When Rome attacked Ynys Dywyll our ancestors met the invaders at the shoreline. Across the storm-warped waters of the Menai Straits, the armies faced off. On one side, the polished brass of Rome’s finest. On the other, black-robed furies, flickering in torchlight, throwing spells at the wind.

Terrified by the curses of the druid swynwr, veteran centurions stood paralysed in the mud while archers mowed them down. Caesar learned that day what mages have always known: words have power. Words are performative. In chapel, when the Minister says “I pronounce you man and wife”, it’s the saying of it that makes it true.

Now, more than ever, this is the word we live in. The word where words become truth. Give voice to your needs, your desires, hates, and fears, and they become reality.

No one knows exactly how it happened, but we all know why.

There were just a few at first, then suddenly they were on every street. Pulsing, barely-there Boxes that were so intangible you could pass your hand right through one. For a few days they were an internet sensation but, when every attempt to examine them had failed, people lost interest. They became part of the scenery.

It was the children who first called them popty-pings, because that’s what they looked like. Microwaves. Even though popty-ping is just baby-talk - not real Welsh at all. Later, in The After, someone gave them a much grander name: Ceridwen’s Gift.

Ceridwen lived many centuries after Caesar’s legions died with curses in their ears. Hers was the time of the Angles and Saxons, when new invaders came to take what wasn’t theirs. And, like the Romans, they too found themselves bested by magic, for Ceridwen was a powerful enchantress, possessed of a cauldron of inspiration.

She was a monster too, this Ceridwen. A giantess, crooked and foul, who ate her servant in fit a rage, when he drank the potion she’d intended for herself. Magically in the way of these tales, once consumed, that servant became her unborn child. That child became Taliesin Ben Beirdd - our people’s greatest poet. A song-smith and a spell-singer whose words united us against the savage Saesonach.

That is how we have always fought, we Welsh. With words. We are a nation descended from mages and mystics, bards and balladeers. We have always played with rhyme. Prayed with song. Used pen and paper, ink and imagination, to craft dragons, wizards, and saviours with enchanted swords. To cast spells that embolden our warriors and diminish our fears.

For a long time though - after the Boxes began to open - we were afraid to talk at all. To even sigh a loved one’s name.

Collectively, our nation hushed herself. Our schools sank into soundless study. Our pubs became temples to buttoned up bonhomie. Our theatres hosted Mummers’ plays, where performers mouthed words to silent spectators. Our lives became subtitled with dumb horror.

In a world where click-click had long since replaced chit-chat, we suddenly discovered that emojis weren’t enough. We craved human speech. The inflection, the warmth, the thrill of susurrate subtexts.

The world we found ourselves in was hushed but never peaceful. We were counting the seconds between lightening strikes. At least once a week, someone would snap - pushed to the edge by the gnawing pressure of the unspoken. Often the noises they made were nothing more than desperate yowls. Anguished roars. Primal screams. The need to be heard.

But sometimes their voices were real, and true, and desperate. Verbal torrents, that poured out the human experience in all its tormented, damaged glory. Then the Boxes would open and, activated by their words, would spew Monsters from the Id.

Before the coming of the Christ, the swynwr and the enchanters forged unholy alliances to keep our people free. In battle they would call on the dormarch - fishtailed hounds, who rode the clouds and consumed dead souls. They befriended the gwyllion - beguiling spirits of lonely highways, who led lost legions to their doom. They knew the given names of the demonic afanc who feasted on the flesh of the foolish. And, while no man may own or command a dragon, they knew the ways of y ddraig, and counted them as friends.

But nothing our forefathers summoned from The Other could have prepared us for the Monsters of our own making. The creatures we fashioned from our petty frustrations and suppressed desires, made flesh by the power of the Boxes. Each was pitiless. Each could only be stopped by the death of the one who had spoken it into being.

The horror of this almost broke us. Could you kill your own child? How many deaths would it take before you ended what they had unwittingly had begun? Many wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And those who did lived on in mute grief.

We became a nation coddled in caution. Never too drunk. Never too angry. Never too alone. We secretly prepared for the worst. Stashing drugs. Drink. Planning how best to end it, should it come to that. We slept with our mouths taped shut. Just in case.

It was the Voxes that saved us from madness. At last we could talk again, even if our ‘voices’ were just speak-and-spell machines.

For a while we were so happy, clicking, and tapping, and marvelling at our cleverness, that we didn’t hear anything else. Didn’t notice that the children had started talking again. Popty-ping nonsense words that somehow robbed the Boxes of their power.

Our forefathers had used words like ‘llwyd’ to describe the ash of ember, the grey of rabbits. A quality of hue rather than a colour. The children had learnt that the Boxes had no poetry in their souls. Ambiguity confused them.

They borrowed and blended new with old, weaving spells around an ever-changing lexicon. They crafted words that made sense without making sense. They hung meaning on what wasn’t said. On rhythm and intonation. They fought these new invaders as our ancestors had so long ago: with magic.

Together, our people regrouped. Became a nation of new bards. Words became our resistance and the Boxes our unwitting salvation.

THE END