Water Walkers are small dragons that are frequently found around bogs and ponds. While they are flightless, they retain the flight sacs and hollow bones of their airborne cousins. These traits, coupled with their extraordinarily long, webbed toes, allow them to stand on top of calm waters, using their small sails to propel them wherever they please. They spend the majority of their lives on the water, retreating to the tops of lily pads when the waters become too rough to float atop.

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.

Dhanay is an author, a fact she hides from other dragons in nearby territories. Many of them view literacy and language fluency as "dumb smart people stuff", and she doesn't wish for them to come after her, a comparatively small, fragile water walker. (None of them even appreciated her trying to correct the phrasing of "dumb smart people" to something less clunky.) To be technical, Dhanay is only half-literate: her digits, limb shape, and wetness make it difficult to hold a writing tool and apply words to paper, so she dictates to her loyal assistant, the only dragon privy to her secret. A curious individual, she enjoys writing stories that cover topics she learned extensively about. Her favorite is a 230-page novel about the adventures of young, humble seafarer, which she wrote after learning about the four-hundred-year history of a particular group of humans across the strait. In the human communities, the story is much-shared and much-copied, though no one knows who was behind it.