I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 800: Belle Falkrona SS [1]

I always told myself I was lucky to have been born into a large family.

More than being born into one of the mightiest Houses in the world, the Falkrona Household, I think what I treasured most was that I had never grown up alone. I was surrounded by siblings from the very beginning, and as a child that felt like a blessing greater than wealth, status, or the power behind our name.

I had five siblings in total: four elder brothers and one elder sister. I was the last child, the youngest of them all, and being the youngest turned out to be both sweeter and more complicated than I had once imagined.

In some ways, it was wonderful. Everyone spoiled me. My brothers especially doted on me far more than they probably should have, and my father and mother were no different. There was always someone to indulge me, someone to tease me, someone to keep an eye on me whether I wanted it or not. Yet being the youngest also meant I was always trailing behind the rest of them, forever a few steps too late to fully belong to their world.

Kleines was the youngest among my elder brothers and the closest to me in age, but even he was six years older than I was. That distance may not seem like much to an adult, but as a child it felt enormous. By the time I was just beginning to understand the world around me, my siblings already seemed halfway into another one. They all treated me like a child, naturally enough, but that was exactly the problem. I was loved, yes, but also gently excluded, protected to the point of being left behind.

Still, I loved my family deeply, and for a long time that was enough.

Unfortunately, being born into the Falkrona Household did not guarantee happiness.

Everything was fine when we were children, when we were still too young to grasp what it meant to belong to a House like ours. Back then, family was simply family. But as we grew older, the atmosphere began to change. Rivalries that had once been harmless sharpened. Old frustrations deepened. Quiet ambitions started taking shape beneath smiles and formal words. The question of who would one day lead the Household began to cast a shadow over us all.

Among my brothers, Kleines took the lead almost immediately.

He awakened the Core Bloodline of our House at an unusually early age, much like our grandfather had. That alone set him apart from the rest, and everyone knew it. My father, whether intentionally or not, began devoting more attention to him after that. More training. More expectations. More time. It was obvious, and it did not sit well with my other brothers.

Silas, the eldest among us, was especially displeased.

Even then, I could sense the bitterness growing between them, though I was too young to understand all of its depth. In a House like ours, strength was not merely admired; it was weighed, measured, and used as proof of worth. Kleines’ early awakening made him the natural focus of everyone’s eyes, but the strange part was that he himself seemed to care very little for the role being prepared for him.

His heart was elsewhere.

Kleines had fallen in love with the Olphean princess, Lydia Alea Olphean, who also happened to be my closest friend there. I still remember how different he seemed whenever she was near, as though all the expectations of our House slid off him the moment he looked at her. For perhaps the first time in his life, he wanted something that had nothing to do with power, inheritance, or duty.

But because of the political tensions between Sancta Vedelia and the outer world, he had little choice in the matter. If he wanted to remain with Alea, then he would have to settle in Sancta Vedelia with her.

Alea was too proud and clearly not the one one to leave her House and her beloved sisters especially.

And that was exactly what he chose.

He chose love over the House.

I knew that decision angered my father greatly, even if he did not always show it openly. Yet I could not truly resent him for it. My father was many things, but in this matter I could not entirely blame him. He had no interest in naming as heir a son who did not care to lead the Household in the first place. In his eyes, affection was not enough to preserve a great House. Commitment was required, and Kleines had given his heart elsewhere.

Even so, I think the greater turning point came with Thomen.

If Kleines stepping away disappointed my father, then Thomen’s departure altered the family in a way none of us could ignore. Unlike Kleines, whose choice had been rooted in love, Thomen had always carried himself with a certain independence, as though some part of him had long belonged beyond Falkrona lands.

He had ties to Celesta from early on, more than any of the rest of us. Even before things changed formally, he was already in close contact with them. He had befriended Prince Charles Celesta while still young, and Draven as well. Those bonds did not seem political at first, at least not to me. They looked genuine. But in families like ours, genuine bonds often become political whether one wishes it or not.

Then came the campaign against the territory taken by Ante-Eden.

Charles led the subjugation, and Thomen fought at his side. He did not merely assist him either. He played a decisive role in the victory, and from what I later learned, he even saved Charles’ life after the prince suffered a grave injury. It was one of those moments that shape the course of several lives at once, though few realize it while it is happening.

Afterward, Lucius Celesta, who was king at the time and Charles’s father, officially granted that territory to my brother Thomen in recognition of his service.

It was quite ironic to say the least.

That very land had once been granted to our House by the Celesta Royal Family two centuries ago, a gesture of friendship meant to strengthen the bond between the crown and the mighty Falkrona House.

Yet the decision had stirred unrest almost immediately within the Kingdom of Celesta. Many nobles viewed the king’s decree as a humiliation, an insult directed at every lord of the realm. To them, handing over such a vast territory to a foreign noble house was unthinkable, worse still when that house was the arrogant Falkronas.

Because of this outrage, the territory, despite officially belonging to the Falkrona House, was never placed under the rule of any Falkrona lord. The royal court feared that doing so would ignite endless political conflict.

And so the land remained in an uncertain state.

For decades, minor landlords were ordered by the king to oversee and maintain the territory in the crown’s stead. Yet even they regarded the duty with bitterness. They saw it as an affront to be burdened with governing land that was not truly theirs, while the royal family stubbornly refused to grant ownership to anyone else, clinging to an old promise made by their ancestors to the Falkronas.

As expected, the territory received little genuine care. Neglect spread slowly through the region like rot beneath polished wood. Villages declined, roads crumbled, and lawlessness quietly took root in forgotten corners of the land.

Then came the news that shook the kingdom.

Ante-Eden had established itself within the territory.

The revelation sent waves through the court and nobility alike. What had once been dismissed as an abandoned political inconvenience had suddenly become a matter of fear.

Our father then sent Thomen, who was still very young by the standards of our House, to aid Charles in reclaiming it.

And reclaim it he did.

Looking back, that may have been the moment Thomen ceased to be merely one of Falkrona’s sons and began becoming something else entirely, a man with his own city, his own alliances, his own future.

Back then, however, I was still just a child.

A younger child than I should have been for something like that, certainly, which is precisely why I was forbidden from going anywhere near it. But I was worried about Thomen, and more than that, I was fascinated. War, rebellion, a lost territory, the shadow of Ante-Eden, all of it sounded larger than life to me. So, in a moment of reckless curiosity that I later dressed up as devotion, I secretly ran off and followed him.

I joined the campaign without permission.

Even now, remembering it makes me grimace a little.

I would not go so far as to say the victory happened because of me. That would be absurd. Thomen and the others did the real fighting, bore the real danger, and carried the burden of command. But I was there, and I did contribute in my own way. In fact, it was I who came up with the plan that led to the recapture of what would later become Falkrona City.

At the time, I felt really proud of that.

I had spent so long being the youngest, the one left behind, the one everyone shielded and dismissed with fond smiles, that being useful in something so important felt intoxicating. For once, I was not simply the child tagging along after his older siblings. For once, I had mattered.

Maybe that was the beginning of many things.

The beginning of my pride.

The beginning of my attachment to Thomen as well.

As if one brother choosing love over the House had not already been enough, Thomen soon followed the same path.

And the woman he fell in love with was none other than Oryanna, another of my closest friends and Alea’s sister.

People might say Kleines’ decision had been the greater scandal, but in truth, Thomen’s choice stirred something even harsher inside our family. With Kleines, there had at least been the argument that he had never truly cared for the House to begin with. But Thomen was different. My father had never been willing to let him go so easily.

At first, he refused outright.

He would not hand Thomen over. He would not allow him to simply walk away from the Falkrona Household, not for love, not for personal desire, not for any reason that placed private happiness above family duty. But Thomen was as stubborn as my father, perhaps even more so in some matters. He wanted Oryanna. He loved her. And just as importantly, he wanted to leave the Falkrona Household behind.

That alone was enough to make the atmosphere in our home feel unbearable.

By then, tensions among my elder siblings had already grown worse with every passing year. Most of them were more concerned with the succession of the House than anything else, and that ambition poisoned nearly every interaction between them. Rivalries sharpened, words became colder, and even ordinary conversations began to carry hidden barbs.

If there was one reason the family had not fallen apart completely by then, it was our mother.

She was the one who held us together.

Of course, none of my siblings would openly defy our father. He was too strict, too imposing, too deeply rooted in all our lives for anyone to challenge him directly without consequence. They may have disagreed with him, resented him, even hated some of his decisions, but in front of him they behaved. They swallowed their complaints and stood in line as expected.

Our mother’s influence was different.

If Father was the force that kept the family disciplined, Mother was the one who made it feel like a family at all. She brought warmth where he brought order. She brought affection where he brought expectation. However strongly we quarreled, however deeply one of us wounded another, it was often our mother who stepped in and softened things. She had a way of making us remember that we belonged to one another before we belonged to the House.

That was why everything changed when she became bedridden.

After that, something vital disappeared from our home.

Without her moving through the halls, without her voice, her gentleness, her presence, the bitterness that had been building in silence finally spread unchecked. Every conversation between siblings seemed to turn sour. Every disagreement became an excuse for mockery, anger, or contempt. The house no longer felt like a home. It felt like a place where people endured one another while calculating what they stood to gain or lose.

Love had not vanished entirely, perhaps, but it had become difficult to find beneath all that poison.

And I think that atmosphere, just as much as his love for Oryanna, was one of the main reasons Thomen ultimately chose to settle in the territory he had been granted.

No noble in Celesta could deny him that right. He had earned it with blood, sweat, and will. He had fought to reclaim that land from Ante-Eden, had nearly given his life for it, and had helped carve a future out of a place others had abandoned. Whatever anyone thought of his decision to leave Falkrona behind, no one could say he had not paid for his independence.

So Thomen began a new life there with Oryanna.

And in the end, I chose to follow him.

There were many reasons for that decision, more than I could fully explain even now. Part of it was simple attachment. I loved my brother, and I loved Oryanna too in my own way, as one of my dearest friends. Part of it was admiration. Thomen had built something that was his, something beyond the reach of the suffocating tensions in our old home. But if I am being honest, the greatest reason was much simpler.

I could no longer stand living in the Falkrona Household.

At least not in those days.

Not while Mother remained bedridden, and not while the house felt so steeped in resentment that even breathing there seemed difficult. I told myself I would not return until she recovered. At the time, I thought of it as temporary, a brief departure until things improved. Looking back now, I think some part of me already knew I was fleeing.

And even now, I still think it was the right decision.

The years I spent there afterward were some of the happiest I had known in a very long time. There was peace in that new place, a kind of peace I had almost forgotten could exist. My brother Thomen was kind to me, far kinder and more patient than he ever needed to be, and Oryanna’s presence only made that home brighter. She was already one of the people closest to me, and living near her meant I spent more time with her than ever before. We talked often, laughed often, and for a while it felt as though life had settled into something gentle at last.

For the first time in years, things seemed to be going well.

That was why the tragedy that followed struck so cruelly.

It was the first true blow to the life Thomen and Oryanna had built together.

The death of Edwin, their first child.

He was only five years old.

And with his death, the happiness we had all been trying so desperately to hold onto began to crack.