Prologue

There exists a race called dark elves.

A mutation of elves who had taken shadow elements into themselves, they shared the half-elves' fervent thirst for knowledge, and on top of that their swings of emotion ran more violent and their fidelity to instinct ran deeper.

In the age of the gods, those traits drew them into the chaos of war alongside the evil gods and demons. As a result, the elves, who held the protection of the Crystal Pillars and of the human god's knowledge as an absolute duty, came to treat them as a shame upon their own kind and began hunting them down on their own, while the other races, too, came to regard them as enemies.

At heart, however, they were never truly battle-crazed nor nihilistic, and so before long the dark elves took to hiding themselves away from the eyes of others.

Of course, there were also those who went out into the world driven by grudges for slain loved ones, or by desires they could no longer suppress.

Amid all that, the Nelius couple had parted from the other dark elves, yet rather than descending to human settlements they lived quietly within the depths of a treacherous forest.

Their high magical power left their daily life wanting for nothing: the occasional hunt, days of tilling in fair weather and reading in foul.

They were happy days.

Unlike elves, whose ovulation cycles ran more than three times longer than those of common humans and who imposed celibacy on themselves on top of that, it did not take the couple long to be blessed with a child.

The child's skin came out the same dark brown as her parents', but of course there was no disappointment in that.

"Thank you, Flora. She's our child."

"Coruto… fufu. Carry on like that and the poor thing will be quite put out."

To her husband, who clutched the infant to his chest with tears running down his face, the wife smiled back faintly with tears of her own.

"Her name…"

"Ah, since she's a girl… Lula. Lula it is."

"Lula… pleased to meet you."

As his wife lovingly stroked the small infant laid down beside her, the husband watched her with gentle eyes.