The Skin Eustace Could Not Shed

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a selfish boy named Eustace Scrubb wanders into a dragon's cave, falls asleep on the treasure hoard, and wakes up to find he has become a dragon himself. His greed has made him into the very thing he most needed to escape.

He tries to fix it himself. He scratches at the scales, peels back a layer — only to find another layer beneath. Then another. No matter how hard he digs, the dragon skin remains.

Then Aslan comes.

The great lion tears through the skin in a way Eustace never could. In Eustace's own words, the very first tear went deeper than he had dared to scratch. It hurt — terribly. But when it was finished, Aslan threw him into a clear pool, and Eustace emerged as a boy again. Clean. Restored.