There's a fun game going around online asking you to

[GreenPartyVoter]

type out the first line of a book, and then tack on “and then the dragons arrived.” (Come to think of it, that’s rather like the fortune cookie game.). Anyway, I added a twist of my own and wrote a paragraph to go with it.

Never in living memory had there been such an ill-fated year. Winter became summer, and summer an unbearable inferno. Great swathes of crops were lost to locusts. Famine and plague stalked the land, preying on young and old alike. The mad king grew madder still, bidding his subjects to imbibe all manner of poisons in order to ward off the great evil that had beset them.

And then the dragons arrived.

[In_The_Wind]

1. I like what you did.

[First Speaker]

2. "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton"...

...and then the dragons arrived...

[ret5hd]

3. So...in this particular story, the dragons are the good guys!!!

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. That would rock!

[Leith]

4. Hhmmm...

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. And then the dragons arrived.
—George Orwell, 1984

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. And then the dragons arrived.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. And then the dragons arrived.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

[TlalocW]

5. The Bard

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

For tis true love that they did strive
But then the dragons arrived

I know I broke the a-b pattern of rhymes. Don't care.

TlalocW

[central scrutinizer]

6. Send your entries here

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

This site is a hoot. Some of the cleverest, most vile prose ever written. An runnerup from 2019:

Olivia followed her breasts into my office where I was studying the dead flies on the window sill and dropped a large brown envelope on my desk, which rearranged the dust as it came to rest next to my right elbow, causing me to lose interest in the flies as I watched her walk away, watched carefully while wondering if the motion of her hips could bring a dead man back to life, which led to wondering what she could do to a man who was still alive.

[ironflange]

7. Hardy

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.

And then the dragons arrived.