The Hammer and the Whip / The Crack

It has been a long time, but the empty hole where they spent so many months was there, like always, a frozen empty space in a frozen world. Now also empty, waiting for events to restart again.

 - We didn't knew anything at the time.

They were the Breathers. He tried again, slowly opening the vest and letting the viscous liquid atmosphere to enter his mask. It smell sweet, the smell of rotten meat, just like the first time he noticed the smell in his bad-isolated old vest. After so many years in that rock, he got used to it. Now it was almost like getting back a childhood memory.

His brother was there, standing next to him. He looked taller, thinner, not older, but more mature. He was changed, both were. His arms didn't get rocky like himself, but softer, longer, articulated without elbows, so different from his rigid, bold and spiky limb. The same black skin, darker than anything else, but the walls of that cave.

 - "The Hammer and the Whip", she called us.

 - I told you to not rely on her, on any of them.

 - You told me that everything was a lie, and it wasn't at the end.

 - It doesn't matter if it was True or Not for any of us. It just turned out that we didn't knew a shit.

Both moved to the wall, the opening of the crack and looked down into the abyss. There, on the frozen planes, the mine were they spent their younghood was going to be built at some point of the next 30 years.

The mine was meant to be exploited on the hunt for rare metals, but then the mix was discovered. After some accidents in which the space vests were broken and the workers, space-born, were exposed to the viscous atmosphere, and didn't died.

They both removed their helmets, and took a long breath of the liquid. Surrounding temperature was just about 50K, on this sunny day on Ceres, the cold and the lack of air should just kill them, by freezing and breaking the blood vessels of their lungs, but it didn't happened, it was just relaxing, it just smelled like home, at last.

Since its discovery, that strange mix extracted from the asteroid atmosphere became the main way of keeping  human bodies in extasis while travelling  in space. The most valuable and unique Mine on any known planet. And Men were breed in space just to work here, as slaves, with no family or personal life, no culture no society. Until they developed their own.

A frozen world inhabited only by enslaved workers, and the Host.

Both turned against the dark entry of the cave. It was months after they scaped from the Mine, after they discovered that they were so adapted to the mix that they no longer needed water or food, they just got it from breathing. They didn't get older, just stronger, and less human. Other workers tried to scape from the Mine, but died after few days in the cold. The brothers managed to survive for months, using the crack in the wall as a shelter.

And then, one day, they found her. Or she found them. And everything changed.

 - We didn't knew that we were already dead at that time.

 - Are we really dead? Are we sure that we can die, even?

 - She told us, so. That we were meant to kill each other. That was just a matter of time. It simply haven't happened yet.

 - Did we? How many years has passed backwards since she touched us? How much time we'll have to wait to see her again?

The Sun was already out of their sights, while Ceres was spinning through its short days. They could see their own father, Jupiter, and its moons, at the center of the sky above the planes. And their constellations, that she used to give them names, Orion and Serpens, shining above them, one at each side of the king planet.

 - Maybe you're true, we are already dead. And this quest is just our purgatory.