Nobody

days; fortunately, they were quiet days, because an entire division probably could have rolled through the fences next to my tower and I wouldn't have noticed. I'd been too busy with thoughts that leapfrogged across all the old stories I'd ever read as I tried to make sense of something even more impossible than the impossible.
And then, when I couldn't make sense of it, I'd gone out and done additional research. Lots and lots of additional research. My new obsession might have made me the butt of endless jokes; but nobody razzed me much. Of course, Rosetti's new orthodontia, compliments of Uncle Sam, might have prompted some of that reluctance. Somehow word had gotten around to leave me and my pagan gods strictly alone. . . .
Beneath the trappings of glory and drinking and whoring it up, the old Viking religion was damned vicious. Three old hags called the Norns made all the rules—including the ones the gods themselves lived by. These three witches made the Greek Fates look like Sleeping Beauty's Good Fairies. Their rules for living—and dying—were ugly, cruel, full of blood and torture and death. Nobody, including Odin, spat without those three old hags' by-your-leave, and nobody broke the rules.
Warriors—those who died in battle—and accident victims did not share the same afterlife. Not ever. And yet there Odin was, apparently throwing everybody into one stewpot, willy-nilly. Odin wasn't allowed to collect victims of accidents—or disease, or old age—for his great battle