The Nightmare Game (79 page)

“While the Illeaoceans were basically a peaceful
people in a peaceful land, the world in which they lived was quite treacherous,
thanks to the aggressive Malitiuans. Their enemy possessed an extremely high
degree of technology as well, but one much more attack-oriented and
destructive. The highly intelligent Illeaoceans were loathe to use their
weapons in the massive cold war that had ensued for centuries, and while they
could have simply killed their enemies outright, they found mass slaughter and
destruction offensive. They were not above assassinations, however, but
realized that had it been suspected, outright war would have broken out, in
which case no one would have won.

“Therefore, for the sake of the continent, the
deaths that Arrosha inflicted had to be designed to seem natural. She was a
high-tech spy, the Illeaocean’s very best stealth and assassination weapon, one
that could work with lethal accuracy. Turning into her monstrous self was
designed only as a weapon of last resort. As you know, she was a limited
shape-shifter, able to change her appearance and age at will, from baby to old
lady. Extraordinarily beautiful in the way that men like, she was created to go
behind enemy lines, seek out her victims, seduce them and slowly suck out their
life force until they were as good as dead, then leave them to their ‘natural
passings’. She would conveniently be back in Illeaocea by the time of their
deaths.

“The ultimate defensive weapon and spy, she was
engineered to be virtually indestructible. If someone cut her into a million
pieces, the larger pieces could find each other and she would regenerate. Even
if burned to a crisp, she could regenerate. That’s why the amulets were
created. The Illeaoceans needed a way to destroy her if ever she turned on
them.

“Since Arrosha thought of herself as a goddess,
she could never accept these facts about herself, for it did not mesh with her
self-image. When she’d see these things in my mind when she visited me to gloat
and brag, even though I tried to hide this knowledge from her, she would
inevitably chalk it up to my own dreams and imagination after her rage had
passed. She never let me forget about how far ahead of us the ancients were.
Her plan, once she took over the world again, was to force our scientists and
engineers to do backwards engineering, so that we could repair her machines and
even remake others. She talked quite freely with me, thinking that no man from
the nineteenth century could possibly understand anything she said.”

“I can understand why they felt they needed to
create her, but honestly, you say they were so advanced and peaceful. How could
they possibly live with themselves knowing that they’d deliberately
manufactured an evil monster like her?” Julian asked.

“They didn’t create her to be evil. They created
her to be a creature with high moral and ethical values, but loyal only to
them. You have to understand that she was a tricky undertaking for the
Illeaoceans, for they knew how powerful a weapon she would be. On top of the
things that I’ve mentioned, she also had a great deal of technology built into her.
She could conjure up many things at a moment’s notice. The Illeaoceans needed
her to be clever and resourceful, but they did not want her to be brilliant.
That’s why she was expert at materializing objects and using her machines but
completely incapable of building new ones or changing the way that major
functions worked. That’s why it took her so incredibly long to stumble upon how
to tap into my stasis chamber’s energies to keep her zombie-like creatures from
dying before she could use them.

“The Illeaoceans were afraid of her knowing too
much. They knew how powerful they had made her and feared her turning on them.
It’s why the programmed her to be intensely loyal to them. Even so, as a
virtually indestructible weapon, how else could they control her? What other
safeguards could they afford themselves? So while they were ‘cooking up’ her
genetically engineered soup, they were also creating the amulets that they
would need in order to destroy her, should she ever turn on them. The designed
them in the shape of dragons, the representative animal of Illeaocea, for
dragons still existed in those days. More indestructible even than she, the
pieces were designed to protect the wearer until its task was either completed
or the wearer had died.

“Since her creators made these pieces to destroy
her and since they’d made her smart and wily, they feared her gaining access to
these amulets. It’s why she had so much trouble sensing me in the beginning.”

“She never had any trouble sensing me,” I
responded.

“That’s because she was expecting you to wear it.
She could not have sensed you if it had been a surprise.

“But still,” Edmond continued, “all of the
Illeaocean’s careful planning left still one more problem. What happened if an
amulet fell into the wrong hands? What if the Malitiuans got hold of one of
them? That’s why the Illeaoceans created them as two pieces that would join
only in Arrosha’s presence, so that an enemy could not kill her from a vast
distance. That they had to come together was a safety device, like the pin in a
grenade. Should anyone retrieve a single piece, with or without its box, it
would return to its mate after a suitable length of time. Even though the
pieces sensed that Christopher and I were working together and that he would be
en route to join me soon, had he changed his mind or if his health had taken a
turn for the worse, his artifact would have materialized next to mine within a
few weeks. That was just one more reason why my actions were rash and
irresponsible, but how was I to know it at the time? I only learned of these
things from Arrosha’s dreams after it was too late.”

“I know I saw Arrosha killed, turned into crystal
with my own eyes, but how did the pieces actually do it?” I asked. “I mean, why
weren’t the rest of us affected?”

“The music of the amulets set off a genetic time
bomb within Arrosha. If Max had not destroyed the crystal afterwards, the
statue which she became had an extremely fragile molecular structure that would
soon have fallen apart and turned into tiny dust-like fragments. There would
have been no resurrecting her.”

“I still don’t get it,” Julian said. “How could a
creature created to be, as you say, ethical, turn so incredibly evil?”

“When Pangaea fell,” Edmond continued, “Arrosha’s
world quite literally collapsed. Since she had been created and programmed to
be entirely faithful and loyal to the Illeaoceans first, to herself and
self-preservation second, and to no one and nothing third. She was entirely
devastated by their loss. That’s what drove her mad and turned her into a
monster. She was lost completely, with no moral compass left whatsoever without
her homeland.

“While the Illeaoceans could not possibly have
predicted the events that destroyed their world when they created her, they did
anticipate that she might be captured and tortured, so since she could not die,
they engineered an ability into her to be able to shut down and go dormant
should she ever need to. After the fall of Pangaea, she went dormant for the
first time.

“When she finally came out of her dormancy, the
world had recovered to a limited extent and for eons, at least in her conscious
mind, she lived a life blissfully unaware of the talismans that could destroy
her. Her story was pretty much as she told you until the sixth century.”

“What happened in the sixth century?” I asked.
“She didn’t mention a word about it.”

“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t,” Edmond replied. “She
never mentioned it because she wanted everyone to think of her as an omnipotent
goddess. Her pride and her ego would not even let her acknowledge the incident,
except on a survival level, let alone speak of it. A group of monks that had
control of the amulets imprisoned her; she never even knew the artifacts
existed until that point. She found out a great many of their rules during that
imprisonment, but, fortunately for us, the monks did not know everything. That
learning curve is what made this game endure for almost two centuries and,
thank providence, led to our eventual victory.

“Everything I knew about the amulets, with the
exception of what I mentioned earlier about her not being able to sense me when
I carried my cane, I learned through the forced link that was developed between
us after she had trapped me, because then, whatever Arrosha knew, I eventually
knew.

“But Pangaea had been destroyed,” Julian said.
“How on earth could the monks have gotten hold of the amulets?”

“I don’t know,” Edmond told us. “If she did not
know it on some level, not even if it was buried deeply in the recesses of her
subconscious, like the rest of what I’ve told you, then I had no way of knowing
either. My long years trapped in her stasis chamber gave me ample time for
speculation, though. My personal theories are all I can share.

“I think that there must have been at least two
sets of amulets. The main set of amulets was kept in Illeaocea. They must have
been hopelessly lost at the bottom of the ocean, buried under miles of rubble.
The ones that destroyed her were probably from an extra set which, most likely
always traveled with her entourage on official business. I can’t see how those
artifacts could possibly have survived unless someone with her on that
diplomatic envoy survived as well. Remember, they were designed to protect the
person who had possession of them. She assumed that everyone was wiped out, but
she never did any actual body count. They must have stayed in the possession of
the survivor long enough for him to pass them onto someone he trusted. This had
to have happened, person to person, until it survived into our era. That it
took them so long to take action against her led me to believe that any real
knowledge of her was lost for a great length of time. The parchment that was
found with the pieces, the parchment we found along with the strange material,
proved that whoever found her did not want that knowledge lost again.

“By way of the amulets, these monks imprisoned her
for several hundreds of years without food, water or light, conditions
guaranteed to force her into dormancy.”

“Why didn’t they just kill her?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, that particular sect of monks did
not believe in killing anything. The world would have fared so much better had
that not been true. They thought they could simply keep her prisoner forever.
They were wrong.

“An earthquake in the Kathmandu region in the mid-thirteenth
century destroyed most of their monastery. It also allowed in a tiny beam of
light into Arrosha’s cell, but that was all it took. With that small sliver of
light, she began to photosynthesize enough food to make her strong enough to
escape, find people and go upon a feeding frenzy. She wound up killing almost
all the survivors in the area, which is how the amulets earned their reputation
of being cursed.

“After that, painfully aware now that the amulets
existed but unable to find them, Arrosha swore that no one would ever be able
to imprison her again. Knowing now that her own ingrained gifts, though more
than considerable, were not sufficient to battle the amulets, she searched the
world over for the help she needed in order to make herself strong against
them. As in her early days after Pangea’s fall, as she traveled the globe, her
existence once again gave rise to numerous legends of succubae and other
supernatural creatures.

“In India and Asia, she studied the energy arts.
In what is now South and Central America she studied human sacrifice. In
Africa, she studied demonology and in the Balkans, she studied the black arts
and alchemy. She found that while her newfound skills made her temporarily
stronger and extremely powerful when used in conjunction with her innate
technology, they also exacted a price from her that was so high she was loathe
to use them except in the most dire emergency.

“These black arts were the only thing that she
could use against you that would work, Ashley. Despite the price, she was
desperate to get her hands on the amulets, for they were the only thing that
could destroy her. She was willing to use anything to seduce you to her side,
even if it was something that could temporarily hurt her.

“I still don’t understand one thing, though” I
said. “If there were so many deaths surrounding your house, how could that not
have aroused suspicions, even if she did make the deaths look natural? I mean,
wouldn’t word have gotten around so that nobody wanted to stay there? Rumors at
least that the place was haunted or something like that?”

“Rochere thought of that, so not everyone that
stayed in the apartment was someone that I’d called. Not everybody that stayed
there died, only my potential champions. Any regular person that booked a
vacation at the apartment was allowed to go home unharmed, although after a
while, most left long before that because the place became so run down. It
helped to keep the suspicion and rumors away.

“She kept the realty agency as small and
inconspicuous as possible. As a former deity and aristocrat, the role of
realtor was something she considered a real step down. She felt trapped in the
role and hated it, for it never suited her self-image. She took out her
resentment on me for it regularly and often. However it was necessary for her
to keep an eye on the people I called and to feel as if she had some control
over the amulet pieces and their boxes. The situation at the mansion with her
followers was more than just a trap for you, Ashley. It also helped to feed her
ego until the game was over.”

“It’s such a shame, really,” observed Julian.
“Arrosha had so much to give the world with such technology so literally at her
fingertips. She proved that she could cure diseases that still baffle us today,
even aging and death, but she gave us nothing but her worst. She could have
been a blessing, but instead chose to be a curse.”