Priestess of the setting sun

It was so hot even the maggots died and the corpses stopped smelling. Everything looked bleached, all the colours sapped of strength. Even the flowers had become colourless. The days had become too long, the sun took its time to set and it burned and burned everything in its way.
Twelve young girls had been gathered, chosen by the whiteness of their eyes. As they stood in the temple carved into ancient desert rock, all twelve perfectly lined-up next to each other, there came a moment when one of them felt herself growing goosebumps, like a presence was walking among them. The sun had sunken low, a giant marigold, brilliant and gold. She felt the warmth of the fading light on her skin, but still started shivering, her breath came fast and shallow. There. A cone of light was forming, like a lighthouse sweeping the waves. But there was no lighthouse, there was only the sun and the sun was casting a beam of pure light on them, on the girls in her temple. Noursa, who had been sold at twelve and widowed at fourteen, felt it shifting over her, felt it tapping and probing her forehead, her hands and limbs. She closed her eyes and felt its heat. It was like burning up. It was like coming home. Her heart flared to make room for the upwelling emotion. It thundered wildly in her chest. She felt herself being filled, poured full of the most brilliant power, the radiancy of the divine. It hurt and soothed at once, like a burn under cold water. Like ecstacy prolonged too far.
But suddenly the warmth was gone and as Noursa opened her eyes in panic to peer over, the light had shifted over to the next girl and was moving further down the line. A great and sweeping sadness came over her. Deep and sorrowful as nothing she had ever experienced, it made her limbs leaden. Her body constricted in loss, throat burning, hands sweating, feeling wrong. There was terror in her soul, that she had looked into the face of the goddess, had felt her eternal embrace to be now again devoid of it for the rest of her life. It took all she had not to break the line, walk to the temples edge and cast herself off of it.
Shaking, she stood, as the sun sank lower and lower, as the beam was sweeping across all of them, testing them. Noursa suffered, barely able to see through the tears, her whole Being collapsing in on itself.
The sun was nothing more than a bright red band on the horizon. A sob worked itself up her throat, out deep from her belly, when suddenly she felt herself burning anew. Noursa stood there gaping, drowned in golden glory and divine ecstasy. Looking down on herself there it was, the beam of the sun that grew ever smaller by the second. Now only as tiny as a pinprick, but one that sat right at her heart. The world surged around her. The sun surged inside her. She had been chosen. Her eyes burned and her mouth went dry, but she did not cry. Gold was pouring from her mouth and eyes. Heat was coming off of her in waves. Around her the other girls fell to their knees, shielded their eyes from her brightness, as the darkness of night spread around them. Only their temple carved into the rock was still illuminated by the blazing glow of their priestess.
It was that blaze that swept through Noursa in the most glorious pain imaginable. She was fired like a clay pot in the kiln of eternity. She was destroyed from the inside to be built again from light. There was no change to her appearance, but her mind was purged and reworked as if a thousand suns were blooming behind her eyes.
No sound escaped her, no tears spilled. The priestess of the sinking sun could no longer cry.

The burning lasted until the next sunset. They endured for one night and one relentless day of the dry season, while the light burned away Noursa the child-bride and the other girls silently grieved their lost chance at divinity.

Then came the late afternoon glow and at last the priestess came back to her senses. The girls rose from their knees, trembling and half-blind, as the priestess stepped forward, steady and sure, into the sun-setters arch. Her silhouette was sharp and black before the horizon of the setting sun. Behind her there was sun and there was earth and between them a line of purest colour, of burned amber, of the deepest marigold. The priestess turned, her small hand curved in the golden light as she grabbed that brilliant line separating earth and sky. With a swift motion, with a flick of her wrist, she pulled forth that line of marigold and the sun fell like a guillotine beneath the horizon. Sudden darkness enveloped them. The sun had left nothing behind but the thin string of amber gold still dangling brilliantly from the priestess hand.