The Casino in Connecticut is the capital building for those of us in the Great Game who live in New England. My friend Matt is a professional gambler who thought he discovered a game full of high rollers to crash, but it wasn't that simple. Since friends invite their friends along when they do stupid things I came along for the ride. What we discovered is that there are people betting on what utter strangers will do next. These Architects of behavior have the money and power to do more than make you disappear. For centuries, the Architects have moved people like puppets, and encouraged players to become monsters with no law constraining us, but their own. What we share here is our journey into a world where anything is possible, and you will be amazed at how simple this all seems. Based on a true story, and it will have you doubting what you know. Everyone questions if someone has already been pulling their strings. Even the paranoid are right sometimes...

Provides information on the gods, heroes, rituals, beliefs, symbols, and stories of Norse mythology.

An overlook of the Norse religion based around the gods stories and the lessons they deliver that are still relevant in todays society. This mysterious religion could have been created to develop a deeper understanding of life itself. A religion is a belief system that teaches and guides people on how to live. This exploration of the stories explains the possible symbolic representation of everything from gods to giants. Such an intricate set of stories that are intertwined with each other could not simply be for mere entertainment purposes. What if Norse mythology is a teaching tool from millennia ago that explain the complexity of life itself.

Seidr is the intriguing and powerful early Norse system of shamanistic trance practices. In this book, Katie Gerrard has contributed major work on the practices of seidr and trance prophecy, providing a practical manual full of dynamic group rituals and techniques based on known Seidr practices.

Originally published: La Jolla, CA: WildStorm, 2003.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A retelling of the Norse sagas about Odin, Freya, Thor, Loki, and the other gods and goddesses who lived in Asgard before the dawn of history.

"The runes you must find ... Which the mighty sage stained and the powerful gods made and the runemaster of the gods carved out." (The Poetic Edda, translated by C. Larrington) The runes are mysterious and powerful magical keys to the primal forces of nature that shaped Norse and Northern European culture. These twenty-four unique and inspiring symbols of the Elder Futhark (first runic alphabet) each possess powerful energies, identities, meanings, and sounds. The runes are invoked and harnessed to create change through inspiration, healing, protection, knowledge and divine wisdom from the Norse gods. Odin's Gateways is a practical guide to using the runes in our lives, in magic and in divination - a unique journey into the mysteries hidden within the runes, filled with the information and practices necessary to developing a deep personal understanding and relationship with them. By focusing on how to directly harness and channel the energy of the individual runes, the author guides the reader along the path to self knowledge and empowerment. With a deft hand and lucid style, Katie Gerrard cuts to the heart of the runes, combining the wisdom of the Norse Sagas and Rune Poems with practical advice and techniques gained through living and experiencing their powers. The divinatory meanings of the runes are given, with a range of different reading methods; bindrunes are explained in detail, with numerous examples presented ready for use; galdr (incantation) and spellcraft, charms and talismans are all seamlessly explored and made accessible in this fluid, concise and practical guide.

In the sequel to The Gospel of Loki, Loki’s adventures continue when he finds a way out of the end of the world and plans to restart the power of the Norse gods. The end of the world—also known as Ragnarok to the Norse gods—has occurred, and Loki has been trapped in a seemingly endless purgatory, in torture, until he finds a way to escape. It seems that he still exists in the minds of humanity and uses that as a way to our time. Back in the ninth world (Earth), Loki finds himself sharing the mind of a teenage girl named Jumps, who is a bit of a mess. She’s also not happy about Loki sneaking his way into her mind since she was originally calling on Thor. Worse, her friends have also been co-opted by the gods: Odin, Jump’s one-eyed best friend in a wheelchair, and Freya, the pretty one. Thor escapes the netherworld as well and shares the mind of a dog, and he finds that it suits him. Odin has a plan to bring back the Norse gods ascendancy, but Loki has his own ideas on how things can go—and nothing goes according to plan.