I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 801: Belle Falkrona SS [2]

Was it truly the right choice to leave our home and build a new one in the Kingdom of Celesta?

In the end, had it really been the better path?

I had wanted to ask Thomen that question more times than I could count. Perhaps every year since we left. Perhaps every time another loss came and hollowed out the life he had fought so hard to build. The desire to ask only grew stronger after Edwin died. But grief has its own silences, and I knew such a question would have been cruel then, not only to Thomen but to Oryanna as well. What answer could he have possibly given me in the middle of that pain? What comfort could there have been in wondering whether everything might have been different if they had simply chosen another road?

And yet I wondered all the same.

Sometimes I asked myself whether they would have been safer in Sancta Vedelia. I still remember Kleines trying to persuade Thomen to settle in the Olphean Kingdom instead. Even Alea had nearly begged Oryanna not to go, unwilling to part from her sister. She had pleaded with her more than once, though never in a way that would burden her too openly. She knew Oryanna well enough to understand that once her mind was made up, moving her was nearly impossible.

But Oryanna refused.

She wanted to begin again somewhere new, somewhere that belonged to neither her past nor ours. Thomen wanted the same. He could have gone back and asked Father for a place within our old home if he had wished. I knew that much. It would not have been easy, and pride would have made it bitter, but it could have been done. Yet he never asked. He chose Celesta, and Oryanna chose it with him, and together they built a life there with their own hands.

For the first few years, it seemed they had chosen well.

Celesta had been a good place for a new beginning. There had been peace, warmth, hope. There had been laughter in their home, and children’s voices, and the sense that something beautiful was taking root after so many tensions and disappointments. But then Edwin died.

Two years later, Oryanna died as well, my dearest friend there, the one I had long since come to think of as a sister rather than merely a friend.

And then, ten years after that, I lost Thomen and sweet Elona too.

By that point, there was no use pretending otherwise. Things would have been different if they had not chosen Celesta. Different in ways I could not fully understand, perhaps, but different all the same. I could no longer comfort myself with uncertainty. Too much had been lost. Too many people I loved, too many people I had called family, had been taken from me there.

In the end, they had all left me behind.

Left me alone in Celesta.

“Belle?”

I blinked awake at the sound of my name and found a small face staring at me with open concern. A young boy, no older than seven, stood before the couch, his greyish-red hair slightly tousled, his amber eyes fixed on me concerned.

Orlin.

“Are you crying?” He asked softly, lifting a small hand to my cheek as if to make sure.

Only then did I raise my own hand and touch my face.

It was wet.

My eyes moved around the room in a daze before memory returned. I had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of the day, a book still resting half-open beside me. So that was it. I had not merely been thinking of the past. I had drifted into it deeply enough to dream.

“Are you okay, Belle?” Orlin asked again.

I quickly wiped my tears away and forced a smile, gentler this time, one meant more for him than for myself.

“I’m okay,” I said, reaching out to ruffle his hair.

I had never imagined I would one day have a child in my life like this. I had not dreamed of sons, not truly, not before now. And perhaps I still did not dare dream too much. But somehow, with Orlin beside me, I felt that I already had something precious enough. This sweet boy had become part of my days so naturally that it was hard to imagine the house without him anymore.

“You don’t look okay,” he said with disarming honesty, then climbed up to sit beside me.

“Is that so?” I asked, letting out the faintest laugh.

I slipped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him gently against me. His small body was warm and solid, so comfortingly alive that for a moment it pushed the chill of memory away.

“Did you have a nightmare?” He asked.

“Not really,” I said, shaking my head before sighing. “Not exactly.”

It had already been half a year since I lost my brother and my niece, and still there were moments when the grief struck as sharply as if it had happened yesterday. How was I supposed to recover from losses like that? How was I supposed to accept a silence left by people who had filled so much of my life?

If I had remained capable of working, of smiling, of moving through the days without completely breaking apart, then Orlin had played no small part in that.

He and Tihana had become unexpected lights in that dark time.

They were Edward’s familiars, though calling them merely that had always felt strangely insufficient. They were clearly no ordinary creatures. I still did not know what kind of absurd fortune my nephew possessed, but somehow he had ended up with familiars of the rarest sort. They could take human form, for one thing, and there was an intelligence in them, a presence, that set them apart immediately from any common mana beast.

I had tried to research what kind of beasts they might originally have been, but I found nothing convincing. No record matched them closely enough. No text offered a proper answer. Whatever they were, they were far beyond ordinary.

At times, I even wondered whether they might have been born from Enigma Beasts.

From what I had seen of them, the idea was not as far-fetched as it sounded. They were too intelligent, too capable, too unnaturally gifted to be explained away so easily. Perhaps the fact that they had hatched for someone carrying both Falkrona and Olphean blood played a part in it. That alone was unusual enough to invite strange outcomes.

But I doubted that was the only reason.

That boy had always been special from the very moment he was born.

I knew it the first time I held him in my arms.

Even now, I can remember that feeling with clarity, his small body warm against me, the sense that I was holding someone who would one day matter in ways none of us could yet understand. It was also the moment I gave him his second name. Edward was the name I had always thought I would choose if I ever had a son of my own. I had secretly hoped Alea might pick it herself, but as expected, she was far too attached to her children to leave something as important as their first name to anyone else. Still, because I was her friend, she allowed me the privilege of choosing another name for him.

And so, in that small way, a part of me became tied to him from the start.

He was a clever child even then, sharp-eyed and strangely perceptive in ways that often caught adults off guard. There was something bright about him, something attentive, something that made you feel as though he was quietly understanding more than he should at that age. But after Oryanna’s death, everything went terribly wrong for that poor boy.

I tried to help him.

More than once, I reached out to him, hoping that if I stayed patient enough, gentle enough, he might let me in. I wanted to be there for him, if only a little. I wanted to give him some measure of comfort after all he had lost. But every attempt ended the same way. He rejected me. Not coldly at first, but almost painfully, as though my presence itself hurt him. There were times when he went so far as to almost beg me to stay away from him.

That more than anything made me stop.

It was clear that seeing me only deepened whatever turmoil was already consuming him, and so, however reluctantly, I stepped back and left him in my brother’s care. I told myself it was the right thing to do. If Edward did not want to see me anymore, then forcing myself into his life would only make matters worse.

The truth is, it hurt.

I cared for that boy far too much for his rejection not to wound me. But I convinced myself distance was kinder than insistence.

In the end, that may have been my greatest mistake.

Leaving him in the care of my grieving brother had seemed reasonable at the time. Thomen loved him. Thomen had every reason to protect him. But grief can make even the most loving hands careless, and by the time I realized how badly Edward had changed, it was already too late.

I was furious with my brother when I understood the extent of it.

Not because I believed he had meant to harm Edward, never that, but because he had failed him in the worst possible way: by not seeing how deeply Oryanna’s death had shattered him. He should have known. More than anyone, he should have known. And yet Edward was left to rot inside that pain until it twisted into something darker.

There were many times when I was tempted to tell him the truth.

Many times I wanted to tell Edward that his real mother was still alive. The words rose to my lips more than once. But each time, I held them back.

Because for the Edward standing before me then, Oryanna was his mother.

And in truth, she had been.

She may not have given birth to him, but she had raised him, even if only for two precious years. And those years had not been insignificant. When Alea entrusted Edward to her, Oryanna had been overjoyed. After losing Edwin, Edward became a light in her life, a fragile new hope in the middle of unbearable grief. She poured so much love into him, indulged him, cherished him, and in return he loved her with the full sincerity only a child can give.

Then she died.

And something inside him broke.

I saw the aftermath of it in the way he withdrew from everyone. Even from sweet little Miranda, and of his own sister, he began to pull away. The warmth that should have bound him to the people who loved him turned into distance instead. Elona would often come to me in tears, speaking of Edward, asking what she should do, why he had become this way, why he looked at them like that.

And I never knew what to tell her.

What could I have said? He refused to see me. He refused help. He was sinking into something none of us seemed able to reach. Even now, when I think back on those years, I cannot help but wonder if I should have tried harder. Perhaps I should have ignored his demands and forced my way through that distance. Perhaps I should have endured his anger, his fear, his rejection, and remained anyway.

Perhaps.

But regret is always bold after the damage is done.

Then, years later, everything changed again.

One day, in a turn of events so unexpected I can still picture it clearly, Edward appeared at my door and told me he had left his house.

The moment I saw him, I knew something was different.

I could not have explained it at first. His face was the same. His voice was the same. He was still Edward. And yet there was a new glow in him, a clarity that had not been there before. The tension I had come to associate with him had shifted into something stranger, quieter, more controlled. Of course, I was never going to turn my sweet nephew away, no matter what had happened. I welcomed him into my home without hesitation.

In the days that followed, that first impression only deepened.

He had changed. So much so that there were moments when I caught myself wondering, with a discomfort I could not quite hide, whether he was truly still Edward at all.

I think he noticed.

There were times when my doubts must have shown too clearly on my face, because eventually he told me the truth himself.

He remembered his past life.

To say I was caught off guard would be putting it mildly.

At first, I hardly knew what to make of such a confession. It sounded absurd. And yet, with Edward, too many impossible things had already happened for me to reject it outright. More importantly, it explained so much. His sudden change in behavior, the odd maturity in him, the way he seemed at once familiar and not.

And strangely enough, once the shock passed, I found myself grateful.

It was a blessing in disguise if anything.

If the memories of Nyrel had changed Edward, then they had also freed him from something. From fear, perhaps. From whatever darkness had once gripped him so tightly. They had altered the way he saw the world, and in doing so they had saved him from becoming the boy he might otherwise have remained.

It left me with an odd feeling I still struggle to put into words.

Whenever I spoke to him after that, it often felt as though I were speaking to two nephews at once, Edward and someone older, someone shaped by another life and another grief layered quietly beneath him. But I did not dislike that feeling.

If anything, it only made him more endearing to me.