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.

Long ago, Wavecalmer was rescued as a hatchling by the human Feathers. She was young herself, then, not even yet immortal. Only a child with calloused hands and a soft voice. It was that girl, in a way, who really held the Old Featherwing Weyr together for as long as it did.

It could never have lasted, not when the dragons the Weyr protected expanded, when Feathers was grown and unchanging, not a personal caretaker to every dragon hatched. They all knew her, all met her. But not all the dragons could ever love her like her first few dedicated friends did.

Wavecalmer knows that Feathers was not killed in the Great War. He saw her spirited away, clasping tight to a dragon with flesh rotting off the bone. One of the last hatchlings she saved, nearly killed by neglect. Wavecalmer saw them flee together into the night, and so when the War came to him, he surrendered.

His fight will come later. He waits in the Weyr of Flame, ready to return to Feathers' side once more, whenever she returns.