Superiority Complex
The peak of Arthur's Seat.
Everyone agreed that the easiest way to get rid of Morrigan was by a payload-carrying drone, or a bomber flying high above her sphere of influence, either way, they could vaporise the top of Arthur's Seat, write a nice letter of apology to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, and get on with the rest of their day.
Unfortunately for them, Morrigan was watching the traffic that buzzed overhead and, even though she thought it was the work of sorcerers, she still knew it made her vulnerable.
Over the centuries she'd found that the humans who’d opposed her displayed, “The stench of weakness wrought of concern for other mewling mortals.” (as she had put it hundreds of years before), which was why she'd commanded women and children to sit at the foot of her throne, to act as a human shield.
She longed for the time (still a couple of days away) when she would be strong enough to start cutting a swath of destruction through the countryside but in the meantime she had to settle for looking down on (in both meanings the phrase) the mundanity of daily life spread out beneath her.
Clothes and their owners were washed in Dunsapie loch and hung out to dry (the clothes every day, the owners only occasionally) on lines strung in a triangular shape between three tree trunks driven deep into the ground, each with a single blow from a fist.
The clang of hammer on anvil and sawing of wood filled the air as arrow and sword smiths busied themselves making arms and ammunition for the growing army.
It was a cold, yet sunny, day and the smell of cooking filled the air, as a lengthy queue of worshipers formed to place tributes against the wall of the hastily erected, stone temple near her throne.
Military Intelligence, with a battalion of infantry and artillery support, had arrived the previous evening, planning to set-up a command-and-control centre in the nearby Scottish parliament, to coordinate a ground assault on the hill, but that was before ninety-seven percent of them became her thralls and slaughtered their non-Celtic comrades.
With their number added to the growing army, that meant that there were thousands of bodies to outfit and feed, resulting in daily raiding parties to collect supplies.
Many of the new troops, former military and ex-civilians alike, had swapped their clothes for the medieval-style uniforms of Morrigan’s army, hurriedly prepared by the hundreds of tailors and blacksmiths, although there still wasn’t enough to go around, and some of the raiding party were still wearing British army uniforms or street and nightclothes.
The newly equipped ones wore bowl-shaped steel helmets, long, dark-blue tunics, and leggings tied at the waist with padded light brown vests on top. Knee-length boots of the same colour came up to the bottom of their tunics and tied with darker brown laces that wrapped around them from ankle to knee. They wore small, round, wooden shields on their left shoulders, or vice versa for the left handed.
Most of the battle axes or claymores that hung on their backs had been taken from museums and private collections as the armourers struggled to keep up with the demand, even though they were working at superhuman speed.
The army had established an exclusion zone around the seven hills, tested by tying ropes around the waists of volunteers who would walk into a suspect area and were pulled back at the first sign of a 'Mor-ri-gan, Mor-ri-gan, Mor-ri-gan,' chant from them.
Which made it easy for her raiding parties, as all they had to do was intersperse their number with women and children to discourage aerial assaults and wander freely, looting to their heart's content.
On the way back they stopped to visit the non-Celtic, housebound, ensuring they were fed and comfortable, but it had nothing to do with compassion, every believer gave strength to their goddess and when she had more that enough worshippers to attain full power she would leave them to die of starvation as she started a war without end.
After the Scottish Government heroically fled to Glasgow, forty-six miles away, at the first sign of trouble they had convened an emergency cabinet meeting, to formulate a plan of attack.
The commander of the martial law forces, General Alcott-Browne, a deceptively jovial looking man in his fifties, was outlining a proposal to destroy Morrigan with a deadly bombardment that would also kill thousands of innocent civilians.
The politicians agreed with his strategy, but demanded that they suppress any news of the casualties, as it might hurt their re-election chances, that was until a major from Military Intelligence pointed out that the international press already had aerial photographs of the civilians camped on and around the hill and it would be impossible to pretend that an explosion big enough to rock the city was survivable at ground zero.
Once the meeting was over, the Minister for Public Safety held a press briefing where he read a statement saying that, “We have received terrorist demands, stating that they will detonate a bomb in an undisclosed part of the city, if we do not agree to surrender government control to them.”
He paused to look straight into the television camera lens dramatically, “To those watching who think they can destroy our democracy, I say to you now that we shall stand firm!” what he meant was that a lot of people were going to die, just not anybody important.
At the same time the First Minister of Scotland's speech-writers were inserting phrases like, “Collateral damage,” and, “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims at this difficult time,” into a statement to be delivered at a press conference scheduled for broadcast on the evening news, it would blame the deaths on an enemy bomb going off prematurely.
On Arthur’s Seat, Morrigan stood up in frustration as she sensed the approaching assault, “Vexatious ways and bothersome bugs disturbeth mine strengthening slumber,” she shouted, pointing at the sky where drones had been circling all day, sending data and video back to their base.
She threw her head back and opened her mouth in a silent scream, black smoke spewing out unaffected by the stiff breeze, it formed into a vortex high above her head, growing steadily until it extended for a mile in all directions, within seconds.
The thing that hung in the sky, centred over her throne, was a living creature made of the darkest of thoughts and vilest of actions ever committed, and those who dared utter its name called it the Smoc-biast, although the outside temperature was normal, its insides were hotter than a million suns combined, vaporising anything caught inside in a split second.
It was an incubator for creatures conceived in the fires of hell before the first human was condemned to its fiery pits.
Hulking monstrosities feared for millennia and not seen for generations were being incubated inside that hellish form.
Fifteen miles away, using targeting data received before they lost the connection, eight 155 mm howitzers barked six times each in thirty-seconds.
Forty-eight shells arced high in the air, their trajectory taking them towards Arthur's Seat at a mile a second, they had a combined explosive power that could turn a hill into a valley and were only seconds away from doing exactly that.
Green, baby dragons (of the non-fire-breathing variety), known as uileupheist, swarmed out of the Smoc-biast to meet them. Even though they had just been born, they were a hundred feet long and twice as wide. They formed a shield to intercept the shells, the ferocity of the explosions being nothing compared to the place they’d been spawned.
After a moment’s calm, a squadron of Royal Air Force Typhoon combat aircraft flew low overhead, air-to-surface missiles leaving trails in the sky as the dragons moved effortlessly to block them, some of the fighters smashing into their sides.
The ones that managed to pull up in time sped off at over fifteen hundred miles an hour, only to be overtaken as if they were standing still and swallowed whole as the bombardment intensified with more artillery joining in.
In the Glasgow command-and-control centre serious and important people stood around monitors watching things their brains told them couldn’t possibly be happening, the drinkers amongst them decided to give up alcohol as the teetotallers made up their minds to start drinking.
Throughout the day the speech-writers became increasingly hyperbolic and by the time night fell they had basically plagiarised the plot of “Red Dawn”.
The government told the media in Scotland to report that what looked like green dragons circling tirelessly over the hill was a strangely shaped cloud formation caused by the hallucinogenic gas the terrorists were manufacturing then slapped a gagging order on anybody who tried to say anything different.
The Internet exploded with conspiracy theories, most of the ones that got past the censors were spread by the Ministry of Disinformation, and if anyone ever tells you it doesn't exist, I suggest that you take another look at the third word in the title, by nightfall the most prevalent theory was that foreign invaders had established a foothold in Scotland, which was what the government wanted people to think.
But despite their best efforts, all over Edinburgh, in their private thoughts and whispered conversations, perfectly sane and reasonable people, especially those of Celtic descent, were starting to believe in magick.