Outside of a dedicated partnership (aka, a ship), Dan Heng is decidedly single, but far from celibate. As the Nameless' travels take them to planets that often house billions of people each, there's no shortage of those he might have a brief rendezvous with, to relationships that might last a little longer but ultimately end due to the transience of the Astral Express. (And of course, it can't be forgotten that Dan Heng's hypersexuality is oftentimes the driver of these nightly affairs, but never to any lovers' detriment.)
However, there was a break in this trend that was a significant outlier simply due to the sheer novelty of its circumstances.
When Dan Heng entered Evernight's Memory Zone to locate Stelle over a thousand arduous years, fresh off the success of succeeding in Georios' trial to become the demigod of Earth, several circumstances were ultimately stacked against him. He was a newly made demigod with no chance of adjusting to his newfound powers--overwhelmed by the synchronicity he experienced with all of Amphoreus and its life--connecting for the first time with the memories of a dying goddess, all at the threshold of the penultimate battle with Irontomb. Together, all these components created an unusual cocktail that he wouldn't have experienced otherwise.
He wasn't alone in the thousand years he searched for Stelle. Though the time was gradual, he was connected totally to Cerces and her memories. As she grew to trust him beyond the time spent in the Grove previously, Cerces began to physically appear and join him on his journey. The two became traveling companions, united at first by their shared goal of saving Amphoreus: Cerces wanted her home saved, and Dan Heng was desperate to rescue his family. As the long years wore on, they befriended each other, but that closeness evolved into something more. For the new demigod who was the sole witness to the world as Cerces remembered it, as one of the few beings left that could connect to her when so many of the others had died, friendship plunged into something deeper, even codpendent.
The world as they knew it was dying. Although entrenched in the Memory Zone, Dan Heng could feel the last gasps of a dying earth while Cerces mourned how the world and all its hard-fought truths were slowly eroding, as all the memories and legacies of Amphoreus' collective knowledge withered away. They clung to each other. He dreamt of Cerces dying, and she begged him to stay. He dreamt of how she told him to make an arc from her divine corpus to ferry the life of Amphoreus to the stars, and he had. When they awoke to another day of searching, they would embrace for so many reasons. Of desperation, to mourn, to be each other's anchors when they had no one else on the dying earth, simulation or no.
It wouldn't have been an exaggeration to say they fell in love. It would have been even more unbelievable to say it happened within a few minutes that stretched over an eon.
But it did happen, even if it was only a dream they shared, in the end.
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