The Elves, also called the Skyborn Elves, were considered a higher and superior race in the world.

They were superior because they arrived already complete.

Five thousand years ago, when human tribes huddled in hide tents and fought over waterholes, when the concept of a ’kingdom’ was less real than a dream, the Skyborn Elves simply... appeared.

Not as wanderers. Not as refugees fleeing some older catastrophe. Not as explorers seeking new lands.

They appeared as a civilization.

A superior civilization, definitely.

Back then, humanity wasn’t really savage, but they were in the right transition toward the next step, and it was in such a time that they met the very first elves. Human tribes had learned to farm the river valleys and herd sheep across the high meadows. They built walls of mud and stone around their growing villages. They traded obsidian for salt, furs for copper, stories for other stories.

The first true kingdoms had not yet risen, that would take another thousand years, but the bones of those kingdoms were already forming beneath the skin of the earth. And then the elves came down from the sky.

At such a moment, obviously, elves, with their unique appearance, alabaster skin of surreal white that seemed to glow even under clouded skies, ethereal features sharp and delicate as broken glass, elongated ears that caught the light like translucent shells, almost appeared like gods to them.

The humans had never seen anything like them. The most beautiful human woman or man looked crude and unfinished when standing beside those carved faces and luminous eyes.

Considering them as Gods in the old ages couldn’t be an exaggeration.

It didn’t help that they did act as such in some ways, as they had helped humans to transition, teaching them most of what was necessary to evolve faster than expected.

They showed humans which herbs truly healed and which only made the patient feel hopeful. They demonstrated crop rotation on a piece of barren land that bloomed the following season. They drew maps in the dirt with their fingers, maps of weather patterns, of underground rivers, of animal migration routes that no human had ever tracked because no human had ever thought to look up and see which way the geese flew in relation to the stars.

Putting all these together, they indeed appeared like living gods for them.

Unfortunately, following an incident involving elves where they had started being enslaved by humans, their relations broke entirely. No single record survives of the first enslavement, the elves do not speak of it, and the humans who did it did not write down their crimes. But the shape of the story was known through fragments. A human chieftain, greedy and clever, realized that an elf could be captured if you used the right bait: a dying child, perhaps, or a promise of safe passage to a sacred grove.

Elves, for all their power, were vulnerable to empathy. They could not watch a child choke on fever without trying to help. And when they bent down to help, chains of cold iron, which disrupted spirit-bonds like throwing mud into a clear spring, could be thrown around their throats.

Once captured, an elf was priceless. A living elf could be sold to any human king for enough gold to buy a kingdom. An elf’s tears, if collected in silver vials, were said to cure any poison. An elf’s blood, mixed into paint, could make a portrait immortal. An elf’s bound spirit, if you could force the contract to transfer, could power a city’s forges for a hundred years. None of this was true, or barely true, or true only in the way that rumors become truth when enough people believe them. But the humans believed. And belief was enough to make them hunt.

And so, fewer and fewer elves started stepping down from Sylphara toward the ground where humanity lived. First, it became rare. Then it became an event worth recording in song. Then it stopped entirely for nearly two centuries, the storm walls around Sylphara thickening until the floating islands vanished behind a permanent shroud of lightning and howling wind.

Hatred was nurtured among elves, especially toward humanity, who didn’t help themselves either, as elves were seen more as priceless rewards to capture than as living beings.

The Skyborn were not a forgiving race. They do not forget. Their spirits remember every slight, every chain. And the spirits whisper those memories back to each new generation of elves during their bonding ceremonies.

And because of the Elves’ long lifespan, memories did not fade. They would curdle.

Even during current times, it would not be surprising to see elves being enslaved, though it was extremely rare. The rarity was not because humans have become kinder. Humans had not become kinder. The rarity was because elves had become nearly impossible to catch.

But without doubt, an elf alone in a kingdom of humans was clearly dangerous. Not to the kingdom, the elf had no interest in burning fields or collapsing walls. Dangerous to themselves. Because every human who saw them would calculate the value. Every merchant would weigh the price of betrayal against the price of silence. Every lord would wonder if their dungeon had strong enough chains. The elf would be a target easily captured, not because elves are weak, but because humans were many, and humans were patient, and humans had spent five thousand years learning how to trap things that should not be trapable.

They were a cunning race, certainly, a race that always managed to evolve and adapt frighteningly fast.

Because of this, nearly no elves would step down from Sylphara, avoiding humanity like plague.

A human might live an entire lifetime of seventy or eighty years and never see one. They would hear stories, of course, every tavern had a drunk who claimed to have glimpsed a Skyborn descending through the clouds, every market had a merchant selling ’genuine elf tears’ that were just salt water with a pretty label. But an actual elf, standing on human ground, breathing human air, looking down at a human with those pupil-less eyes? That was an event. That was a thing that happened once in a generation, if that. And when it happened, word spread like wildfire.

The elves did not miss stepping down. They had Sylphara, its luminous forests, its singing rivers, its endless sky. They had their spirits, who loved them in ways no human could understand. They had each other, and their hate, and their grief, and their stubborn refusal to ever again be made into currency.

So what could drive one of these beings to wander so deeply into human territory?

The reasons varied. Some ventured out purely out of arrogant curiosity to observe the ’lower race’. Others left simply to explore the continent. However, the most common reason an Elf appeared so far from home was banishment following a severe crime.

Ulrich stared intently at Ceres. Her pointed ears were exposed, and even underneath the mud and river water clinging to her cheeks, her delicate features possessed the ethereal glow that almost screamed of her heritage.

But Ulrich knew she wasn’t a pureblood. She was only half-Elven. Her father had been an Elf, but her mother had been a human, and not just any human. Her mother had been a Witch.

This dual lineage made Ceres a unique and dangerous anomaly: a Half-Elf, Half-Witch hybrid capable of both contracting spirits and weaving potent Witchcraft. According to the scattered parts he had mentally pieced together from the novel, Ceres had originally lived in Sylphara. Once the Elven authorities discovered her mother’s true nature, however, both of them were exiled.

They managed to find shelter within a hidden coven for a few years, but tragedy struck again when her mother died. Unwilling to accept a Half-Elf into their ranks, the coven drove Ceres out into the harsh world alone. A young girl wandering the world with highly prized Elven features was a walking target for slavers and criminals. Just before she was swallowed by the worst of humanity, a retired Hunter had found her and taken her in as his own daughter.

At least, that was the biography Ulrich had managed to stitch together from his memories of the book. He still didn’t know all the details of her life, and he certainly had no idea why she had decided to wander into a deadly beast den inside his specific territory. Did she have a death wish?

In the original timeline, Ceres obviously survived whatever ordeal was supposed to happen here today. However, since the novel never once mentions a living grandfather by the time she reached the academy, Ulrich could safely assume the old man was originally destined to die in this forest to ensure her escape.

But Ulrich had intervened. He had saved them both.

As a major character and future powerhouse, getting on her good side would certainly be a wise decision. If he could prevent the obsessive, murderous hatred she was supposed to harbor for him, he could eliminate one of the greatest threats to his cover at the Imperial Academy. Saving her grandfather’s life was a great first step in securing her loyalty.

But Ulrich wasn’t a man who settled for mere neutrality; he needed trust. Since fate had dropped her right into his lap, he decided he might as well manipulate her gratitude completely, just as he was currently doing with Anna-Maria’s daughters back at the estate.

To do that, he first needed to disarm her panic. He needed to put the terrified Half-Elf completely at ease.

"What is an Elf doing here?"