Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It is clearly a water animal.

And look! Its fins have grown larger! 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.

Hydros knows he is too young to leave the safe harbor beyond the sides of his parents. Certainly, he can play there, bounding between water and air, laughing all the while, but he is not satisfied with that—he hears, late at night, soft whispers calling him further and further out to sea. The young Bluna is often withdrawn from others, lost in his games with figures unseen. They hide, he says, in the shimmering waves, just on the foaming edge, and they are truer and deeper in the blackened depths he will swim in one day. He talks of that day with a chirping excitement, stumbling over his words eagerly.

On the whole, no one believes him, except, perhaps, his mother Talise. The shy treasure-hunter won't say aye or nay to her son's claims, but sometimes when he speaks, she closes her black eyes and a shudder races through her long body. It is she who holds him back, to where he can be watched and protected—she who knows the depths where strange treasures and monsters lie.