"You're welcome."

The clouds shift so that errant tufts of vapour form the silhouette of a castle, subtle enough that you'd have to be looking closely to see it.

She spots it when she banks. "Hee."

The cloud-castle gets a cloud-garden full of tiny cloud-flowers probably not visible to anyone who isn't an Elf. The Emperor giggles.

"That's so cute. Do you do cloud art a lot?"

"Sometimes! It's fun. Hardly anyone ever notices."

"Humans seem to have pretty bad vision."

"Well, compared to you, yes. I cheat with magic, of course."

"It must be fun to be so magical."

"It really is!"

"Who's the next most magical?"

"Oh, hard to say. I show up when a self-dedication runs longer than ten hours or so, but I don't keep close track of them after that. There's some people around who took the full second tier, and a handful of people have ever survived taking Life but I don't know offhand if any of them are still around, the last one was a while ago."

"Why do you show up?"

"I like to meet people who're going to have significant power, so if they're obviously going to be trouble I can stop them before they get there. Early on, somebody got through Life and Death while I wasn't paying attention, and he didn't manage to kill me but he made an awful mess trying; when people know they're going to meet me the moment they step out of a long dedication, that sort of thing doesn't happen so much."

"Hm. Why did he want to kill you?"

"He wasn't super eloquent about it but I got the impression he disapproved of my hobbies."

"That did seem likeliest but it could have been something else."

"Which, well, fair enough, but when killing me didn't work because I am immortal he decided the thing to do was try harder, and he ended up wiping out most of a city before I got him."

"Oh dear."

"Gave me a new appreciation for people who manage to complain about my lifestyle without killing a hundred thousand people!"

"When the Valar warred with Melkor to stop him from running server farms full of tortured uploads there was a lot of collateral damage but it was in the long run fixable."

"Well. Resurrection exists. But I liked that city."

"Did you resurrect the residents?"

"...you would've heard about it if I had, it'd take me centuries even if I did nothing else the whole time and there'd be no way I could possibly pass it off as 'oh I guess he didn't quite manage to kill you'."

"Are you planning on setting aside time for it eventually?"