Reaper

Reaper is a notoriously prickly and private loner who claims no permanent home. For unknown reasons, his only goal seems to be finding abandoned unhatched eggs. Until he met Pillbug, he left these eggs randomly in the nearest clan's lair, but he could never shake a suspicion that they would be cast out again or maltreated. He also cannot hold his pearl and an egg at the same time while flying, and therefore, he would have to leave his pearl unguarded whenever he needed to carry an egg elsewhere.

Pillbug came across Reaper's pearl on one of these occasions. She thought little of it besides that it might make a nice pillow, and so beside it she curled up and took a nap with her head resting on that smooth pearl.

When Reaper came back, he was astonished. Why was a stranger guarding his pearl for him? That must be what she was doing. After all, she wasn't stealing it. And Snappers don't sleep or stop for no reason. Everyone knows that. Flustered, he snatched his pearl out from under the still-slumbering Pillbug--who started awake just in time to see Reaper fly away.

Reaper needed to leave his pearl behind again the next day. He found Pillbug and, without a word, unceremoniously deposited his pearl on her back and left. He returned to retrieve it later. This became a regular occurrence. Soon he began also leaving eggs he found with her until he found a clan he trusted to take them in. Reaper slowly grew to see Pillbug as the closest thing he had to a friend.

Paradoxically, sometimes these found eggs have started hatching on their own in the two's presence, and the hatchlings look like they would if Pillbug were their mother and Reaper their father. (Jekyll, the scientist of Mirrzam's clan, theorizes that coloration and genes might not be a biological matter, but rather be inherited from the dragons who interact the most with the eggs while they are gestating. This is similar to how a dragon acquires its elemental alignment from the alignment of its nest.)

Pillbug--a dragon completely uninterested in romance or mating--regards this development in the same way she would a tumbleweed crossing her path or strange ducklings randomly forming a line behind her. (Reaper, on the other hand, seems to have found his calling here as a devoted if cold caretaker to the orphans, and his reactions to other dragons' insinuations that he and Pillbug might actually be the hatchlings' biological parents are reminiscent of a juvenile denying he has a crush.)