"Aelarish whimsy, maybe."

"You get a lot of that?"

"What else would you call deciding to make you a cake just because I'm happy and I feel like it?"

"I didn't say it was an unreasonable label."

"Then yes, all the time. I'm the Aelare of cake."

"Just cake? I wouldn't like to wake up one day and find all of the furniture in my room stuck to the ceiling and my feet replaced with wheels."

"Cake and things like cake. Nice things."

"That's much pleasanter. I'm a disaster on feet, I don't think wheels would improve me."

"I'd make you hover, like Piper," he says, laughing.

"Now that would be convenient if only I could move along a bit faster than Piper can."

"Well, nothing's perfect."

"I know, it's a terrible pity."

He laughs.

"That's how you can tell that I'm not a goddess."

"...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"...I think we might have different ideas about what 'perfect' means and whether or not it's a good thing."

"If it fails to be a good thing then it fails to be perfect pretty straightforwardly on that basis, I think."

"I think I'd rather live in an imperfect world than one where there are gods deciding what perfect means and changing the world to fit."

"Well. And you do."

"Yeah. I just - I don't trust 'perfect'," he says. "I'm not sure there's really such a thing. Not the way some people mean it. To me, 'nothing's perfect' is kind of... comforting. It means there's room. I don't know, maybe that doesn't make sense."

"Not a whole lot, no."

"I could try to explain, but it would probably be depressing."

"Maybe. I won't know unless you do explain it."

"...I don't think I could live in a perfect world," he says. "I don't just mean I wouldn't like it there, I mean - I'm not Aelare. I don't have a mythological exception to all the rules. And I don't think anyone else's perfect world would have a place in it for someone like me. In my father's perfect world, I wouldn't exist at all. He'd have a son who was just like him."