A tale to tell...

[Strike Witch]

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Prologue

The vestiges of space were cold and unforgiving. And yet, sometimes the void was welcoming…

The sparse, cold, irradiated rock of Iris’Ghee was not a welcoming sight to most bipeds of the Tiel arm, but nevertheless, there was a still a city on its sun-ravaged surface. Exploration teams often overlooked it, mostly due to the fact that it looked like a big rock sticking out of the irritating, all-pervading, and dirty gold sandy wastes.
There were a few pretty odd looking satellites, noted a search team, in possibly artificial orbits, but the search team couldn’t be bothered taking a look. And so the city officially remained a sandy rock on a bigger sandy rock that orbited another sandy rock, because boredom and detachment are common things in the universe. The rock still held life. But nothing lasts.

The skies were lit up with globes of red. Millions of crimson streaks rained down, most bouncing off gravity deflectors, some getting through and smacking into bunkers. In orbit, a fleet of grotesque, misshapen, black battleships rained fire. They bore the appearance of pentagonal boxes, larger at the front, and smaller backsides, with many sensors, cameras, and view ports. They bristled with weaponry, firing sixteen salvos at a time, and were covered with arcane symbols and dried blood. They appeared to an observer to be the only ships in the sky, but they were fighting someone. Also in orbit, were a pair of normally inconspicuous irregular moons, but the thing that set them apart from the rest was the small, subtle fact they were flying into battle spewing thousand molten projectiles in every direction. Despite their audacity, they were being badly mangled. Though they were huge, strong and hard, they were being cut up and having their insides burned out.
One exploded, taking a sizable chunk of the enemy fleet with it, and the other followed soon after, maiming three ships. The other, smaller moons that spat molten gobs soon were decimated in short order, allowing the intruders to attack the city.

As rock melted and life extinguished, the destroyers were too deep into their bloodlust to notice a small, hourglass-shaped black ship slip out of orbit and break out of the magnetic field. It extended translucent, insect-like sails, picked up an open spot, and dived, with a bang, into subspace.