"Am I correctly picking up on the implication that you did a lot of that work yourself?"

"It's been my project for most of my life but part of it was enabling them to make use of advice and input from people who hadn't spent that long studying them."

"Sensible," he says, nodding.

"Valar can pay attention to about a hundred times as much stuff as a Quendi, even a Quendi with all the - chip things - for attention, so it was more useful that way."

"That and different people have different perspectives - I can imagine that if I had to teach a god how people work, I'd want them to hear from as many reasonable people as I could find, as soon as they understood enough to be able to usefully learn from that..."

"Yes, that too."

"I still think we aren't going to need them to figure out death, though," he says. "Golems already exist, and there's drawbacks but they're still a way to get there - for all I know my golem armour might make me the same way, at least while I'm in it, I do know I don't need to eat or sleep with it on..."

"At all?"

"Yeah. Can't sleep, actually. And then I have awful dreams, the first night after I take it off - dwarves don't normally dream at all, but I guess there's something about the lyrium that does it."

"You don't normally dream? Why?"

"Same reason we're never mages - we don't have the same connection to the Fade as everyone else."

"I think we don't have the Fade. But we dream."

"That's interesting - I wonder if it's really the same thing or if it just sounds similar, I wonder what the explanation for your dreams is..."

"Minds doing random things to organize themselves."

"...Really? How'd you find that out?"

"...it's complicated. But one of the Valar's... things... is dreams."

"Really? Seems like a strange thing to be a god of if it's just your mind talking to itself..."

"I've heard that said about our dreams, actually - that it's your mind telling itself stories using the Fade as a theater."

"Some of the Valar are gods of silly things. They can do things they aren't specifically gods of though."

"What kinds of silly things?"

"Nessa's thing is dancing."

"That's pretty silly!"

"Yes. But by and large their powers are alike, they just differ in what they've put the time into."

"Is there a reason why that one went for dance?"

"The Valar like beautiful things almost the way we do, and she does dance very beautifully."