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?"

"No."

"It's actually not possible for me to resurrect everyone who dies. At the end of every year of trying I'd have a bigger job ahead of me than I did at the beginning, evem if I never slept and did two a day, which is not a pace I could keep up any longer than a month. So something has to change before people start getting resurrected at scale. Maybe I figure out how to do a hundred thousand people in a day, or maybe someone else survives the self-dedication for Life and Death and goes around encouraging more people to try it and bringing them back when they fail until there are enough of them to keep up. Who knows. But I don't plan on setting aside time for it someday because the only way it's possible is if it stops being a thing I'd need to set aside that much time for."