Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

peaked. Her usually lustrous black eyes seemed dull. “You all right, Eglantine?” he asked.
    “I didn’t sleep that well. Bad dreams I think, but I can’t remember them really.”
    The five owls left for their various classes. All the owls were required to attend all classes, even if they were not a member of that particular chaw. Tonight, however, theywere all quite distracted and in navigation; Soren nearly crashed into Primrose.
    “Soren, attention please!” Strix Struma hooted. “Too much harvest celebration, I think!” And she made a clicking sound with her beak.
    In the dining hollow, near dawn after classes ended, Soren, Gylfie, Digger, Twilight, Primrose, and Eglantine gathered at Mrs. P.’s table.
    “I’ll stretch myself out longer,” Mrs. Plithiver said, “if you’d like to invite some friends over.”
    “Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Plithiver,” Gylfie replied. “We’re fine just the six of us.”
    But they weren’t really fine. Gylfie, Soren, and Digger were very quiet. Eglantine was twitchy; Twilight sensed that he had missed out on something important, and so did Primrose, for that matter. Soren thought it might have been better if they had invited a few other owls over, even Otulissa. A nonstop talker like Otulissa would have made it easier. Their breaklight, as this meal was often called, was delicious with Ga’Hoole nut porridge and milkberry syrup poured over it from the new harvest. Toasted mice and caterpillars dipped in a sweet juice made from the plump berries. No one, however, seemed especially hungry. In fact, they were ready to turn in by the time the firstrays of the sun slid over the horizon. But first, of course, they had to go and bury pellets for Dewlap. There was only one more day and then they would have completed their flint mop. It couldn’t come quickly enough.
    Soon they were all asleep in the hollow. But Soren, even in his sleep, could sense his sister’s restlessness as she fluttered in some storm-tossed sea of dreams. Then toward noon when the sun was reaching its highest point, a terrible shrill scream split the air of the hollow. A small tornado of downy feathers swirled up from the dreaming Eglantine.
    Soren was immediately by her side. “It’s just a bad dream, Eglantine, a bad dream. You’re here at the tree safe in the hollow with me and Twilight and Digger and Gylfie. You’re perfectly safe.”
    Eglantine put her talon out to touch Soren as if to make sure he was real and this was not a dream. “Soren,” she spoke in a quavering voice. “I knew those stone walls that you described, where the rogue smith had her forge, reminded me of something.”
    “Yes?” Soren said slowly.
    “Remember the isinglass when Trader Mags came last summer? When I saw that, it reminded me of something, too. It was after that, that I came out of my, my…”
    “Condition,” Gylfie added slowly.
    “Yes, Gylfie. It was after that, that I recognized Soren again. Well, in this dream, I dreamed of stone, and it has helped me remember more.”
    “Remember what?” Soren said in a whisper. All the owls waited tensely.
    “I know where they kept us now, kept all of us from the Great Downing.”
    “Where?” Soren was now in a fever. For months, Boron and Barran had tried to figure out the mystery of the Great Downing. Where had the owls been before? Why they had been dropped in an open field far from any hollows or nests? The owls themselves were so confused and stunned, they could give no clues as to the answers to any of their questions. In fact, for the first several days, the only words they uttered in their strange little singsongy voices were weird chants about the purity of Tytos. The owls rescued in the Great Downing had all been some sort of Barn Owl, and the formal name for the family of Barn Owls was Tytonidae, or Tytos for short. Even when they finally were rested and brought back to health, not one of them could recall what had happened to them.
    Eglantine opened her beak slightly as if she were about to speak then shut her eyes tightly. There was a long pause. “You see, it comes in patches. When I saw that thin sliverof colored stone last summer—the isinglass—and the moonlight through it, and I heard the harp tuning up, I remembered how much they hated music.”
    “They? Who is they?” Twilight leaned forward, towering over Eglantine.
    “Well, they were Barn Owls like us for the most part—some Sooties and some Grass Owls, a few Masked