Hatching a Dragon egg

[Ser Brandimore]

Hello everyone! Something just occurred to me and I didn't find it elsewhere on the forums, sorry if this has proposed before.

Hatching a dragon egg seems to be something rather difficult: in fact, despite having dragon eggs available, Targaryens haven't been able to hatch a single one of them since 150 AL or so, it is known.
But, before the dance of dragons, the hatching of a dragon egg seemed quite frequent, most of the eggs we are aware of in "The Rogue Prince" and "The Queen and the Princess" do in fact hatch without much clamor.
First thing first: I don't believe the eggs hatched because of MMD sorcery and sacrifice, there were many other sacrifices made to wake the dragons in the past, but non served to hatch the eggs.

I have thus concocted some theories why the dragons' eggs stopped hatching after the Dance:

1) Eggs may react to the presence of other dragons. If there are enough dragons alive around the eggs, then they are more likely to hatch. This provides a reason for the Targs to have a single place (Dragonstone) where the dragons breed and the eggs were brought.
When most of the dragons died during the Dance, the eggs rate of hatching dropped and by the reign of Aegon III stopped altogether.
Alas, this theory is rather dissatisfying: it doesn't explain how Dany's eggs hatched, given there were no dragons alive in Westeros and Essos at that point. Also I'm not completely certain they kept all the eggs on Dragonstone: quite the contrary, as we'll see in point 2.

2) Eggs react to infant Targ babies. Most of the eggs we know of were presented to Targaryen babies the moment they were born, and they kept the egg around till it hatched. This is a souspicious practice: why bring an egg to an infant? We have two answer to this question, firstly, if and when the dragon in the egg hatched, it would see the baby and thus a bond between the two would be created, or, secondly, a Targaryen baby is actually needed to hatch a dragon.
So why did the practice endend with the Dance? I think the fault lies with Aegon III himself. The king wasn't fond of dragons since Sunfyre ate his mother in front of him, and may have shunned the practice, not knowing its importance, because he didn't want dragons near his sons. By the time the last dragon died it was too late, there were no newborns around and Aegon didn't know the importance of giving them an egg, thus the practice died and with it the hopes of a new dragon hatchling coming forth from its egg.
But, 150 years after this, Dany got three dragons eggs and she kept them around her while she was pregnant (so the eggs were very close to a newborn (well a not-yet-born, anyway) Targ, and when the time came they did indeed hatch.
Note that the eggs unfastened well before the spells of MMD: Dany thinks they were warm while she was travelling in the grass sea.

3) Maester poisoned the eggs. Not wanting another dance to occour, the maesters decided to kill the dragon before the hatched by poisoning all the eggs they could lay their hands on. This way every attempt to hatch them proved indeed fruitless, because they were all dead eggs.
Dany is given brand new eggs, freshly baked in Asshai (ok, not 'freshly', they were described as petrified, but still...), eggs that the maester could not have poisoned and thus were able to hatch quite readily when a Targ approached them.

Let me know what you think :)

[Rhaenys_Targaryen]

1) More dragons might point to the magic being stronger (the way the spells of the pyromancers in KL became stronger because Daenerys had hatched three dragons in the east). So the thought "more dragons makes it easier to hatch eggs" isn't a weird one. If "more dragons" makes the magic stronger, and magic is needed to hatch eggs, it is a logical way of things.

2) The practice of putting eggs in the cradle did not end with the Dance. Aegon V had an egg in his cradle, and it seems at least Aemon and Aerion did so as well (thus it stands to reason that all of the grandsons of Daeron II, at least, received an egg in the cradle).

3) Maesters can't poison eggs, I think. They could have poisoned eggs, but with the sickly dragons having died rather young, it seems unlikely they laid the eggs that the Targaryens had in their possession afterwards. These eggs would have originated from earlier, from before the Dance, most likely. These would be eggs from healthy dragons.

As to the giving eggs to Targaryen children, from the reading of Fire and Blood this month, we know that little prince Aenys Targaryen was quite a weak child, who became stronger only after he bonded with his dragon. Since it seems that the children of Aegon I did not have eggs in their cradle, and the Targaryens born on Dragonstone before neither, so perhaps the "tradition" originated from the effects they saw that bonding with a dragon on such a young age had on Aenys.