Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It spends its time pouncing on insects.

And look! It has grown wings! It must be close to maturing. It is also now covered in brightly colored stripes.

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.

This young dragon enjoys only one thing more than leaping on unsuspecting insects, and that's to rub the squishy guts of said unsuspecting insects all over her unsuspecting playmates. Small, fastidiously clean Lumina hatchlings let out screams of horror when she smashes the remains of a dead cricket into their smug little mugs, and whimpering baby Shimmerscales don't shimmer half so nicely when they're layered in caterpillar remains. About the only other hatchlings she respects are the baby Turpentines, as they clearly know how to handle a little goo.