rock airships are relatively safe, whatever is keeping the stone afloat, it does so no matter what you do to it, there hasn't been a case of an airship just falling out of the sky for no reason. Flying mounts are not nearly as safe, even raised from a hatchling they're still wild animals and aren't 100% predictable and simply not enough time has passed to domestic any of them.
3. Practicality: Training a mount takes time, you have to raise it, teach it, reinforce your teaching. You also have to feed it, keep it healthy, breed it or find new eggs/young to keep the cycle going, on the flip side, floating rock is everything and doesn't need anything but space.
So flying mounts are more of a specialty item, nobles will ride them when they want to show off, knightly orders may use them like the knights of old did with horses on the ground, some might even be used like draft animals to pull airships along, but there aren't huge queues of transport flying mounts about in the world and certainly not WoW style mount outposts where someone will just throw you on the back of a flying mount and it will always go the EXACT same way to the EXACT same destination (and both magically disappear and reappear at each area to save on a mounting/dismounting animation)
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