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.