Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. Ever since it hatched, it has been hiding among the tree leaves.

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.

Incumbrance's adoptive parents have already taught him three languages, and he loves them (his parents and languages). Likely coincidentally, those languages all share the same alphabet, give or take a few characters with diacritical marks, but there's this one that the pink apes across the river use that uses dots and squiggly lines that he wants to learn, too. Incumbrance never communicates purely in telepathic ideas any more, which irks other hatchlings who don't understand what he's talking about. He likes how putting letters together forms words, so when he doesn't have any chores or assignments, he spends his time making up more words, such as dewocx, oekjvbvdsllse, ausw, and opexaaoai. Some people say that they have to be meaningful and pronounceable in order to be useful. Bah! Incumbrance thinks of himself as a bright and clever dragon, so he will figure out how to get something like "hnertsheec" into the regional dictionary.