– 1 –
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
There are armies marshalling. Edmund can feel them. There are missiles coming, bombs being loaded, hard men prepping their weaponry for a fight.
Edmund can feel it.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
There are children being born. There are children playing. There are children who have grown old and grey.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
Starlight falls on the world, from Sirius, from Barnard’s Star, from Wolf 359, and most certainly from the sun. Plants grow. The ocean surges, rises, falls. Birds sing. Animals rustle in the brush.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
– 2 –
Mr. Gulley wakes from a nightmare. He staggers downstairs. He gets himself a cup of coffee. He toasts a delicious strawberry Pop-Tart, ignoring his distant dismal knowledge that the rain of scissors killed off strawberries along with a good portion of the biodiversity of the Earth.
What is actually in his Pop-Tart? He does not know.
He puts it on a plate.
He takes a sip of coffee. He turns around.
There is a wolf.
“Oh,” he says. “I had thought that was the nightmare.”
The wolf stares down at him.
He looks at it. He thought that he’d be frightened, but he isn’t. He’s smiling instead. He says it. “I’m smiling,” he says. “Why am I smiling, love?”
The wolf hasn’t said anything.
“I’m going to kill you,” he says, “you know.”
The wolf licks its lips. There is drool on the carpet. Mr. Gulley remembers promising Helissent that there wouldn’t be wolf drool on the carpet, but that was a long time ago.
Starlight falls on the world, from Sirius, from Barnard’s Star, from Wolf 359, and most certainly from the sun. Plants grow. The ocean surges, rises, falls.
The Agency is marshalling, he assumes.
They wouldn’t have missed the freedom of the wolf. Surely they wouldn’t have. Most likely the armies of the world are readying as well.
There are children being born. There are children playing. There are children who have grown old and grey.
He touches it. He leans against its fur. He loses himself in the softness of it.
He tries to remember what his cool, awesome parting line was going to be.
“I’m sor—” he starts.
With one great snap it eats him, and Mr. Gulley’s done.
– 3 –
The world is full of awful pain.
Fenris had considered it rather bad during the course of its binding. Freedom, in comparison, is practically unbearable.
Its every movement is stiff. It feels as if its heart is pumping, not blood, but fire.
It staggers.
It lurches. It is crawling. It thinks it has eaten — it isn’t sure. Houses. Humans. A churchyard.
I am probably not good.
It is too much.
It is impossible. Its stomach is still unhappy from the boots it ate earlier. It knows the humans will kill it if it does not eat, if it does not grow strong, but it cannot keep walking. It is too hard.
It sees everything around it as burning.
Everything is as light glinting across metal. Everything it sees is burning. Its eyes cannot handle the full light of the surface sun.
Another wave of pain builds up in its ruined limbs. It totters.
It is bad, incidentally, to nuke picturesque British communities. I am pretty sure that I have mentioned this previously, but in case you had forgotten, I wanted to remind you. It is bad. Don’t do this!
The wolf staggers and the wolf falls down.
It can feel the bullets begin to rain down onto it. It can feel the poisons seeping into it. It can feel the net of razor-wire being pulled down onto its flesh.
It gasps for breath. Its world is a maze of pain. It pants.
The last thing —
No, it realizes, I am just dreaming.
It had thought for just a moment, as the bombs came down, that it could smell its Saul.
– 4 –
Some time later.
“Oh,” says the wolf, startling awake. Its ears swivel. “I woke up. I hadn’t expected that to happen.”
It sits up. It looks around.
Everything is devastated. Everything is an awful ruin. The sun gleams off melted window-glass. It is peaceful and still and no birds sing.
It looks around a little more.
A dusty sunbeam shows Saul. He is sleeping against the tail of the wolf. His belly is very round and he is glowing, just a bit, because he has been eating nuclear explosions.
“Oh,” says the wolf. “Oh.”
Its brain sends conflicting signals. It tries very hard to stay still. It must not lick the boy. It must not jump on the boy. It must not wag —
It cannot help it.
It wags its tail. Its tail wags itself. Circumstances wag Fenris’ tail all about. Saul bounces up and down and is flailed around.
“That is ridiculous,” says the wolf. “Saul, you look like a musician.”
Saul mumbles.
The wolf struggles around to where it can see Saul. This hurts. It winces. It goes to lick its leg.
Result: failure!
“If you gnaw those bandages off,” Saul mutters, creaking open his eyes, “I am going to put a cone on you.”
Fenris considers this. Then it sighs. It stretches out.
“You left,” Fenris says. “You left, Saul.”
“Did I?”
“You reincarnated.”
“I just changed my hat,” protests Saul, who is still pretty much asleep.
“Bah,” says Fenris sulkily. It does not have proper tear ducts. It gnaws on a nearby building. “You should have come back sooner. I got adopted by a mean family that tied me up in the basement and threw boots at me.”
“Haha,” laughs Saul.
“Haha?”
“That’s over now,” says Saul. “Now we can live happily ever after.”
The wolf is coming to eat the world. The Agency’s coming to kill the wolf.
“And never,” says Saul, “ever again, to die.”
– 5 –
Edmund straggles his way there eventually. He’s slower than Saul.
He gets there and his eyes are bloody and his face is gaunt and he looks at Fenris for a very long time. Then he gasps and he throws himself down for the wolf to eat.
Fenris licks him thoughtfully.
Edmund closes his eyes.
“You’re not ripe yet,” Fenris teases.
Edmund shudders. Then he shakes his head, vigorously. “No,” he says. He pulls himself to his feet. “No. You have to eat me. That’s what makes it OK.”
“I’ll eat you later!” Fenris assures him. “Or I won’t. That’s up to events and circumstances!”
“But —” says Edmund.
He discovers that you cannot actually make giant wolves eat you. Fenris utterly ignores him.
The wolf is feeling friskier now. Wolves like him, they heal fast.
He’s been hopping from roof to roof and chewing around in the houses.
“I found a Setter,” he says. This is pretty exciting for the wolf, since there are hardly any people around after the initial breakout and the bombs dropping. “It was all sad because its family had left and you didn’t eat all the bombs properly, Saul, but then I ate it and now it’s happy.”
“Don’t eat Setters,” says Saul. “It might be catching.”
Fenris gives Saul an eyebrow.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
There are armies marshalling. Edmund can feel them. There are missiles coming, bombs being loaded, hard men prepping their weaponry for a fight.
Edmund can feel it.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
There are children being born. There are children playing. There are children who have grown old and grey.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
Starlight falls on the world, from Sirius, from Barnard’s Star, from Wolf 359, and most certainly from the sun. Plants grow. The ocean surges, rises, falls. Birds sing. Animals rustle in the brush.
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
Saul hops down. He nudges Edmund.
Edmund rolls over. He sits.
He looks at Saul.
“What have I done?” he asks Saul. “I let it free. I let it free, and it won’t even eat me. What have I done?”
And Saul holds out the miracle to him.
Saul presses it to Edmund’s mouth. Saul rubs Edmund’s throat. Saul makes him swallow it down.
“You’ve set a hurt thing free,” says Saul.
Edmund’s tears are falling now. “I am a monster,” he says. “I am the worst of monsters. I couldn’t control it. I ate people, Saul.”
The wolf is coming to eat the world.
“You’ve set a hurt thing free.”
Fenris suddenly turns its head. It looks far away. Its ears are practically straight up.
“They’re coming,” he says. “A whole army. Oh, thank God. I didn’t get to eat the last one, Edmund. Saul was so greedy! I didn’t get to! I fell asleep, and when I was awake again, he’d et them all!”
The world is ending.
You’ve set a hurt thing free.
– 6 –
“Someone’s been talking to the House of Dreams,” Saul says, judiciously. He looks at what is coming.
The battle platforms are floating in the air. They are a stately and awful procession and there are spheres of unknown import orbiting them as they come. There are men on deck in the black uniforms of the Agency, and no few from their cousin Agencies in the EU; and even the Mayor, who doesn’t want to be there, looking firm and chin-up and martial but entirely out of place. There are ninjas, and summoners, and wolf-track killers among them; there is Paul, in his useless yellow hat, and there is Morgan, and there is Max.
The guns of the anti-wolf assault force are charging.
It’s bad to use human souls as ammunition. I’m just saying.
It’s terrible to overclock a hat.
It’s bad to trap the honeyed, floating dreams of children and use them to lift up a battle fleet; at least, if that battle fleet is meant to kill a wolf. Those children wouldn’t like that! They’d want to kill that wolf themselves!
It is worst of all, Saul thinks, when he sees it, to build the corpse of Skoll, with its eyes still burning, into the central warship of your fleet.
There is darkness all around it.
It is drinking down the sun.
Then, just before the human-soul guns fire, the skull of Skoll lifts up its bony jaw and ignites the world around the three of them with fire.
It is terrifying; it is awful; and it is completely and utterly irrelevant.
The wolf is smiling as it comes. The wolf blurs forward and the flames wash pointlessly against its fur. The wolf has caught the skull of its brother; the wolf is wrestling it this way and that, and then with a happy yelp it goes tumbling, wrestling with the lead warship, back and forth, across the ruins of an old covered market.
There was an opportunity to kill the wolf with this kind of thing earlier, when it was weak and wounded.
That time is past.
And Edmund is yelling something, something frightened; Fenris can’t make out the words.
And the speakers of the ships are booming out demands.
And Fenris tilts its head for a moment. It listens. You must kill them! You must surrender! You must stop! You must fight! Eat them! Don’t eat them!
Be good!
Be bad!
The voices of Vaenwode and Jordis; Nordri and Saul; Mr. Gulley; Eldri, Brygmir, Aubrid, Hans; Edmund and the Agency’s chief —
Fenris shakes them aside.
The wolf stands up, delicately, on the tumbled battleship.
“You have to stand down,” the Mayor is shouting, and the soldiers are pelting Fenris Wolf with souls.
“I don’t have to do anything,” smiles the wolf.
It leans back its head.
It gives forth a sound.
It is like a howl, but not it is not a howl.
It is like the wind, but it is not the wind.
The sun shivers at that sound. It cracks. It drips. It bleeds.
The earth rolls, twists, shudders, splits.
There are many of those who have come for Fenris Wolf who hear that sound and lose their reason. It is outside their conceptions. It cuts through the theater of their senses and the theater of their thoughts: it imposes itself directly upon them as reality and it mazes up their thoughts, and they chase those thoughts down alley after twisting alley into the grip of a wolf-wroth. They foam at the mouth. They turn on their allies and their comrades in an ulfserk fury. A great number of them rip and tear at their own or others’ flesh.
The rest —
They tumble over. They are wolfed into sleep; shuddered into it; broken down from the towers of their consciousness and sent off into a phantasmagorium of dream.
They fall.
The wolf walks among them. It leans and stands and walks upon the crumbled walls.
Where it goes the streets are dark and the street lamps seeping.
Where it goes the cars crunch down and the earth bleeds red.
It picks at the sleeping soldiers. It noses over the civilians in their ranks. It opens the shells of their machines and armor like they are lobsters, and then it begins to eat.
Not all of them. By no means all of them.
It eats only the great and the good.
When it is done it coughs. It rolls its head. It stretches. It is larger. It is stronger. It is shining, now, it is beautiful; to look upon it now is to fall in love. It gleams like some moon-beast. It shakes out fur grown soft and silken as the finest sheets.
It looks back at Edmund and Saul and its eyes are glowing.
“Fetch,” it says.
Edmund stares up at it hollowly.
“I want to play fetch,” says the wolf. “I am lonely. Not since Hans have I got to have done.”
It noses a pill-bug shaped sergeant, suggestively, but Edmund doesn’t pick the sergeant up and throw him.
He doesn’t play fetch with Fenris at all!
He just takes off his hat. He gives a pained smile. He leaves it there, in the rubble. And he walks away.
– 7 –
“No,” says the wolf. It follows him. “No. Edmund. Ed. Buddy.”
But he walks away.
And in the end it turns around. It sits. It waits for him.
It lets him go.
– 8 –
The day ends and the night comes; the night ends and the day comes; Saul wakes comfortably against the broad fur of the wolf.
“They will never stop,” says Saul. “You know.”
He pokes thoughtfully at a sleeping civilian attaché.
“They’ll just keep attacking.”
Fenris bounds up to stand on top of the natural history museum. It looks around. “I think they will become used to me,” he says, “in a year or two. They will laugh. They will say, ‘we were so silly, panicking over a single giant wolf.’ Then another year or two later they will attempt to integrate me into their world order. We will be united nations, and wolf! By the time they realize their mistake they will already be too busy worshipping me to care.”
Saul raises an eyebrow at him.
“It’s a bad wolf that wants worship,” he says. “Hans’ll come and —”
Saul hesitates in confusion. He waves it off.
“I am worthy of it,” Fenris says, curling up neatly on top of the museum and licking itself in a fashion that we will not further discuss, even though in some respects it is a more intellectually interesting process than it was for Skoll. “One day there shall be no Earth, you know, but only me; no sun, but only me; if I am good, and clever, and strong, and can breathe in space, then there shall be no galaxies, but only Fenris, and possibly an abandoned floating bunch of boots.”
“Is that what people worship?” says Saul.
“It is a panulfic heresy,” grins Fenris. It shakes its head. It stares up at the sky. “Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s go take on the world.”
Only, he doesn’t.
He doesn’t get the chance!
It’s taken a while to boot up, since they’d lost the nithrid who’d been meant to supply its power; but there’s a Lethal Magnet at the heart of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth — an ulfleiðarsteinn or ulfrafmagnsteinn, a wolf-magnet — and it has finally finished turning on.
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