Sylfreyre's high elven ears detected a slight knocking which he believed to be faint footsteps. Still, they were enough to lift his eyelids and fill his sight with brown and yellow decay. This windowless closet with peeling, yellow walls was his home, if anything could truly be called his home. He sat up on the cushioned bench which served as his bed and looked at his notes sitting on his desk in the darkest corner of the room. For a moment he considered getting up and resuming his work but a wave of sickly fatigue came over him and decided it would be better now to just sit and think.
This reticent elf spent a lot of time sitting and thinking in his cubicle. Everyone else at the school called it his quarters but he called it his cubicle. The name seemed a better fit to him. He had little social relations at this school in Summerset Isle and nothing in the way of clubs or organizations he attended. He was as disdainful of his peers as they were of him and possessed that life-giving assurance of the victim that they are either morally or intellectually superior to their victimizer. Sylfreyre believed both but he never said so in words, not even to himself.
He had been found abandoned at the doorstep of an orphanage and had grown up there until old enough to attend school. He believed he had been abandoned for racial reasons because his parents considered him impure. The effect this thought can have on an adolescent is polarizing. On one side it can make him feel inferior and drive him into depression, on the other it can make him hateful of his own parents and arrogant. It can make him look upon his own with nothing but contempt for rejecting him. Whichever of these poles (or both simultaneously) holds itself in his consciousness he will never be content with what he sees when looking into a pond on a clear day.
Today, Sylfreyre was feeling ill. He was sick often, which further fueled his feelings of inadequacy as the high elves prided themselves on being more resistant to diseases than the lesser races. This thought filled him with melancholy and he scolded himself for his feelings of inadequacy. He hastily grabbed his copy of "A Pocket Guide to Empire" and began reading a passage on the Altmer. He knew the passage practically by heart and agreed entirely with its interpretation of high-elven culture. He certainly felt like little more than a number and counted himself among the euthanized infants, although he was not killed. He felt he had also been rejected for his racial impurity.
He read many histories of Tamriel and rejoiced at the victories of heroes like Reman. But he especially revered the character of Tiber Septim, the man who by his extraordinary deeds had become a God. The man who proved that transcending the old laws and becoming an overman one could truly be immortal, but not just never to die, to be a God; and to do this without a single drop of elven blood.
Sylfreyre believed he too could transgress societal law and longed to prove himself above his fellow Altmer. He wanted to rise above the fray he saw around him and hated so virulently. An arrogant youth to be sure, but come now, don't we all think of ourselves as Tiber Septims now in Tamriel.
He shut the book. Reading the passage had only augmented his anger. He made his way out of his room and down a small staircase to the commons. Three ne'er-do-wells we're sitting in the corner that he recognized from previous trouble. Sorcalin, Ancotar, and Salmo were their names and silence grabbed the room as they met his gaze with their own. Sylfreyre turned abruptly and went out the back door hoping to alleviate his anger in the forest. The three followed, smiling at the subject who had come to alleviate their boredom.
"Hold up there, bosmer!" called Salmo laughing, "going to hide in the trees again? I swear he must be part wood elf. He runs to the woods to avoid his troubles."
"You're ridiculous, Sal, he's taller than you," said Sarcalin.
"Fine, so his father was an anxious bosmer and his mother a giant whore. That way the height balances out."
The three exploded with laughter. Nothing short of a fireball would break their mirth. Unfortunately, a fireball did come.
The three began attacking him and he picked up a piece of metal to defend himself and did so with eloquence until a paralysis spell hit him in the arm and he fell, as stiff as an oak, to the ground. He was unable to cringe in pain as his body hit the solid ground. A wall of frost passed in front of his vision. It didn't touch him but was close enough for him to feel ice crystals forming on his brow. He couldn't turn his head to see who had helped him and was now helping him to his feet. The three had fled and he looked upon his savior and thanked him.
"It is a duty to help a victim, do not thank me, just call me friend. What is your name?"
"And... "
"And what?"
"You haven't asked me mine. That's frightful bad manners."
"Sorry," he said, a little annoyed with the jest. "What is your name?"
"Calindil." snapped the eager elf almost before Sylfreyre had finished the question. "You're not too bad with a shield there."
Sylfreyre grunted a reply. He wanted to leave without offending his rescuer but was skeptical of the whole "friend" idea.
"Ah, you've dropped your book, hmmm. Pocket Guide to Empire. Well you know what that says about Summerset Isle?"
"Yes!" he snapped, expecting a confrontation.
"Well its spot on in my opinion," said Calindil much to his listener's surprise. "But I am," he leaned inward as if about to divulge a personal secret "one of the beautiful."
Sylfreyre had heard the name and knew the groups beginnings as a salon club for artists and intellectuals to discuss the reasonable philosophy that Summerset Isle must stop looking to the past if it wished to progress to its future. For a while now it had existed as a revolutionary group bent on destroying all things of tradition and had been party to more than a few murders. The mention of this group peaked his attention.
"You should come to a meeting some time, I was just on my way to one now," said Calindil. And so Sylfreyre joined the Beautiful and fell in love, so to speak, with a new philosophy and was blind, as young intellectuals often are to the aspects of the philosophy that his heart of hearts could never agree with.