Aww... It’s a cute baby dragon. Its eyes glow brightly at night, and it enjoys attacking insects and small animals.

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.

Nightflame Thuwed, reputedly descended from a Meerkat, an Echidna, a Remington, and a Pumpkin Pie, could only have been set to spin stories for a living. His collections of faerie-tales still awe and delight dragonets all over the globe, but nobody knows what happened to Nightflame himself -- trapped in time, some said, or slipped quietly away to perish as a hermit, all alone. Every now and then, a new Nightflame tale is discovered, as fresh and entrancing as ever, but the author's fate is the one story that he might never choose to tell.