I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 795: Simon Falkrona SS [1]

SIMON

I can still remember that day.

I know I always will.

It lives in me with a terrible clarity, as if that moment split my life cleanly in two. There was the world before it, warm and whole and ordinary, and then there was the world after, cold and broken, a place I no longer recognized. In a single stroke, everything around me seemed to collapse.

My parents died that day. My father, my mother, and my uncle too. All of them were taken from me at once, and with them went the shape of the life I had known. I was only nine years old, and in the span of a few hours I became an orphan.

I had once had an aunt, but she had died years before, so there was no one left. No one from my family remained. That was the part I could never truly understand. One day I belonged to something, and the next day I was alone.

At that age, I couldn’t make sense of death, let alone death like that. No one gave me an explanation that meant anything. No one could tell me why it had happened, or for what reason, or who had decided my family had to die. There were words, of course, but they were empty words, the kind adults use when they do not know what else to say. In the end, I was simply expected to accept it.

To bear it.

To keep breathing as if the world had not just ended.

Then, the day after, Thomen Falkrona came to me.

I remember that with the same sharpness. I was still mourning them, still numb with shock, still unable to believe that if I turned my head quickly enough I would not see my mother or hear my father’s voice. And through all that grief, Thomen appeared and offered to adopt me.

I knew who he was. He had been close to my parents for years, familiar enough that his face did not feel strange to me. I think that was why I trusted him so quickly. Or perhaps I simply needed someone, anyone, to hold on to before I disappeared into that grief completely.

He, too, had lost someone that same day. His wife, Aunt Oryanna, was gone. At the time, it struck me as a terrible and strange coincidence, though even then I suspected it was more than that. It seemed possible, even likely, that the same hand had reached into both our lives and torn them apart. Ante-Eden. The name was already beginning to gather darkness around it in my mind.

And yet, in the middle of that grief, I found something I had not expected to feel again so soon: hope. Frail hope, uncertain and trembling, but hope all the same. Not because my pain had lessened, but because suddenly there was the faintest shape of a future in front of me. A place to go. A hand extended toward me. Something other than emptiness.

The adoption happened quickly, and before long I came to know Thomen’s children properly: Edward Falkrona and Elona Falkrona.

I still remember being brought into that house and introduced as a new member of their family. Even now, I struggle to describe what I felt in that moment. After so much loss, after a grief that seems ready to swallow a me whole, their home looked like light. It looked like rescue. It looked like the beginning of something new.

And I needed that more than I could ever put into words.

The pain of losing my family was tearing through me from the inside, and I think if I had not found something to cling to, it might have consumed me entirely. Thomen gave me that chance. He gave me a roof, a name to stand beside, and the possibility that my life had not ended with theirs.

But not everything unfolded the way I had hoped.

Not entirely.

Of everyone in that house, Elona became the brightest part of my new life almost at once. My new little sister was, without question, one of the greatest gifts I had been given after everything I had lost. She was gentle, kind, and she had that rare warmth around making everything brighter around her.

Every time she called me brother, something in me softened. The word filled a hollow place inside my chest, reaching into the emptiness my family had left behind and warming it, if only a little. It never erased the loss, but with her it did not feel so bottomless. We grew close quickly, and for the first time since that day, recovery no longer felt impossible.

Edward, however, was different.

I understood, at least in theory, that he was grieving too. He had lost his mother, and I knew enough of pain by then to recognize it in others. In some ways, I was in the perfect position to understand him. But in truth, I understood almost nothing of what was happening behind his eyes.

From the very first moment we met, something about me seemed to perturb him. He did not merely dislike me, not at first. It was stranger than that. There was a look in him I could not name then, a kind of tension, as though my presence itself panicked him. As though I had walked into that house carrying some invisible threat with me.

I tried to bridge the distance between us. I truly did. I spoke to him when I could, tried not to intrude, tried to be patient, tried to give him time. I told myself that grief could twist a person inward, could make even simple kindness hard to receive. But nothing I did seemed to matter. Every attempt fell flat. Every small effort dissolved into silence or coldness.

And as time went on, it only got worse.

Whatever unease he had felt toward me hardened into something harsher. His behavior changed little by little, until it could no longer be dismissed as grief alone. He became more aggressive, not only toward me but toward Elona as well. The tension in the house deepened. What had first felt like a fragile new beginning began, slowly, to darken at the edges.

Even then, I kept trying to believe things would improve.

I wanted that family to hold.

I wanted that light to last.

So I held on to hope.

Even if Edward kept his distance, even if every attempt to reach him ended in silence or tension, I still had Elona. More than that, I had a reason to stay. If nothing else, I told myself, I would be there for her.

She was the one suffering most under Edward’s behavior.

Elona loved him deeply. That was always obvious. No matter how harsh he became, no matter how often he pushed her away, some part of her still clung to the brother she remembered, or perhaps the brother she wanted him to be again. That was what made it so painful to watch. His coldness wounded her more than it would have wounded anyone else, because her love for him had never been shallow. It came from the heart, and so every cruel word struck deep. In time, even she could no longer call him big brother without bitterness creeping into her voice, without that love colliding with hurt and turning heavy.

Even so, I made a promise to myself.

At the very least, I would be there for this new family I had been given. I would be there for Elona, and for Edward too, when the day finally came that he was ready to lay down whatever wall he had built around himself. I kept believing there was something beneath all that anger, something wounded rather than rotten, and I refused to give up on that belief too easily.

When the academic year at Royal Eden Academy began, I still held onto that hope. Edward remained difficult. He could still be dismissive, still sharp with both me and Elona, and there were times when it felt as though he was fighting against anyone who tried to get close. But he had changed, if only a little. The change was small enough that someone less desperate for signs of progress might not have noticed it, but I did.

I saw the way he looked at Elona.

The fear that had once flickered in him whenever he looked at me was no longer there, and the aggression in him had begun to lose its edge. In its place, I sometimes caught something else before he could conceal it: guilt, softness, a kind of quiet sorrow. He was still guarded, still difficult, but those glimpses made me believe he was not as far gone as I had once feared.

And eventually, things did begin to mend.

Edward and Elona repaired their bond. Seeing that filled me with relief I can still remember. Even I, in my own cautious way, managed to draw a little closer to him. Not enough to call us truly close, perhaps, but enough that I believed the worst had passed. Enough that I let myself think our fractured family might still become whole.

Then everything collapsed.

It happened when I met Uncle Conrad in the Enigma Dungeon and learned the truth, or at least what I believed to be the truth then. I saw with my own eyes that Thomen had killed my father.

Even now, remembering that moment feels like stepping back into a nightmare. It was as though the ground gave way beneath me. The man who had taken me in, the man who had given me shelter when I had nothing, the man I had come to see as family, was the one who had killed my father. My mind rejected it at once. I did not want to believe it. I fought against it with everything in me. But when I confronted him, all I received was confirmation.

That was the moment my world broke apart for the second time.

Bitterness swelled inside me first, then anger, then disgust. They came so fast that I could barely think around them. I had lived in the house of my father’s killer. I had grown up surrounded by the wealth, safety, and protection of the man who had taken my family from me. Every memory I had built there seemed suddenly poisoned. Every kindness became difficult to look at without suspicion, as though even comfort itself had turned into an insult.

And because pain is rarely fair, because grief so often strikes the wrong target, I began to withdraw from Elona too.

Seeing her reminded me of Thomen. She had done nothing wrong, nothing at all, but my heart had become so tangled in rage and confusion that even being near her hurt. So I began avoiding her. I put distance between us where there had once been warmth. I still remember Edward confronting me about it, calling out my coldness toward her, and the bitter irony of that moment was not lost on me. The roles had reversed. Once, I had watched him wound Elona while I tried to protect her. Now he was the one standing before me in anger because I had become the source of her pain.

The truth was that I loved Elona too much to let my ugliness touch her.

That was what I told myself, at least. I convinced myself that staying away was an act of care, that distance would protect her from the bitterness growing in me. I did not want to turn my resentment on her. I did not want my anger at Thomen, my confusion about the past, and my disgust at everything I had learned to spill onto someone who had only ever shown me kindness. So I stepped back.

And in doing so, I made yet another unforgivable mistake.

Elona died during Ante-Eden’s attack on the capital.