“Humans are a puzzling lot, particularly in what they naively glorify. For example, they take the lion as a symbol of courage. That’s really interesting. Because, you know, when you weigh 500 pounds and you can kill with a slight gesture of your forelimb, you don’t usually have to have a lot of courage. I mean, let’s face it. You’re nature’s ninja. Nothing hunts you except humans and other lions.

Now consider the mouse. A largely defenseless creature the size of a walnut in a world of monsters, nearly all of which want it dead and most of which consider it a snack. Yet this astonishing animal will consciously face threats of impossible sophistication and deadliness, again and again, generation after generation. If there is any creature that knows everything there is to know about death, it is the mouse, whose people are, practically speaking, the pioneers of death. If there is a new way to die, mice will find it.

And so I suggest that were the humans wise, and more concerned with courage than spectacle, it would have been Richard the Mouse-Hearted, not Richard the Lion-Hearted. And shields that would effectively strike terror and respect into foes would not depict lions, but figures truly worthy of mythic awe: members of Genus -mus-.

The meek shall inherit…”

— an anonymous informant