When they first arrived, we were overjoyed. Proof that we weren’t alone in the universe, that there were other races to share and exchange technologies with! Their arrival brought about world peace - with other life forms out there, we needed to present a united front. World hunger and poverty was solved within a decade, a demonstration to our new friends that we were worthy of the responsibility of exploring the galaxy.
They accessed our histories, they saw everything, and they recoiled in horror. They could not fathom the world we had created, and the solutions we had brought about not because it was the right thing to do, but to impress them.
They were not impressed. They told us, regret tinging the translators, that we could not be trusted as keepers of this world. The damage we had done was coming close to being irreparable, and for our own good they’d need to take over.
I have to say, I agreed – humans are terrible. But the funny thing about humanity is, even if something is right, if it means giving up our control, it is wrong.
At first we fought back democratically. This race that had descended from the stars was peaceful, never seeming to favour violence. We didn’t think they’d start killing indiscriminately. We didn’t think they’d take inspiration from our own history books.
As with so many other things, we were wrong.
An extreme group of humans succeeded in ambushing and killing several of their high-ranking Xenos. Human lives were lost in the process, but the extremists saw that as a necessary sacrifice, a means to an end. The Xenos had been shown that we wouldn’t tolerate their kind here, that they should leave and let us get on with things how we always have.
Within days, war had been declared, and we learned why we should have tried harder. Had they decided to simply fight the moment they touched down, to systematically advance and wipe out every human life they came across, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. Their weapons, armour, tactics, the sheer firepower and the size of their armies were beyond comprehension. Out of rage and grief, they marched over us, and began the slow process of wiping us out. Bullets couldn’t pierce their armour and shields, rockets fell to the ground lifeless, and even nuclear devices were somehow disabled mid-flight.
Still we fought back. Humans never have figured out how to give up when all hope is lost.
There was no formal resistance of rebellion, we simply gathered, fought, and survived where we could. When something new happened, it took weeks, months, to reach every last survivor.
And then, something unbelievable happened.
Stories started filtering through to the pockets of us in hiding, strange stories – a freak electrical storm in Greece that appeared from a clear blue sky and wiped out a thousand of them in less than 15 minutes; Xenos impaled on braches of rare trees, some kind of grisly warning that we chalked up to particularly violent survivors in that area; whole armies frozen to death because the temperature around them had dropped too quickly for their environmental suits to keep up with. Freak weather patterns that worked in our favour, violent survivors, terrain they couldn’t navigate. That’s what we told ourselves when the stories filtered through.
But then they got weirder. There were stories of Xenos being swallowed by the ground itself. A pack of wolves, larger than anything ever before seen appeared from a crack in a mountain range to storm through an encampment and kill every last Xenos. There was a massive surge in the number of corvids around the world, and they always seemed to congregate where the Xenos were thickest… days before something killed everything. Then they’d vanish, and more corvids would appear somewhere else. Harbingers, just like the old tales.
One day a massive seafaring vessel chasing a fishing trawler was pulled under the water – no reefs or icebergs in the area, and the sea mines had long been disarmed and deactivated. I spoke to a man who had been in the sloop running from the Xenos ship, and he swore blind the Kraken had got it, the tentacles alone bigger than the tiny boat he’d been huddled on. He shuddered and drank too much, and I put it down to hallucinations caused by a bad batch of moonshine. There was no such thing as monsters.
Then we heard about warriors. We heard about chariots, of all things, chasing down whole platoons of Xenos in Egypt, chariots so bright it felt like staring into the sun; a huge hound with three heads was spotted in Greece, a man in shadows and a woman of light removing the leash as Xenos advanced on them; a woman showed up in Iceland standing head and shoulders above the tallest man there, with an army of her own. They didn’t seem to fall in battle, and pushed the Xenos back, fighting with sword and shield and spear, a fury that our alien invaders couldn’t match.
Humanoid creatures with eyes of fire supposedly began granting wishes over in Syria, as long as your wish was for them to kill your enemies. There were sightings in Ireland of pure white horses, horses that once ridden wouldn’t let you off, that dragged people into bogs and rivers. Tales came out of brazil of monstrously large snakes, sometimes with the faces of women, dragging aliens into the gloom of the rivers and rainforests.
But there’s no such thing as monsters.
I finally believed when I saw three women facing down the largest army of Xenos I’d ever come across – at least twelve thousand by my counting. I’d been running from a scouting party, and when I stumbled out of the treeline onto a road I realised they’d chased me right into the path of the oncoming horde.
The moment you face your death is a strange one. Everything felt calm except the thundering of my pulse in my ears, and the crows that seemed to come from nowhere to blot out the sun.
Then three women strolled into the road in front of me, placing themselves between me and the advancing army. A young woman, barely out of girlhood; someone who could have easily been my mother; and a woman so old she was almost bent double. It was the oldest who strode towards the mass of Xenos without any fear, leading the other two towards their deaths, and the din of the crows got louder.
The youngest one glanced my way and smiled playfully, and something from my grandmother’s tales made me flatten myself to the ground, hands clamped firmly over my ears.
The scream started low, in the back of the old woman’s throat, travelling through the ground and making every bone in my body shudder with the vibration. Realisation began to dawn on me as Maiden and Mother joined in with their Crone, and the scream climbed to a crescendo that could have shattered glass. Even with my hands tight over my ears it pierced me to my core, a screaming agony that made me want to curl in on myself and die.
I survived because it wasn’t meant for me.
The Xenos, however, felt the full force of the rage these women contained. An entire planet’s worth of grieving poured out of them in this shriek, rooting their enemies to the ground with the difference in tone and pitch between these three women telling their stories.
The mother stood tall and resolute, screaming her grief at these invaders, a mother mourning all of her children.
The crone’s low snarl was that of war. Weary of the fighting but always ready to defend what’s hers, she growled her challenge, and the Xenos couldn’t stand against it.
The maiden was hope, the only act of defiance in a world on the edge of ruin. When everything was dust, when the last stragglers of humanity were contemplating giving up, she was the hope that kept them fighting.
Part of me wondered how many shirts they’d washed, how many rivers they’d wept together, before standing up and saying “no more.”
The scream stopped abruptly, leaving me feeling like the breath had all been sucked out of me, a void in the air around me that rushed back in and filled my lungs with a long, shuddering gasp.
I opened my eyes to carnage. The Xenos had died where they’d stood, their organs haemorrhaging, what passed for blood pouring from every orifice, their eyes turning to liquid in their skulls. Bodies were everywhere, and the crows circling overhead had fallen silent, uninterested in the feast this must have surely been for them.
The Morrigan was one woman now, ageless and terrifying.
“Get up, child.” She commanded, and I had no choice but to obey, trembling legs pushing me to my feet. She reached out a hand, and gently wiped a trail of blood away from my ear. “Did you really think we’d abandoned you?” She murmured, and the crows descended, carrying her to the next battle.
Monsters are real, and some of them look like people. But the Gods are also real, and they still believe in us.
So I’m still fighting, and my battle cry is full of hope.
