I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 781: [The Rewritten Lost Past] [21]

Since the day he was born, Amael had barely known anything of Eden’s world.

He had been taken to the Garden Realm a handful of times, but never by choice. Each visit happened only because his father decided it would happen. Sometimes Nihil brought him there as if it were an obligation, not an invitation, dragging him into a realm that never felt as though it had been meant for him in the first place.

Belle, on the other hand, wanted the exact opposite. She wanted her son kept as far from Eden’s Realm as possible, and with good reason. Amael was the Vessel of their oldest enemy, a living danger by nature alone, whether he wished it or not. To her, Eden was not a place of wonder or belonging for him, but a place where too many eyes might look at him and see only what slept inside him. Nihil, however, seemed driven by another purpose entirely. He wanted Amael to know Eden’s side, to understand its powers, its rulers, its structure, its truths.

Anyone with sense could have wondered whether Nihil had been trying to shape his son’s mind from the very beginning, teaching him what to admire, what to fear, and what to obey. If Belle had not been there to counter him, he might very well have succeeded. That thought alone was enough to send a chill through Amael whenever he allowed himself to dwell on it for too long.

Still, even with all Nihil’s teachings, Amael’s knowledge of Eden remained incomplete. His father had told him stories, given him names, spoken of great figures as though reciting a map of powers that ruled the worlds, but hearing about them was not the same as standing before them. There were many he knew only through reputation, through warnings, or through the careful way Nihil pronounced their names.

He had never met Eden herself.

There were Guardians he had not encountered either, Lumen, Nox, and A-Nox, though the last of those was for reasons so obvious that Amael never questioned them. In truth, he was grateful for that much.

And beyond the Guardians, among the other great powers, there were none spoken of with as much weight as the Khaos Princesses. They were, by all accounts, the only beings whose standing could truly be placed beside that of the Ymir Kings. Yet of them all, Amael had met only one: Merithra. That single encounter had been enough to leave an impression he could not easily put into words.

He did understand regardless why the Khaos Princesses were treated like Princesses among Gods.

There were others, too, who remained absent from his life. Raphiel was one of them, or rather, someone both his parents had made sure stayed absent. Neither Nihil nor Belle had ever shown the slightest desire for Amael to cross paths with her. From what little he understood, Raphiel despised Samael, and by extension, anything touched by his legacy. Amael had never asked much more than that. Some silences were heavy enough to warn him not to pry.

Yet among all the figures he had never met, one absence weighed on him more than the others.

Laima, her godly name as Prophetic and Fate Goddess.

Or Nevia by her true name.

She was supposed to be close to him in the simplest sense of blood: his half-sister, born of the same father. But in every other sense, the word sister felt almost too small, too ordinary, too human for what she truly was. Their shared blood hardly seemed to matter when everything else about them stood worlds apart. Their status, their nature, their very divinity were separated by a distance so vast it nearly erased the relation altogether.

She was a Primordial Goddess, a being whose importance surpassed even Nihil’s in certain whispers, despite having come from him. It was said she had been born not only of Nihil and Aniha, but of fate itself. Amael had heard many impossible things in his life, but few names were wrapped in as much dread and reverence as hers. Laima was not merely powerful. She was the kind of being whose existence altered the meaning of power around her.

And perhaps that was exactly why Amael had always wanted to meet her.