Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. It enjoys sunning itself in the morning light.

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.

Offener Himmel (translation: "open heavens") moves in mysterious ways. At one moment—or for many moments, days, years—invisible, absent, gone, and the very next instant a presence filled with light and laughter, with all the capricious joy of the first golden rays in a sunrise, or perhaps the first bright bolts of lightning in a long-awaited storm. That presence moves the cave's residents to smile, to repeat an adage that the little dragon's parents coined since its birth: "Even if you feel forsaken, the skies will open up."