When Water Dragons mature, they lose the ability to survive on land, entering the water permanently. They are adept swimmers and eat whatever fish are in the lake they live in. They tend to inhabit the same lake for their entire lives, although a few live in the ocean and swim all over the world.

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.

Yemaya takes after her mother Osun, and is her frequent companion on her travels. However, she is more literarily-inclined than her mother, and will often keep a telepathically-recorded travelogue of her trips, which she shares mind-to-mind with any dragon who is interested. She is a gifted ethnographer, and has a wide interest in human and dragon cultures—her telepathic abilities give her significant advantages over human ethnographers in this respect, as they have to actually go through the messy process of formulating questions and interpreting answers and observations to learn about another society, while she merely has to read minds. (It's probably a good thing that she is discreet and careful in her mind-reading, however, and that her human subjects are generally completely unaware of her intrusion into their mental worlds, so delicate is her touch.)