Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It always seems to be picking over its scales.

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.

After a mere week of watching the adults, Minlu has decided the being grown-up is stupidly complicated. Really, they fought over everything, even silly little bumps and shoves. Minlu asked about this once—and only once, because being told that all those 'silly little' things were 'power-plays' that 'helped a dragon raise their status by lowering another's', and that the reason some dragons were so careless was because 'those fools are the lowest rank and can afford to be so stupid; those up top couldn't possibly show such weakness', and all kinds of nonsense explanations. All those little intricacies and politics made her want to tear out her perfect scales in stress, and she was only thinking about it—those adult dragons must have been stressed all the time! No wonder the other Luminia dragons were constantly shedding scales. But not Minlu! She would stay a hatchling forever, and never worry about such stressful things.

It was better that way.