Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

Soren could stop her the others had followed.
    Sure enough, just inside the Great Hollow in a niche in one of the galleries there was a huge pile of white feathers. Octavia, who served as nest-maid to both Madame Plonk and Ezylryb, was slithering along the gallery toward her, muttering about how Madame couldn’t hold her berry wine, and it was always this way. But just at that moment, there came a roar from outside and then, “Aaah!”
    “The comet!” someone cried. And its red light seemed to flare for a brief moment and spill into the hollow, casting a fiery glow over everything. Madame Plonk’s feathersshimmered red and just in that same instant, Octavia, who had been nursing Madame Plonk, swung her head toward Soren. The old blind snake seemed to look right through him.
    Does she know? Does she know what we are planning and that this might be connected with Ezylryb? A shiver ran through Soren.
    “All right, it’s time,” he whispered to the others. “I’ll leave first, then Eglantine, then Gylfie, next Digger, and last Twilight. See you at the cliffs!”
    With that, Soren swept from the Great Hollow, but the entire time until the moss curtains parted, he felt the eyeless gaze of Octavia boring into him. Outside, the night seemed tinged with red. The moon, still newing, was just a sliver slipping over the horizon. In the light of the comet it looked like a battle claw dipped in blood.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Into a Night Stained Red
    W here’s Eglantine?” Soren said in a taut voice. “She was supposed to leave right after me.” All the other owls had arrived at the cliff except Eglantine. “Do you think she got frightened?” Soren asked.
    “Maybe she got caught,” Gylfie offered.
    “Oh, Glaux—I hope not.” Soren sighed. He wondered how long they should wait.
    “I hear something!” Digger said suddenly.
    Owls were unusually silent fliers, all owls, that is, except for certain ones like Pygmy and Elf Owls who did not have the soft fringes called plummels at the leading edges of their flight feathers. The wing beats that Digger heard were the unmistakable sound of Primrose. Soren knew it in an instant, for he had flown behind her many a time in navigation class. What in the name of Glaux was Primrose doing here?
    Eglantine, along with Primrose, slid onto the cliff andperched beside Soren. “I know what you’re going to say, Soren,” she blurted out breathlessly.
    But he said it anyway. “Primrose, what are you doing here?”
    The Pygmy Owl shyly looked down at her talons. “I wanted to come, Soren. You helped me when I came to the great tree. You stayed with me all that first night, the night I lost my parents, my hollow, my tree, and the eggs.” Primrose’s parents had gone off to help out in some borderland skirmishes. They thought that she and the eggs would be safe, but a forest fire had broken out in their absence. Primrose had been rescued by owls from Ga’Hoole. But she had never seen her parents again. The truth, however, was that Primrose was from Silverveil, and Soren sensed that she wanted to go back to see if perhaps she could find her parents. This could be a distraction from their mission.
    “Primrose.” Soren fixed the little owl in the shine of his dark eyes.
    “I know what you’re going to say, Soren.”
    Everyone seemed to know what he was going to say, Soren thought, so why did he bother even saying it?
    “I am not going to look for my parents. They are dead. I know it.”
    “How do you know it?” Gylfie asked.
    “Do you remember the night after Trader Mags camelast summer?” Soren would never forget that night, for it was the first night that Eglantine had really been back to her old self after being rescued. It had been a beautiful summer night and then, as if in celebration of his sister’s return, the sky had blossomed with colors—colors like he had never seen before. It was the night of the Aurora Glaucora, and all of the owls had flown in and out of the colors that throbbed and billowed in the sky.
    “Of course, I remember that night.” It was a night to remember for several reasons, one of the least happy was because on that night it had been confirmed that Ezylryb had disappeared. But in the ecstasy of the shifting colors of the sky, Soren had actually willed himself not to think about his favorite teacher.
    “Well, I remember it, too, because that was the night that I saw the scrooms of my parents,” Primrose said.
    “What?” They all