It was a quaint little village: crowded wooden houses with tiled roofs and narrow dirt roads winding in between. The place was perpetually awash in a shade of dusty gray; infinite layers of dense clouds clogged the sky and encircled the village in a sphere. The village was its own little cloudy microplanet, a dreary snowglobe floating through a mysterious void.

One day, the clouds in the sky began to freeze. They hardened until layers upon layers of frozen condensation surrounded the village in an icy gray dome. As more ice formed the dome grew heavier and heavier–it could almost be heard groaning and sighing from struggling to support its own weight. So it came as no surprise when cracks began to form on the dome. Though slow at first, these spiderweb cracks picked up exponential speed, racing across the icy roof, fracturing it like a haphazard jigsaw puzzle.

The sky-ice-puzzle could be admired for only a split second, because almost immediately after its creation one piece broke away, plummeted towards the village, and soundlessly smashed three houses flat. There was now a gap in the dome where that fallen ice puzzle piece had just been before–it was a tiny window into the never-seen-before void.

But the void was not a blank vacuum filled with emptiness. It was quite the opposite. From the little view provided by the puzzle hole, hundreds of millions of stars could be seen shining, twinkling, and shimmering, drifting together in an arced path through a backdrop of deep navy space. Some shone brighter than others, revealing colors of luminescent greens and purples and yellows. Others dappled the space like celestial glitter. It was a scene that had never been observed before, a display that was a sight to behold.

And yet it was a view that could only be marveled at for a brief moment. Almost as soon as the first ice puzzle piece broke away, other pieces quickly followed suit, bombarding the poor little village with unforgiving frozen chunks. Though the ice dome had fallen and the starry sky was now free for all to see, there was no one left in the village to see it.