Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It hides in dark spaces and lunges at anything that gets too close. Small piles of bones are accumulating outside of its “lairs”...

And look! It has grown wings! 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.

Once wild, aggressive, and full of herself, this female swaggered back and forth across her parents' cave like she owned the place. This all changed, however, when she saw herself.

Prancing proudly through the caverns one day, she encountered a small pool of water, lit by the light streaming in from a crack in the ceiling above. Curious, she peeked in--and for the first time in her life saw her own reflection. The sight of a bug-eyed, snaggle-toothed demon waiting to pull her beneath the water was simply too much for her, the little thing letting out a terrified shriek and promptly bolting straight back to her mother. Needless to say, her reputation for being fearless was destroyed, and even worse... she seems to have been quite literally frozen in fear, not growing an inch after the day of her scare. Now a (very tiny) adult, she spends her days grumbling to herself and viciously murdering any rodents she can get her claws on.