Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It enjoys swimming in a nearby pond.

And look! Its fins and tail have gotten bigger, and you’ve moved it to a larger body of water to swim in. It must be close to maturing.

Young dragons are relatively defenseless. They are born with relatively soft scales, which are shed and replaced with harder ones as the hatchling matures. Once a hatchling’s wings grow in, it typically marks the beginning of maturation. At this point they are often capable of hunting on their own and are usually left alone by their mother.

The water hatchling Cat was found in the abandoned cave. The human Kad thought him too weak—he was rather like a wriggling tadpole—and tossed him back in. A few days later, she picked up another water hatchling only to discover it was the same dragon. The frustrated human attempted to kill him with a knife, but the hatchling miraculously survived the wound; the poor dragon was thus named The Cat Came Back.

Unlike his yellow namesake, Cat is a murky shade of blue-green and has never grown bigger since his ordeal. His color renders him nearly invisible in his personal algae-covered pond. The other dragons in the clan outwardly despise him as an outsider, but inwardly envy him for his special place in their human's heart. Cat regally ignores everyone else and prefers to instead dive for fish in his isolated pond. Having never left his retreat since first placed there by his human, he knows nothing of intellectual pursuits and delights in eating raw fish.