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.

Slyrissa's tiny wings hadn't even grown in when her parents died, drowned in the torrent of floodwater. The event scared her, and sometimes she can still hear her parents' screams and see their muzzles disappearing beneath the surface as they fought the powerful current. Slyrissa is terrified of water because of it, and will only drink from the smallest puddles. But deep inside she knows that it is quiet silly for a Water Walker to be afraid of water and often dreams of doing the one thing that had occupied her mind before her parents' death--- doing a backflip underwater. Sometimes she misses the cool feeling of the water lapping over her skin and the surprising strength of the water's surface under her webbed feet. But these dreams quickly turn into nightmares.