Aria dragons are a brightly-colored and sprightly breed, perhaps most adored for their lyric calls. Their song-like melodies fill the areas they inhabit; their coos resemble those of birds, only more elegant and refined. They have fairly strong magical capabilities, but tend to reserve these strengths for last-minute defense, choosing to live their lives in simple peace. Arias, sticking to the tropics, typically live quite far from human settlements, giving rise to the previously held belief that they had gone extinct.

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.

Aria Soul writes essays and books on history and current events, or rather, "history" and current events with a dose of fiction. Rather than bother with inconvenient things like facts, he writes about topics that interest him, and if he thinks something should exist or should happen, he describes them as if they do happen or have happened. His "Written Record on Little-Known Elemental Birdsong" has been copied and passed through countless hands, and "The Ongoing Tragedy of the Dawn Charge" and "Methods of Handling the Sun Ring Mote" are each held in about a dozen libraries and repositories, under Fiction. Aria is fairly shy and would rather be visited instead of visit. When visited for a chat, he discusses his works as factual and shares that he has supplements written for some of his works. He hopes he'll survive some hundreds more years, long enough for his contemporaries to die and for his works to be seen by future generations as the truth.