The families who settled furthest up the Rain Wild River, in the most dangerous and transformative environment in the known world. The Rain Wilds physically mark their inhabitants over generations - extra fingers, scaled skin, features that become increasingly non-human with each generation - in ways that set them apart from the Bingtown Traders and make them objects of pity and unease. They control access to the Elderling artefacts recovered from the buried cities along the river, giving them economic power that partially compensates for their physical difference. The Rain Wild Chronicles is centred on their community and its relationship with the dragons.

The group of Rain Wild inhabitants selected to accompany the damaged young dragons upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra, assigned one keeper per dragon on the basis that neither dragons nor keepers have much to lose. The keepers are misfits within Rain Wild society - too physically marked by the river's changes to be easily integrated into normal life - and their journey with the dragons becomes a process of mutual transformation as both species recover something of what they were always meant to be. The Dragon Keepers are the central community of the Rain Wild Chronicles.