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Immortality in Gods In Quiet
Immortality in GIQ works in multiple ways but you can divide it in two categories:
- Complete Immortality: the incapacity to die
- Conditional Immortality : the absence of death from "old age"
Complete immortality is the simplest: you can't die. Unless something holding the power of End stops you, you'll live forever. Complete immortality can only be achieved by divine beings or through a divine curse and once it's on you you can't unmake it.
A being who is completely immortal will by default be equipped for it, their body won't be affected by anything, their mind will be able to withstand eternity without any memory loss or overload and their soul will stay completely intact in every circumstance.
IMPORTANT: Complete Immortality technically does not exist within GIQ, as all things, even the gods, can be absorbed by another. Complete immortality only applies to the concepts of End and Beginning, and theoretically to the ultimate Everything god that should exist at the end of the Divine War. For that reason it is usually ignored in discussions about immortality and only referred to by the gods.
Conditional immortality is therefore the default state when referring to the concept of "immortality" and it can be boiled down to: you can't die until something kills you. You will not fade away with time until you are damaged enough that all aspects of you that are everlasting fail to keep you together.
Conditional immortality is dependent on three things: the immortality of the flesh, the immortality of the mind and the immortality of the soul:
- Immortality of the flesh means your body will withstand time without decaying, breaking down or failing in any way. The term also applies to inorganic constructs and everything that has a physical form. It can range from your wounds closing immediately to being outright resistant to everything.
- Immortality of the mind means your brain can conserve the entity of your memories and the effect of living forever and watching everything else decay around you without collapsing.
- Immortality of the soul means the integrity of your soul, of your being, will stay intact even without a vessel or when submitted to assault.
Based on these three things we can divide conditional immortality in two categories:
- true immortality, when all three aspects of one being are unaffected by prolonged existence
- false immortality, when at least one of these three aspects is failing
True immortals are by default made to be that way naturally, they are born to be that way and are fully equipped for it and it's supposedly impossible for only one of the aspects of their immortality to fail, either all three fail and they die or they stay alive. True immorality CANNOT BE REPLICATED without the assistance of a god, if you weren't born this way there are no solutions to make you into a true immortal that doesn't involve a god doing it for you.
False immortality can happen for a lot of reasons through a lot of different methods and it's always horrible for the newly formed immortal. Either your flesh will fail you and your body will decay, your mind will fail you and you will go mad from prolonged existence or your soul will fail you and split under the weight of your life, often multiple of those at a time and it is constant torture and pain. Depending on how botched the process was, the extent of your immortality won't be applied equally to a specific aspect either. For example, even if you acquired immortality of the flesh, it might not apply to all your body and some organs or limbs might decay anyway. This also applies to mechanical constructs and cannot be stopped even with constant replacement of the damaged part. Lastly, false immortals are at higher risk of their own immortal body self destructing, often through uncontrolled growth leading to implosion. Again, this also applies to inorganic beings.
False immortality can happen for many reasons but the most well known one is the Champion of Life granting uncontrolled immortality of the flesh to anyone who asks.