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.

As a hatchling, Serrah had been treated with various reactions by the dragons of his old clan, from open distrust to religious devotion. Every dragon knew that no male had ever visited the Golden Wyvern princess Natalia, a group of female guards watching the only entrance to her lair all the time. And yet one day, during the long nights of autumn, she had an egg and later a strange little hatchling she called Serrah. Only when he matured he discovered his ability to pass through the walls of his mother's bower and with her loving thoughts urging him to go on, Serrah escaped to freedom.

Now living among many dragons of his own breed in a wildly mixed clan, Serrah sometimes asks himself how it was possible that the isolated Wyvern pack had been so ignorant of Shadow Walkers and what ever happened to his father, but he never lets these questions bother him too much. Life in freedom is far to good for that.