Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It doesn’t move much, and appears to be covered in stone.

And look! It has grown wings! It must be close to maturing. However, the wings look too heavy to fly and are filled with beautiful crystal.

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.

Behold, seeker of the dragon lore, Nideone of the Geode dragons. The explanation for her frozen hatchling syndrome took dragon experts a bit longer than usual to figure out, as her mother was not inexperienced, and her father was of the same breed. The reason must have been that Nideone's egg looked nothing like a Green dragon's egg. In fact, it wasn't even somewhat green as all her mother's eggs before. It is presumed that Grindell and her new mate, O'Enenef, did not really accept the egg as theirs in the first days so that it grew cold for a while until Grindell finally started caring for it. Nideone thus hatched sickly, lethargic and rather small and could never catch up on growing properly. She was not chased away or killed, though, but allowed to remain with her parents and her frozen sibling To'rylldalhar. Her parents have learned to accept Geode eggs as truly theirs since.