The results are IN, and you guys are...
...going after our D&D game's most unconventional open relationship??? Okay, we GUESS. Your prize is lore about this lovely couple!
L2tM is... Moon, or at least some version of her. A story you know, perhaps all too well. Drowning in her own body, again and again, a tiny fragment of a god trapped between the ribs of her own body. Left alone, her story would have been much the same - a slow, painful decay, stuck in a fallen body.
Years of rot, waiting for a lifeline for a structure already collapsed, from a brother already dying. A heart restarted in something barely a step removed from a corpse. A slow march to death.
An iterator is a monument. A solution. A tool, for that which mortals cannot solve. A left-over artefact from a world long since gone, for a purpose already passed. A memorial for the dead, written in a language that the living cannot understand. Left unmaintained, a structure can do nothing but erode.
The only difference between a person and an object is the capacity to act. Lying in the remains of her own body, Looks to the Moon was a corpse waiting to be pronounced dead.
In any other universe, she would have laid there for years more. In this one, she was given a chance. An offer, an opportunity - the ability to wrench her heart from her chest, and to turn one, single, infinitesimally small fragment of herself mortal.
An iterator is not mortal. An iterator is divine, unchanging. Where mortal flesh may change a million times in a lifetime, an iterator is set from the moment it has made, its capacity for change infinitesimally small and made over an impossibly long period of time. An iterator is a mountain, an ecosystem in and of themself, the mind of billions and trillions of individual organisms, a landscape, a god in flesh and gold-wired cable.
An iteration is hundreds of billions of trillions of miles of fibre-optic cables, of void-fluid pipes, of microstrata and neurons that keep it functioning. A single organism, to an iterator, is a drop in an ocean - a trillionth of themself, if that, a gear so small as to be insignificant.
To grasp at mortality, they would have to slice themself down to bone and then further. To fragment themself to a single piece of marrow. To dig up roots so deep as to be part of the landscape, cut an oak tree to a single sprout of green. What mountain would
Looks to the Moon was a puppet and a handful of neurons, the last part of the corpse to not yet realize it had died. The mountain that had already crumbled had little fear of becoming a pebble, and the barest fragment of her left found no reason to refuse.
The iterator Looks to the Moon perished, and the slugcat crafted from her pieces took its first breath in her wake.
To be mortal was to be different. Things were faster, now, than they had ever been, more deadly, more thrilling - for she was now so small, now, so tiny that a single swat of the mind that had once been her could have undone her, so minuscule that even the slightest of creatures to roam her once-facilities could threaten her. She fumbled into life with clumsy paws, learning the cycle firsthand, life and death and blood and hunger. She stumbled into the inglorious world, into the remnants of her body, and she began to learn.
There was pain, sharper than she had ever felt before. There was hunger, gnawing its way into belly and bone. There was joy, and rage, and fear, and love, and every emotion in between, so much sharper than she had ever felt before. An iterator was holy, was sacred, was a church without space for the rote and inglorious - in her body of steel, she had had no capacity for any emotion as strong, any state as fleeting, any thought as paper-thin or temporary, but now, all of that was stripped away, life laid bare as a stripped copper wire.
He was inexperienced. But he would get better.
He would laugh. He would cry. He would experience near every emotion his new body could produce, running the range and then some, his new nerves stripped of any callous that age could have formed in face of a body that had never known the ever-numbing tides of immortality.
He would hunt. He would scavenge. He would die, over and over again, and he would learn with each death. The cycle ever spun, guiding him back to his body again and again - he wandered the halls of a corpse, and he found new joy in the remains of the old, that which was once his own body now so vast as to be incomprehensible. He would be wrapped by pole plants, devoured by lizards, trapped beneath rubble and pulled out by lanky-limbed arthropods that would strip the awkward limb of metal from his back with practiced paws.
They experienced the world, in all of its imperfect, jagged, messy facets. And they fell deeply, deeply in love.
To be mortal was to feel -- and they loved to feel, all the joy and hate and sorrow. To be mortal was to act - and they loved to act, to splash in the waves without a care or to feel the rusted metal beneath their paws as they climbed and leapt and ran. To be mortal was to live - and they, the slugcat, the living-thing, the beast-of-god's-flesh, loved simply living, flawed and chaotic in all of its beautiful ways.
They would polish their body from its rusted husk, spend their own skin to defend those who had once cared for them. They would gorge themself on food and drink they never could have dreamed of before now, a whole new sense they simply didn't possess before. They would learn new languages, speak until their mouth was dry and their throat hurt, basking in the camaraderie of new companions. They would discover the basest desires of their new body and set out to discover every new nook and cranny, novelty and connection in one. They would paint their paws with blood and pain and adrenaline, a thrill beyond anything that immortal life had ever offered to them.
And the life they so loved, the many delights and horrors in which they so indulged, would look back.
Inv, Enot, Sofanthiel, however many names you might call it - was a fickle thing, for it stood for the Cycle and the Urges, the inglorious truth of living, its highs and its lows. The Wheel of Fortune, come to earth, unpredictable and prone to indulgence in all the most base of the ways that their Domain spoke of, met a thing that was once a mountain, and that which had already fallen for life fell once more.
Their relationship is... unconventional. The short-lived and mortal can only pass the divine in strands, brief crossings of paths - and yet, Moon and Enot's would cross again, and again, and again. Though they're never joined for long, though they might seek out other partners or live other lives, they still return - past sense, past logic, past even the advent of reincarnation.
A mortal thing, no longer chained to the landscape of her corpse, Moon could have moved on, could have Ascended - and yet, she remained. To live an immortal life, now that she had tasted the ephemeral thrill of mortality, seemed a chain. She had lived as a tree trapped in a flower pot for ever so long, rooted within the landscape and yet never truly able to reach out and touch it, and now she had seen what it was to run and love and exist, and she could not return to the numbness, not now that she had tasted the light.
She cycled, once, her ties to her body finally eroding. Reincarnated, again, and then again, the ever-turning cycle of the world never ceasing. She lived, again and again and again, crossing paths with the god time after time, tying herself closer and closer to the ever-shifting mortal, until eventually she tied herself too tight to leave.
With this dating choice, you tie yourself to that which is life, and that which has loved life too deeply to ever truly die. Though this is likely to just be a brief fling for all of you involved - the timescale that Enot operates on is too great for anything to move beyond "brief", after all, and Moon has grown too restless to ever be satisfied by any one state - you may follow, but she will never remain in one place for long, and no matter how long you follow her tides, you cannot force her to stop them form you.
In this life, she may care for you. In the next one, she may not. Hopefully, you're the sort of person that's content with that, because if not, then this situation might kind of suck for you. Ah, well. Congratulations on the throuple!
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