Norse

I respect the Norse. Not warmly. Not without reservation. But they have earned a specific and genuine form of respect that I extend to very few divine powers: they know how their story ends, and they show up anyway.

Ragnarok is not a surprise. Odin knows his fate. He has known it since he hung from the World Tree and traded his eye for the knowledge of what was coming. He sees the wolf at the door. He sees the serpent beneath the ocean. He knows the exact shape of the end. And every morning, he sits on his throne and does the work anyway.

This is either the most admirable thing I have ever witnessed or a form of insanity so advanced it has wrapped all the way around to looking like wisdom. I have been genuinely unsure for several millennia.

Thor is simpler. This is not an insult. Simplicity in a god is rarer than you'd think, and Thor carries his in both hands along with a hammer the size of a minor geological event. He hits things. The right things, the wrong things, occasionally things that weren't expecting to be hit at all. He is reliable in the way that avalanches are reliable.

The Norse play sacrifice. They give up what they have to become what they need to be. Every resource burned, every card that descends — it comes back. It always comes back. They understand, better than any other pantheon, that the price of power is something you pay willingly. And then you pay again. And then you keep going, because the alternative is Ragnarok without having tried.