Warmth

The story is the one you imagine. Is it romantic, protectionist, affectionate? Is the title perfectly misleading?

Well any story of mine is always pragmatic.

Because we still don't know everything about dragons. The fact is that dragons also use their ability to spit fire in order to... warm their eggs up!

Since the flame of the breath is too hot for direct use, the female blows some fire on her hand, and put her fingers just to touch the egg shells designed to scatter the heat uniformly and keep that heat for some while.

However, the female fingers don't have enough sensibility to measure her own temperature. And if it is too high, the babies can be harmed.

So the male helps there with cold fingers. He touches a specific point on the top of the wrist that tells him if the hand is too hot. At this spot, there should not be much warmth. If he feels something, he will tell the female to wait a bit or to move quicker from shell to shell to avoid overheated spots.

Of course, she doesn't need the male for the first time because she has one cold hand still available, but if she wants to change hands, she would like the male to help her.

However on the long run, female dragons completely lose their sensibility, especially if the brood took place in winter, so the male must be somewhere around to measure at least the temperature of the egg shells. According to what he measures on the shells and on the female's wrist, he simply knows the amount of heat necessary.

Birds use a different incubating mechanism, and it takes much more time than the dragon's. They are smart in this respect. Well they simply use their natural capabilities.

Sorry for having used yet another DAZ dragon. This free one was perfect with the big puffy fingers. I only needed to scale down the claws, and slightly pose the fingers just to touch the eggs.

I used a lot of texturing in this image. There is an artifact with rasterization called Z-fighting that can be used for mixing textures. When drawing two very close polygons, the renderer chooses randomly which one should be front. If they have two different textures, it looks like a mess with random pixel values. But many passes will blend the whole thing and generate smooth regions. I used that technique for the ground of "Drachen", and for this one.

The coincidence with Robert's is purely fortuitous of course. The two last-day shots used the same vehicle...