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.

Winifred, one of Penthesilea's Amazon subclan (a clan of pinks and purples who focus on self-development of their inner talents), is a paleontologist, who excavates old rock strata looking for evidence of ancient life. Her sharp, strong, dextrous claws and telekinetic abilities make her a natural at carefully extracting fossils and stromatolites (accretions in the stone left by ancient biofilms—layers of bacteria and other primitive living matter). She has made many important discoveries about the nature of the first kinds of life to leave traces in the rocks of her planet, and is well known for her incisive, clear, scholarly articles (dragons being telepathic rather than literary, these articles are stored in the minds of stone memory dragons, like her clan's Mnemosyne Memoria, rather than being written on paper). She is an excellent teacher, and often gives lectures on the ancient world to fascinated dragons, hatchlings, dinosaurs and humans, both adult and child.