It was five years after we found the husk of Orujhone that the sun died.

We found her on Jhone, her resting place. She lay underneath a long stretch of farmland, only dug up because an archaeologist noticed the crop circles drawn by the outline of her body. She has been etching these marks for years, blessing harvests in a silent reverie.

When we found her, we first realized that she was nearly in perfect condition -- of course she would be, one archaeologist remarked. She was a goddess. Though her chest was caved in by the weight of the soil and the groundwater caked her with rust, she was still untouched by man and divinely beautiful. We informed her descendants, and a priest blessed the site. We allowed Lord Orujhone and his daughter to be the first to touch her. The princess, Nedia, pressed her forehead against Orujhone and thanked her for blessing the harvests she fueled year after year.

Then, we began our survey. We were careful as we examined her and surveyed her with the utmost respect, cautious to keep our hands and feet clean as we traversed the blessed land surrounding the husk. We found more wreckage from her wounds in the soil surrounding her. We took it, cleaned the rust from her metal skin, and deemed them sacred relics.

The priest insisted that we not take her to a lab, so as to respect a holy body. The husk was taken to the closest temple to be cleaned, dressed, and examined. Archaeologists and engineers swarmed the site; she was, after all, a vessel of mechanical power. Reverse-engineering had always been something of philosophical debate; we knew the goddesses presented themselves as mechanical, and if we could figure out how they brought us here, flying us through the stars to new worlds using nothing but fire, then we could do the same.

Perhaps that was when Orujhone saw that we had failed.

We began our examination without informing the public. Lord Orujhone himself asked this of us; if the public knew, the site would be compromised and panic would ensue over such a religious scandal. How does one inform a people that their goddess was exhumed from her grave? That she was being poked and prodded with tools and picked apart for further study? That a temple was turned into a laboratory?

No; we kept it secret. We didn't tell the Keplans, nor did we tell the Yonites. We did not even tell the other ruling families from their respective planets. We couldn't allow this to move past the archaeologists, scientists, and politicians involved in the project. We were the sole caretakers of a goddess.

Her body was dismantled piece by piece. White, paneled flesh of an unknown element; copper alloy veins in a tangled, spiderweb grid; glass eyes and a supercomputer brain the likes of which we had never seen. It was technology previously unimaginable; something to respect, but perhaps something to fear.

That was when our team split apart. It was an ethical dilemma -- if we could pick apart a goddess' body and understand her brain, does that make her less holy?

We stopped calling it a body then. It was a husk. The word made our actions easier to stomach.

Nevertheless, we continued, fascinated by our project. We measured the size of its outstretched arms and compared it to that of our own measly planes. Engineers crawled inside the husk and followed the trail of activity until we found the living quarters it carried our ancestors in. We took the soft bedding she sewed for them and praised its otherworldly quality, then fought over who could keep it. We cut out the wires from below the skin, then restrung them in our own primitive machines to see how they worked. We ripped the panels off of the outside of the husk and snapped them in half to see what they were made from. It was humbling in a way, to handle each part of the husk; something so mythologized and powerful felt so tangible in our hands -- so breakable and fragile.

In the end, we had taken all we could from the husk. By then it was as the word implies: a shell with all of its insides torn out, nothing more than dust. We had taken everything. We thanked Orujhone for what her remains had granted us, then turned to the priest for final rites. He was scared, I recall, to grant the husk a funeral; after all, it was (not is, we specified, as it was a long-dead thing) once mighty and empyreal. Still, he conducted a small funeral and mass for the husk, with everyone involved in the project present to bear witness. Lord Orujhone and his daughter came. The girl smeared crushed rose petals on the nose of the husk. We buried it in the catacombs beneath the temple, then sealed the door shut. We would never tell any other soul about what lay below the temple.

We continued our individual work in peace, each carrying different weights -- some carried with them chipped-off pieces of the husk, others carried the weight of what they had done. I learned around three years after that a fellow archaeologist had killed himself because he couldn't bear the fact that he helped desecrate the body of his goddess. I did not attend his funeral.

The years passed, and with it came the death of the sun. We were scared of the future; we still are. Lord Orujhone called many of us back to the temple only a week after it died. All of us were haggard, fear tracing the bags under our eyes and our frostbitten skin. He believed we had ushered in something evil with our project. That we had cursed Jhone with what we had done. There were whispers of agreement amongst the crowd, from those I remember to have been especially weary during the project.

With fire in his eyes, Lord Orujhone declared that the husk must be destroyed. He claimed that the evil we wrought would only worsen as long as it remained here. Many of us begged him to leave her be; if she continued her rest, we would be spared her wrath. He did not listen.

Together, we broke the seal and invaded the catacombs. We took the fire from Lord Orujhone's words and set it ablaze upon his ancestor's rotting skin. It filled the room with a cloud of thick, dark smoke, as pitch black as the night outside. It was evil, Lord Orujhone declared; a physical, coal-dark amalgamation of evil, something we purged from a place of holiness.

This was no holy place. It was never holy, not when we took a goddess and tore her to shreds like animals. Her own children turned on her. We left the fire in the catacombs, and it devoured the temple above in flames. We told no one of its cause.

Lord Orujhone declared war against the other planets the day after. For Orujhone, he proclaimed. For the sake of her people. The goddess smiles upon us.

She died weeping, and we robbed her of her peace. In return, she has done the same to us.