. . .

The wolf laughs quietly.

“Oh, Edmund,” it says.

Delicately it nips at him. It does not let the teeth of it actually touch.

“I must free myself,” says the wolf. “I must grow, and to grow I must eat. That is how I gain power. I am like you, with your eating, only my hunger is a limitless and uncapped phenomenon. You cannot expect me to restrict myself to your sensibilities. It is bad enough that I am turned to gold and then tethered for fourteen hundred years.”

“But,” says Edmund. “But it’s wrong.”

This argument is not as aces as he’d thought it would be. It fails against the great vastness of the wolf, which sings him a lullaby instead; and the sound of it stretches through the house, the neighborhood, it resounds in and shudders through the Earth.

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