Her father never listened to her.
Ever since she was hatched, Ember was expected to sit by quietly and watch her father work on dragon stuff. She only learned to talk because he did a lot of it, and he was very large and very loud, and she was there to hear it all.
Of course, other dragons often came around to give news to the Dragon Lord, or pay their respects, or - if they were not so smart - make requests. Ember had learned from this that her father's manner of speech was... largely unique to him, and so she had not inherited his distinct accent.
She couldn't have even been ten years old yet when she heard him cursing the princess of some faraway land. Well, she'd heard that all her life, but this time she finally understood all the words. "The bloody bandit," he said. "What nerve does a pony have to ask a dragon for anything! And for our eggs, no less!" He reached a pudgy claw up to touch the tiny bridge between his eyes. "Hundreds of years. This same pony has been askin' for hundreds of years."
"Daddy?" Ember started to ask - much quieter than the thunderous roar of her father's mumbling.
He seemed not to hear her. "What all is she going to do with them. Eat the buggers?!" he rasped, outraged. "No pony should ever be allowed such an honor as eatin' a bloody dragon."
"Daddy!" Ember said, a bit louder.
"Who would want abandoned eggs?" he continued, pacing back and forth, the earth shaking beneath his feet. "Might as well just let 'em be devoured by the lava-snakes."
"DADDY!" Ember yelled, and he perked his head up and looked round.
He saw her pouting up at him. He smiled - or tried to - and leaned down low. "Wot is it, my li'il precious stone? Daddy is listenin'."
Even at that age she wasn't sure of that, but she tried anyway. "If she won' shuddup until ya do what she wanns, and we're not gonna use 'em, why not just give her the eggs? Then she won' bozzer you any more."
He blinked, his smile dropping quickly. His eyes went to the side, then up, brows furrowed in thought. He slowly exhaled through his nose - careful not to blow his precious little daughter away - and rose. "Sure. You're right, diamond," he admitted low, and walked back to the podium bearing letter. He picked back up the huge magnifying glass, held in one claw, and the little bitty quill, held between two fingers of the other.
He began to speak as he wrote.
"To Princess Celestia of the ponies... Against my better judgment, I, Dragon Lord Torch, will agree to your suggestion..."
This was so stupid. How could he do this to her?
For years she'd been trying to convince her father to consider passing the Bloodstone Sceptre to her, thus crowning her as the Dragon Lord.
Instead, he'd put his own daughter on egg duty.
Apparently, the princess of Equestria had asked Dragon Lord Torch to send any abandoned eggs the dragons found and didn't want over to Equestria. She'd asked him repeatedly for... Ember didn't know, five hundred years? A thousand? It was a lot. (Ember had completely forgotten that, some years back, she herself had pressured her father to accept this arrangement.)
Torch had made it very clear that if a single pony dared to eat a dragon egg, he would order the entire Dragon Lands to burn Equestria to ash. Ember shuddered at this. She didn't know much about ponies, but she knew there were at least three kinds, and at least one of them - unicorns, they were called - had magic. She vividly recalled, when she had displeased her father once, he'd read her a "bedtime story" where a unicorn cast a spell that melted the flesh from some poor dragon named Crocomire. It had been described in visceral detail, and it had been a very slow process, and she'd even remained alive until she was little more than bones. Ember had nightmares for weeks.
Also, while she hadn't been formally educated on the subject - dragons didn't do schools - Ember was pretty sure that not every single egg a dragon laid was fertilized. She refused to believe that so many eggs were being... produced, and then abandoned. She loathed the possibility that she would one day just start dropping them around herself. Either way, who cared if a pony ate an unfertilized dragon egg? Dragons ate actual ponies. And griffons. And sheep.
Mmm, sheep.
Torch had selected the - what was it he said - "softest, most tender-hearted, namby-pamby excuses for dragons" to scour the Dragon Lands regularly for any abandoned eggs. They'd search the local area for parents and, if they found none who admitted ownership of the egg, turn them in so her dad could judge whether they were worthy to keep or to ship off to the pony lands.
He'd picked Ember as a soft, tender-hearted, namby-pamby excuse for a dragon. In fact, almost everyone on egg duty was female. Her father was such a judgmental pig sometimes. Did he not know how many previous Dragon Lords had been female? Ever heard of Scales, dad? She was a necromancer. The next Dragon Lord had to kill her three times. Or... at least that's how the story went. Come to think of it, that and the dragon-melting thing might have been made up...
She stopped to look at the egg she was currently carrying under one arm. It was a pale cream, with a green stripe across its middle, and thorny circles at the top and bottom. If she'd been more educated in pony culture, she may have found it humorous how much it resembled those candy-coated eggs - the ones that foals had to run around looking for, much like she was doing herself. Or, more likely, she would have been deeply insulted, more so than she already was.
As it was, she knew nothing of such silly egg sports, and her eyes softened gazing at it. At first she'd hated these stupid things and only the old dragon law had stopped her from smashing them - but then she realized she and the eggs were not so different.
Their parents didn't want them either.
She held it in front of her with both arms, and choked down her sobs by returning to the topic of the old dragon law.
It's not that dragons cared about vulnerable life - because they didn't, at all - but dragons who went after utterly defenseless things like eggs were the lowest cowards. Even small creatures like griffons or ponies were fair game - some of them had been known to slay dragons before (besides Crocomire.) Dragons were expected to seek thrills, and danger, and worthy opponents. Only a weak, frail, pathetic dragon would go after an egg. Even the rocks would be better, a dragon might break her leg kicking one.
She cleared her throat and forced herself to be proper, then knocked on the wall of the local "Egg Office". These "offices" were little more than specially designated caves or clearings spread all about the Dragon Lands. There was an "egg-mother" assigned to each one, and the other two kinds of dragons who frequented them were getters and runners. Getters gathered eggs one or two at a time and collected them there, and runners would pick them up in bulk and take them to the Dragon Lord for evaluation. Egg-mothers kept the eggs safe and made sure they were ready for pickup.
The egg-mother for this office was a few years younger than her - definitely not "mother" age - and Ember had never caught her name. She was prone to belching. She never excused herself, either.
"Morning, Princess! [belch]" she offered.
Ember wrinkled her nose and set the egg down gently. "You're lucky the smell of all these eggs drowns you out."
"You're up pretty early!" the office master continued, unaffected. "Your dad doesn't let you sleep in, huh?"
"For his many flaws, my father is not nepotistic," she explained. "I am expected to work just as hard as everyone else. Sometimes more so," she finished with a grumble, and the dragon laughed (and burped.)
"Isn't it amazing how [belch] many dragon eggs are laying around this place? We oughta get some birth control," the gal offered. Ember found herself nodding before she could stop herself. "Oof, heavy sucker. This kid'll be healthy," she complained as she tried to lift the egg.
"Say, do you erm, know if dragons can lay eggs that... won't hatch?" Ember asked.
"The heck does that mean? [belch] Of course the eggs'll hatch, if we keep 'em happy," she replied.
"Never mind." Ember flew off without another word.
After another day of egg-hunting, Ember made it back home just before sundown.
"Hey dad, I'm back." Ember called, floating into the hollow, skull-shaped mound.
"Find any heroes?" Torch called hopefully. He was lazing on the giant dais that constituted his bed, surrounded with pointless trinkets. Dragons and their hoards.
Ember's eyes narrowed. "No." she said. "All pales today." In dragon superstition, white eggs - even with decorations like the green-striped one she'd found - were considered nothing special, compared to eggs of vibrant colors, which were believed to hatch stronger dragons.
So-called "pales" definitely made up the bulk of abandoned or lost eggs. Ember's heart sank to think that dragons could be so cruel and utilitarian about their own children.
"Dad," Ember asked hesistantly. "What color was my egg?"
There was a very terse silence; even a guy like Torch thought twice about such a question. Her father blinked and bit his lower lip before responding. "It was beautiful, diamond," he asserted. "There are places where water flows like lava. They call them all kinds of weird words. 'Rivers', 'oceans', 'lakes'. I don't know the difference, but they're all blue. Your mother --"
He paused, and Ember crossed her arms in discomfort before he continued.
"... She told me about the ocean. Your egg was blue. Deep and beautiful, with these cyan swirls as bright as the sky. She said it reminded her of the ocean."
"My mother knew what the ocean was?"
"Get some rest, diamond." he sighed. "You look exhausted."
Ember laid down on her own bed, facing away from her father.