Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It likes to perch on the high branches of the taller trees and look longingly up at the sky.

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.

As a young hatchling, there was nothing Bessy liked better than the stories the adults would tell her every evening. Fierce dragons fighting off the greedy humans besieging their lair, or dragons fighting side by side for the honour of their clans, epic battles of magic and fire... How she longed to be a warrior herself! Young Bessy would climb up and down trees and play-fight with other hatchlings to train herself, and every evening she would look in a still pond to see if there was any progress. Sadly, a congenital defect meant she never grew up, an eternal hatchling staring back at her from the smooth waters of the pond. Now she is only admired for her cuteness, not her courage, and she gets told off by the adults if she play-fights too roughly.