Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It has bright, shiny scales and loves to play in the sunlight.

And look! It’s grown a forked spade at the end of its tail and long, tufted whiskers! 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.

Vaashu would, if anyone bothered asking, describe himself as cursed. Anything he does seems to end in some kind of catastrophe—not out of clumsiness or incompetence, but out of sheer bad luck. That, at least, is what it feels like to him; onlookers are more likely to put the blame on him, if only because the misfortunes that tend to transpire around him strike them as unbelievable unless they've witnessed their occurrence themselves. The catastrophes Vaashu fabricates have left him cynical and passive, minimising his actions, and refusing any complex tasks outright.