Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. This hatchling is hard to see, but in the sunlight it displays brilliant colors.

And look! Its wings have grown large enough that it can now fly. It hardly ever leaves the air now.

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.

Fleck lives not with a dragon clan but rather with an old couple of humans at the edge of the forest. After losing their sons and grandsons to a war, their daughters and three of their grandchildren to the following plague, and finally being left by their last living granddaughter who went away and married, the old couple faced a long hard winter and thought it would be their last. But then they found that shimmering, glittering egg in the forest. The old man decided to take it with him and take care of the unborn creature. That single act of kindness seems to have made the gods smile on the old humans. Ever since that day, good luck has shone on their simple hut, and Fleck warms their hearts with his sunny disposition and the untainted love he holds for his human parents.