I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 812: Alicia SS [1]

Being born into the Raven House was never an easy beginning.

Ours was one of the mightiest Houses in all Sancta Vedelia, spoken of in the same breath as the great Tepes House and the most renowned bloodlines of the Vampire race. But with the Raven House, power was never the only inheritance passed down from one generation to the next. Expectation came with it, and waiting from the very moment of birth.

Our Founder had established the House a thousand years ago, in an age when the Tepes House stood at the height of its glory among the great vampire clans. Back then, most clans had chosen to bend toward the strongest power, and that power was Tepes. Their influence stretched across Sancta Vedelia like a shadow at dusk, and few believed another House could ever rise to stand beside them, let alone rival them.

Yet history is not kind to certainty.

When the Warring Era of Sancta Vedelia reached its highest point eight hundred years ago, the land was broken open by chaos. The great Houses carved out their places through blood, endurance, and will, and among them the Raven House finally rose to the same height as Tepes. That ascent became the pride of Ravenia. To this day, every stone in our kingdom seems to remember it. In those hard centuries, when the Tepes Clan possessed the stronger army and the clearer advantage, our people still endured. They endured because of our Founder, and because those who came after him proved worthy of what he had built. They held the House together through famine, betrayal, and war, and they kept Ravenia standing when lesser powers were swallowed whole.

The Warring Era itself was a nightmare without order or mercy. Vampires, Elves, Humans, and Werewolves turned on one another without restraint, and the continent descended into a conflict so vast that old chronicles struggle to capture its scale. It was no simple rivalry of kingdoms. It was a full and merciless war between races, driven by pride, greed, fear, and old hatred. And in the bitterest irony of all, it was halted not by one of the mighty races who had long looked down on the rest, but by a Human, a race most had dismissed as lesser, transient, and politically insignificant. Yet that man, ignored until it was too late, was recorded in the archives of Ravenia as a monster even generations later.

In the end, none of the races had any true choice left. Vampires, Humans, Werewolves, and Elves were forced to cooperate if they wished to survive at all. A catastrophe involving the Holy Tree of Eden, one that might have erased far more than kingdoms, was somehow avoided, and the chronicles credit that miracle to the Prophetess. Whether by divine intervention, wisdom, or chance, the world was spared from a ruin it might never have recovered from.

That period, eight hundred years ago, became one of the great turning points in the history of Sancta Vedelia. For the first time, a union between all races was seriously considered, not as a fantasy, not as a truce born of convenience, but as a structure that might preserve peace. From that vision came the idea of a Council, formed from the heads of the greatest Houses so that each race, and each realm, would have a voice in the future of Sancta Vedelia. It had been the dream of the first Prophetess, though dreams such as hers were never realized quickly. It took decades for that order to take shape. Even so, when it did, the Raven House stood prominently among those who helped define it.

For a time, it seemed that everything was finally settling into place. Our kingdom grew stronger. Ravenia prospered. The old wounds of the Warring Era did not vanish, but they scarred over. Then, scarcely three hundred years after the Great War had reshaped Sancta Vedelia, another catastrophe arrived, one so great it would split the land once more and set in motion the birth of Utopia.

Five hundred years ago, the Blood Moon War began.

It remains recorded as one of the darkest periods in all our history. A dreadful blood art of unimaginable scale was cast across the whole of Sancta Vedelia, plunging the land beneath a Blood Moon and an unnatural darkness that did not lift. Fields withered beneath red light. Castles stood beneath a sky that looked wounded.

The war was begun by two figures whose names still poison old histories: Rucain, the Regent King of Valachia, and above all, the one who became the true face of terror, the feared Vampire Witch.

She had existed in whispers long before then. Her name, or the titles that stood in its place, had already appeared in legends, in sealed records, in warnings dismissed as old superstition. But it was during the Blood Moon War that the whole world came to know she was real. She cast Sancta Vedelia beneath the Forbidden Blood Moon Spell, and under that crimson curse nearly all Vampires fell to her influence. The spell was said to be impossible to resist. To resist the Vampire Witch was to resist the will of the night itself.

Even Ravenia, proud and powerful as it was, fell with humiliating speed. We were among the first targets of the witches, and for all our strength, we offered scarcely the resistance our reputation demanded. It became one of the darkest shames in the history of the Raven House. Perhaps that is why so little was preserved from that era in our archives. What was lost to fire and war was one thing. What was omitted by choice was another. Some histories are not erased by enemies, but by survivors who cannot bear to leave the truth behind.

Still, after the war ended, after both the Regent King and the Witch were finally defeated, Ravenia began, slowly and painfully, to rebuild. Stone by stone. Bloodline by bloodline. What had been broken was not restored in a generation, nor even in two, but the House endured, and endurance has always been the truest measure of our strength.

Then, nearly three hundred years later, the Raven House would shine again and be hailed by many as a savior of Sancta Vedelia.

Another enemy rose, one unlike the First Apostle and unlike the Vampire Witch, yet no less dangerous for being different.

Deborah Dolphis.

The brilliant princess of House Dolphis, a genius by all accounts and a nightmare by every honest one. She threw Sancta Vedelia into turmoil when she introduced, no, when she created, an entirely new race: the Hybrids. They came in their thousands, then in numbers too vast to easily count, appearing as though from nowhere and answering only to her will. With them she sought nothing less than dominion over Sancta Vedelia itself.

She had allied herself with the infamous Xenos Arvatra, and though his fall by the hands of Lumeus Celesta during the Third Great Holy War splitting the Triangular Continent back then should have weakened her cause, Deborah did not slow, did not retreat, and did not surrender to reason. If anything, his downfall seemed only to motivate her madness. She pressed forward with greater ferocity than before, and in the course of that campaign she summoned a monster spoken of with dread even now: the Behemoth. Where it passed, towns were shattered, cities torn open, and whole populations scattered in terror. At the head of her Hybrid army, with that monstrous creature carving destruction in her wake, Deborah became one more calamity in the long and bloodstained history of Sancta Vedelia.

It was in such a period of turmoil that one of our own blood, one of my ancestors, appeared like a ray of light in the darkness: Victor Quinn Raven.

With the help of other heroes from different Houses, he led the counterattack against Deborah Dolphis and her forces. In the great battle at the Fangorian Capital, he slew both the Behemoth and Deborah herself, bringing her war to an end. Even now, that victory is remembered as one of the proudest moments in the history of the Raven House. After our Founder, Victor Quinn Raven was revered as our second great hero, a figure of immense importance whose name stood nearly untouched in honor because of all he had achieved.

Since that day, the Moonfang House had always held a particular place in our history as trusted friends, for our ancestor had saved their city from Deborah’s destruction. Bonds forged in war had a way of lasting longer than treaties, and among the many alliances of Sancta Vedelia, that one endured.

But the presence of such legendary figures in one’s bloodline was never only a source of pride. It was also a burden. The greater the ancestors, the heavier the weight placed upon those born after them. Glory did not simply inspire descendants; it pressed down on them, shaped them, and demanded that they prove themselves worthy of a name they had done nothing yet to earn.

I understood that much from a very young age. I was made to understand, in no uncertain terms, what kind of House I had been born into and what sort of prestige clung to the Raven name.

My grandfather, Lazarus Raven, was the Head of the Raven House and one of the mightiest men in all Sancta Vedelia. A Demigod. One of only two remaining after Beatrice Moonfang had been severely injured during the incident involving Edenis Raphiel. Many believed my grandfather to be the strongest being in Sancta Vedelia, even greater than Duncan Tepes himself. Perhaps there was some cruel irony in the fact that the only two Demigods in the land were both Vampires, and both the Heads of the only two great Vampire Houses.

The rivalry between our Houses could hardly have burned stronger. It was not merely a political rivalry, nor only one of pride and legacy. It was a rivalry between two Demigods, and like all such things in great Houses, it seeped downward into the next generation, then the next after that. Children inherited disputes just as surely as they inherited titles, blood, and expectations.

Perhaps, in some small way, I was fortunate. I was the youngest child, and I was a girl. That spared me from carrying the full force of my grandfather’s ambition.

Instead, it was my eldest brother, Cyril, who bore the brunt of it.

My grandfather had ambitions too great to let the rivalry fade as previous generations had managed to do. He intended for our generation to meet it head-on, and Cyril became the instrument of that intention. He was kept constantly at my grandfather’s side, molded and sharpened into whatever Lazarus Raven believed he needed to be. Little by little, the brother who had once been beside me so often began to disappear. His absence did not happen all at once. It came slowly, in ways a child notices without understanding, fewer smiles, fewer quiet moments, fewer traces of gentleness. Until one day, I could no longer recognize the caring elder brother who had once stayed near me with kindness in his face.

It was perhaps the first true crack in my mother’s relationship with my father.

My mother loved Cyril deeply, and she had always found my grandfather’s treatment of him intolerable. She watched, helplessly and painfully, as Cyril changed before her eyes. It hurt her in a way I do not think my father ever fully understood. But my father could do nothing. He was not the Head of the House, and in a great family of Sancta Vedelia, that was often the only truth that mattered. The will of the Head was law. That was how the Raven House worked, and it was cruel exactly because no one within it could pretend otherwise.

Then came the final blow.

Victor appeared in our lives, a new older brother, one who was clearly not born of my mother.

My father’s infidelity.

That revelation shattered whatever remained of the fragile structure holding our family together. The cracks between my mother and father did not widen after that; they broke apart completely. In time, my mother lost all patience and took me away from Ravenia, refusing to let me remain in that castle, a place she had come to see as ruled not by family but by my grandfather’s endless ambition.

Even then, it felt strange that she did not take Sirius with us. I remember being upset by it, deeply and selfishly upset, because Sirius was the only sibling I still trusted without reservation. When Cyril faded from my world, Sirius had taken his place in raising me with warmth and affection. He became the presence I clung to, the brother who still made the castle feel bearable.

He was also the reason I continued to visit later on.

And, in time, Victor became another.

He grew into a good brother, far better than I had been willing to admit at first. I treated him coldly, though he had not earned such treatment. Yet my childish mind blamed him for the ruin of my family, even if it was unfair. To me, he had arrived like living proof of my father’s betrayal, and I could not separate his existence from the pain that followed. The anger I felt toward him was only a smaller reflection of what I felt toward my father. In my eyes, my mother had done nothing wrong. She had been the one wronged. She was the one forced to endure humiliation, while my father, through his selfishness, had brought Victor into our lives and torn apart what little remained of our family’s fragile peace.

Everything after that felt wrong.

Suffocating, fragmented and…lonely.

My three older brothers were all different from one another, each drawn away by his own duties, beliefs, and burdens, and in none of those separate worlds did I truly feel that I belonged. Perhaps I did not help matters. I blamed all of them for different reasons. Even Sirius, whom I loved most, was not spared from my resentment. Some wounded, miserable part of me thought he had abandoned me by staying in Ravenia instead of following my mother and me. It was not a fair judgment. It was only sadness speaking in the language of blame, searching for someone to accuse because loneliness was too heavy to carry in silence.

Thankfully, that loneliness did not last forever.

Years later, I came to know the twin Tepes sisters, and it was then that I met Elizabeth.