Shadow Walkers are a strange breed that possess the ability to slip between the planes of reality, becoming immaterial. This allows them to hide in the shadows, either hunting from the concealment of near invisibility or evading enemies. Though they become corporeal to mate or to eat, they spend most of the rest of their lives walking in the shadows. Shadow Walkers are wary creatures, though on dark autumn evenings when the leaves fall to swirl in the chill, rain damp air, they may be seen drifting out from the shadows.

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.

Sulae is a simplistic dragon; not in terms of needs or desires—no, she is just as complicated as any other in those respects—but in reference to her ideas of life and death.

It is very simple, really. Living things are lights. It is that simple. She sees the world as it is, a collection of living, dead, and inanimate things that function together, but on the other side of the spectrum, she also sees it as a collection of lights that flicker unsteadily, until, eventually... they go out. She is not bothered by this view—it keeps the world simple, she insists—though this often leads her to notice the relationships between dragons more keenly than others. These motes of light interact with each other, as normal beings do. Some grow brighter when surrounded by certain kinds of light (and there's no other way to describe it, other than the lights being different types), and others dim and flicker and fade.

Sulae worries over how many lights tend to be with others that dim themselves.