– 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.

<< – 7 –

Chapter 20: Gotterdammerung >>