Deep Sea Dragons, as their name suggests, spend most of their time in the darkest depths of the sea. They have a bioluminescent dorsal spine that serves to attract prey and communicate with their own kind. As with many deep sea animals, they generally eat whatever they can manage to bait. They rarely leave the ocean floor, surfacing only during breeding season. When they do choose to travel to the shallower depths, they avoid bright lights and will only come up far away from shore.

Dragons are highly-intelligent reptilian creatures that—from a human perspective, at least—appear to live forever. Many different varieties of dragon exist, each with their own unique qualities, habitats, and behavior. Adolescence in dragons is usually marked by the growth of a hatchling’s wings, although not all breeds of dragons grow wings and some breeds have other traits that indicate the beginning of maturation. In Galsreim, dragons and humans coexist peacefully.

The researchers and soldiers who descend to her depths do not expect her, and though the steel of their vessels they never see her; but sequences of flashlit photographs, drowned with submersibles in the deepest reaches of the ocean, show her long body's winding progress. First she surrounds the ship, gently pulsating with light, embracing her victims. Naval officers cannot explain why, even as sirens blare and their engines cease to move them forward, they feel a wave of calm, even love, wash over them. The scientists, peering at their video feeds, understand. They die having discovered a beautiful, graceful, secret creature, and their moment of thrill fades into an eternity of repose. No human tongue has survived to name her, but if (by some serendipitous circumstance) one had, it would certainly call her—after the thing that entrances, captures, and makes silent—the spiral of the sea.