In the town’s mead hall lay a basket of baby dragons. One of the town’s mayor’s office’s people had found them on the outskirts of town in the Dragon Temple. After determining that no adult dragons were in the area, and it was hard not to see, owing to the sheer size of the adult dragons, the man brought the baby dragons back to town. There, the mayor’s office immediately got them warm and comfy and out of the elements.

The question on everyone’s mind was: Where were the adult dragons?

The mayor didn’t know what more they could do for the baby dragons, so she sent a messenger down the road to fetch a member of the royal government. It had been a few hours and the local government representative showed up at his humble mead hall.

The mayor’s scribe ushered him in.

“Miss Mayor, the representative is here. His name is Mark.”

“Send him in.”

“Good day, Miss Mayor.”

“Good day,...”

“Councilor. I’m a member of the royal council.”

“Good day, Councilor.”

“So, I’ve heard you have a dragon dilemma.”

“Indeed.”

The mayor gestured to the container near the fire. In it were twenty-something baby dragons.

The councilor noted that they didn’t look like dragons from fantasy and magic that he was familiar with. They looked like puppy dogs. The creatures were called baby dragons because they were babies, and they were taken care of by dragons. It was thought that these babies were the true masters of the civilization that built the temple with giant draconic machines that acted as bodyguards since the babies were free to do as they pleased while the machines stood watch.

Dragon wasn’t an accurate descriptor of the machines that took care of the babies. Lacking a proper name for the machines, tribes and towns ages ago used the word ‘dragon’ to denote the machines that came to their planet and settled on the central continental plateau. The machines came from beyond the stars.

Over the centuries, the people on the central continent built a civilization surrounding the giant Dragon Temple on the plateau. Governments rose, fell, and rose again, before eventually consolidating into the royal kingdom of today. All the while, the dragons remained a constant force. This gave the royal kingdom the name of People Below the Dragons.

“Where did you guys find the baby dragons?”

“In the temple, barely in the entrance, they were huddled together. One of us had gone to drop off an offering and found them together.

“No adult dragons were seen. I sent out some scouts throughout the temple to see if they were beyond the horizon. None. There were no adult dragons.”

“Did you guys ask the sky?”

Asking the sky was a ritual used to communicate with adult dragons. It was nonsensical because the adult dragons were essentially omniscience. But the people below the dragons would set up the ritual as a form of official communication.

“We did. There was no answer.”

That was bad. Even under times of strife, the dragons would weigh in and communicate with anyone who underwent asking the sky.

The councilor’s eyes went wide as his thoughts kicked into overdrive. He broke away from the mayor to rush outside and collapsed to his knees. The man was looking up at the night sky. Shooting stars and strange colors were ablaze in the heavens above.

Four laser beams came from the vertices and combined into a bigger beam of energy before rocketing into the side of a dark shape in the distance across the night sky. The dark object exploded into nothing.

The mayor came out to see what was wrong. She saw the townspeople come out of their houses to see what was up. They were all looking at the night sky.

The mayor looked up and couldn’t comprehend what she was looking at.

“What is that?” she breathed.

“The end times,” the councilor replied.

A single Diamond and its escorts fought a furious battle to hold back the rising tide. Enemy capital ships almost dark as night were pouring into the system from unknown dimensions and distances.

Two Hexagonal Prisms, three Cubes, and fifteen Sideways Pyramids huddled around their flagship blasting everything that twitched. They initiated a distress signal to the rest of the Catalum Empire.

The enemy capital ships held different individual shapes but for the most part they held a sleek bullet-like shape. Each one was unique with various raised or lowered sections with bumps and ridges crisscrossing their hull.

They were armed with laser beams and plasma cannons and shielded with advanced polarized shield projectors.

Most of the enemy capital ships were small. It was a horde of enemy ships after all. Some were larger, and a couple were massive hulking monstrosities like the Diamond. It wasn’t that the small horde ships were particularly dangerous to the Catalum ships. They were threats; they were not massive individual threats. A Catalum corvette was roughly equal to four of the smaller ships. A Catalum destroyer equal to a hundred. And the Diamond could take a thousand. It was more so that the enemy ships swarmed them like an unending onslaught of locusts.

The bigger ships, on the other hand, were more dangerous. The consensus was that there were small swarming frigates, medium-sized cruisers, and individual battleships.

A peculiar aspect of the enemy ships’ technology was that when destroyed, they left behind no signature. It was as if destroying them made them materialize in a different dimension. This meant that confirmation of destruction would be impossible for the flotilla of Catalum ships present over the planet.

The Diamond ship concentrated its weaponry on an incoming enemy battleship. It coordinated its wing of Probe strike craft to attack the large ship. The dark heavens exploded in bursts of light as the enemy capital ship fired plasma flak bursts to protect itself. The Probes were told to back off and assist the beleaguered Corvettes, which were small boats in a stormy sea of angry swarm ships.