In the Arctic: Slowly the ice is changing; bears are starving; dragons are rising; and the souls of the Inuit dead are haunting the skies.

As the weather grows wilder and the ice caps melt, all eyes turn from the north to David's daughter, Alexa.

The book opens with a short chapter about how the Earth, Gaia, is beginning to get restless, and then goes to explain Zanna's sadness about David being gone.

She gives the invisible and shapeless dragon G'lant, which David gave to her at the end of Fire Star, to her daughter Alexa.

She bought a New Age shop called the Healing Touch and is living with the Pennykettles in David's old room.

So she writes an E-mail to a man named Tam Farell, whose role is not yet revealed, telling him to go the Healing Touch and ask for Zanna.

Having disguised himself as a fox, he tricked Avrel into following him, and then filled his head with old knowledge and legends.

Tam decides to buy David's book, White Fire, and Zanna gets slightly suspicious.

Zanna brands Tam with Oomara and erases the memory of that day including meeting Lucy.

Then Alexa is on the phone and tells Zanna that she saw David being a polar bear in her toy's eye.

Lucy finds herself on Farlowe island and brother Bernard appears and leads her to a room.

Back home at the Crescent, Alexa is putting icefire on David's four dragons and they enter the portal in the fairy door.

The Ix (the flip side of the fain that killed David) there are upset that the Darkling had an extra piece which looks like a knife and is the heart.

She happens to be a descendant of a legendary yet mythical woman named Guinevere, who was very close to Gawain, the last dragon on earth.

Lucy Pennykettle – Liz's daughter, now 16, firmly believes that David is not dead and will return to save the Arctic.

As a result of her grief combined with her teenage years, Lucy is easily aggravated and hostile.

David was Liz's tenant and a college student in the previous books, but at the end of Fire Star he disappeared in the North Pole and the question of "is he dead?"

David was shown the dragons in previous books but was still always unsure of that world, yet in The Fire Eternal, he has become much more knowledgeable.

In dark fire, it is revealed that this was due to Arthur writing about him using the legendary claw of Gawain.

The claw was sent to him by Alexa in her pre-born state as a fain because David should have been born to Liz and Arthur.

She is five years old, a bright and intelligent child, yet shows strange awareness and abilities, possibly because of being born to a powerful sibyl and David's mysterious new form.

Her mother is a sibyl and her father is a combination of Ix (an evil type of Fain), man, and darkling.

Up until recently has spent his life as a monk and gaining some special powers of his own, such as he can see through Bonnington's eyes by "commingling".

He is almost completely blind due to his body being invaded by an alien life form but is nevertheless a genius.

At the end of this book, he was captured and invaded by the Ix (an evil offshoot of the Fain) but successfully escaped.

Near the end of the book, he seems to have gained the power of a Teller and is driven with the motive of protecting the Pennykettles and the Martindales.

G'reth – David's wishing dragon can and has travelled through space and time, and commingled with a Fain.

Temporarily had her ears snapped off (by David when he was pretending to be under the spell of one of Gretel's potions) in the book Icefire.

It rests on top of the fridge and its name is mentioned in the last book of the series, The Fire Ascending.

He assists Ingavar (commingled version of David Rain) in search of the eye of Gawain.