We stopped burying bodies when the bogs spread centuries ago. Instead, we submerged family into our mire, mingling great-great-grandmamas with grandbabies that died too young. It was not dirt but it was still our land. Land we had to adapt to, until we almost forgot why we decided to put bodies in the bog in the first place.

It became the way things were.

We built our houses on stilts, we walked to the academy over the sagging sphagnum moss that covered the open expanse. At night, when it was impossible to sleep, we sat outside and dunked our feet in, nudging family members preserved like pickles down there, hoping they’d gift us wisdom for an examination or bravery for a fight. Family was never really gone.

They were just down deep.

When I left P-Fera, I sunk my fist into the bog, feeling the fish and bodies down there, and corked a vial. I carried my family with me across the stars.

We stopped burying bodies when the ice quit thawing and stayed forever. Brexon 5 was always an outpost mining planet, so there were few tears shed when someone slipped and cracked their head open or froze to death while pissing. Bitter fucking place with a bitter fucking attitude. 

We carved holes in the snow walls, shoved the bodies in there, and left the corpses to freeze solid. The only marker was a square of ice situated at the feet. We left it for when times inevitably got tough. That way we knew where to crack the ice open and shave a leg thin like cold, cured meat. 

At night, when it was impossible to sleep, us insomniacs with demons would take our tools and sit under the midnight sun to carve. We chiselled entire stories and dancing patterns on the ice until it became habit. It was just what we did.

On patrol, I liked to walk down the corridors of carved ice and add a few beats of my pick to a swirl or star. 

When I got reassigned, I packed up my meagre barrack room and made sure to excavate space in my bag for a pickaxe. 

We met, you and I, on a clunky, decommissioned government ship bound for Herrin. You had every measure of gun strapped to you; I had my analyzer and enough gum-sized rations to feed a small army. Biologist and hired guard, deployed alone on a limited charity budget to track a mega-eruption’s impact on the soil and rare animal lifeforms that called Herrin home.

It was funny: neither of us had lived in a land with accessible soil, yet here we were here to safeguard it.

“My name is Jiran. Pleasure,” I said and held my hand out to you.

“E,” you responded, clipped. You were all business then. As icy as your home planet.

You took to your guard duty like a calling, protecting my back against desperate, hungry animals as I crouched down, my hands sifting through the soil to catalogue its composition. Biologically unsustainable sulphur, critically low phosphate, and altered pH.

But you could only watch the black horizon for so many days.

“What are you looking for?” you asked me, and I knew then I had an in. A crevasse in your glacier I could slip into.

“Microorganisms,” I said with a grin. “They’re the first to resettle into volcanic substrate. First thing to move back in and get things kick-started. Though so far nothing.” 

“They should hurry up, then,” you said.

The job was supposed to last four weeks.

The ship didn’t come back after four weeks. It didn’t come back at all. Maybe the ‘scrappy’ program was scrapped and they forgot to pick us up. Maybe something happened to the ‘benevolent’ planet that hired us. The whole neighbouring galaxy could have been destroyed for all we knew on Herrin.

Or maybe it was simpler: we’d been for show. Our employers just didn’t care as much as they’d pretended to for the press coverage and sob stories.

I told you we needed to prepare for the worst. 

You didn’t seem to mind. You kept studying the soil, looking for proof that the animals that we ate, that died because of the ash and lava-choked land, weren’t dying without a promise of the next generation’s survival.

You always had a tender heart.

On Brexon 5 I would have eaten it if I were desperate enough.

When we first noticed an uptick in microbial colonies, we split the final bottle of alcohol branded with a sponsor company’s logo. It had soured at some point but tasted sweet after months of tonguing tasteless rations and sucking gamey strips of rib-thin animals off our soil-stained fingers.

I missed P-Fera like a wound then. I ached to sink my feet back into my ancestral bog, run my fingers over the shrubs and whip-thin trees, gorge myself on the blueberry-fat bog lemmings or cranberries we grew amongst the acidic waters. Sometimes I considered popping open the vial around my neck and drinking it. Water was scarce on Herrin, and neither of us had ever lived in a world without much of it. We danced when it rained and rushed to collect it. You were happiest then, drenched so you thought I could not see you crying for the home you hated and missed in equal measure.

We agreed that we had to find someplace to live, even if it wasn’t home. So we traversed looping, basaltic mounds and scaled the rocky spires until we found a hollow lava cave. Our bedrolls lay side by side as we used one of our last firestarters. We were often a sleepless pair and spent the nights talking about our homes instead.

Your ice planet was a failed attempt to course-correct an insufferable heat that made mining the precious minerals inside impossible. They tilted the axis of your planet only a few generations before, but they tilted it too far. The blizzards and ice age that followed limited the mining to a few key spots. A recovery for the pox-covered world, but hostile to those who remained.

My own world housed so much carbon that life became unsustainable. The peat that spread kept carbon trapped below, and we thanked it by sinking our loved ones underneath. Generations kept in a natural brine, guarding our future as much as our past.

Herrin would have to create its own answer, too, we agreed. We were agreeing on more by the day.

One morning, I walked out to collect my samples and load them into my analyzer, when I saw the answer: a speck of pale green lichen in a sea of black rock and dead dirt. 

I wanted to kiss you, or at least be near you at that moment. “E! Lichen! Small but mighty!” I shouted as I ran screaming into our cave. You whipped the gun out at me and didn’t lower it until you realized I was screaming for joy.

You admitted later you’d never heard a sound that happy before.

You tried to kiss me. I shut that down. There was no romance between us. You tried. I could not reciprocate. I explained it as I sifted the soil through my hands: “I’ve endured my own disaster. It made me inhospitable like the dirt on Herrin.” I stared at you, wanting to see the hurt so I could let my own disappointment die with it. “Don’t bother planting your hopes here. They won’t survive.”

At that, you laughed. It pissed me off.

“Seriously?” I snapped.

“No, I’m sorry,” you said, hands raised and smile imploring. “It’s just that your theory is unsound. Bacteria, fungi. After a disaster, the land selects for what grows best in the new conditions. It might take months or years or decades, but eventually it finds something that grows right. Look at our lichen.”

“I’m not lichen.”

“No. No, you’re not.” You hummed, tilting your head. “But we must grow something between us to weather a lifetime here. You’ll just have to decide what can grow best inside you.”

Choice on Brexon 5 was a luxury for few. It was as foreign to me as we were to this damned planet. I couldn’t articulate how your words melted something inside me. Instead of romance, I gave you my carving tools and you handed me your vial. I kissed your lips once, to seal my decision, and then chose the version of us that would survive.

For interlopers, we built a rather lovely lifetime together on Herrin in the decades that followed.

More lichen grew in the cracks and gaps of lava flows where the scarce rain pooled. Fungi sprouted and little ferns unravelled. When roots cracked at the lava, crunching it down into fertile soil, I tilled a homestead with your pickaxe and saved the seeds of what Herrin chose to grow. Trees flourished that we could light on fire—long after our firestarters were gone—to feel heat not shared by our bodies or from the sun. The small animals that had survived the great starvation grew in abundance. We kept the tamest as pets, for something to fuss over that wasn’t each other.

Years and years of sweat, compromise, trust, and time together with nothing to do but share. I taught you each lesson I remembered from the academy, you created fanciful stories—you had a hidden talent for it. We unspooled every mundane concern we’d ever had, shared every embarrassing thought, we held hands and trudged into the tangle of memories to face what made you shoot up in bed shouting at night.

There was an indescribable happiness to be known down to a molecular level. I could have taken a deep puncture of your skin, traced it like layers of peat that told the story of a millennium, and mapped out your entire DNA sequence of memories for a board of scientists. 

We merged like my ancestors suspended under moss, like slicing and consuming your comrade’s frozen foot to fuel your body’s desperate need for warmth. 

I loved you with only the kind of love you can give to yourself, because I knew you like myself. I never needed to kiss you again to know that. I saw it in your eyes when you held me gently at night or maintained my analyzer without me ever asking.

When the time came—and it was inevitable—we decided to go together.

Rot.

It was funny that we both were strangers to it. I never used to find things funny, but I did now, thanks to you. So many things were thanks to you, Jiran.

My dead encased in ice. Yours submerged and mummified. Returning to the soil was a foreign language we did not speak. Death to us meant continuation. Meat sticking to your bones (unless your barracks got hungry enough) and faces preserved in peaceful slumber for all of eternity.

When an infection turned my leg black and my veins looked like dark rivers under my skin, and the pain in your back from hunching over your failing analyzer became agonizing, we knew. 

“It’s a happy thing,” you said as you laid out what we needed. “I feel happy. Isn’t that strange?”

“Not at all.” I smiled, short one tooth knocked out from a bad fall three years prior. There was something comforting in knowing my smile wouldn’t be permafrozen for some adventurer in a century’s time to find. All my smiles belonged to you until my lips disintegrated. “We’ve known for decades what the end would hold. I’ve made peace with it. I like giving back to Herrin. To nourish your soil.”

You lifted up a handful of small black dots and laughed for me. Your laughter was the only eulogy I ever wanted. “I don’t know how much Herrin needed us in the end, but yes, we’ll surely see to that.”

We took turns swallowing seeds, grinning as they stuck in our teeth. We’d decompose and something would grow. Whatever our combined mush decided could thrive.

We chewed the seeds you’d determined were poisonous last. Together. 

Then you lifted my carving tools and chiselled into a wave of hard lava above the field we rested in. You carved out how you saw me: a great tree with roots surrounded by stars. I took the vial around my neck and uncorked it. I tilted it so you could finally swallow back your family. 

No human had ever had a burial on Herrin. We’d be the first. And over the years, the soil would reclaim us, bury us beneath it. 

First of our kind in a long time to rot under solid ground.