Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

Eglantine was very agitated.
    “The Sacred Flecks of the Shrine Most Pure.”
    “Flecks!” Soren and Gylfie gasped in horror. Flecks—like the ones at St. Aggie’s!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A Muddled Owl
    I n a large spruce tree, the old Whiskered Screech Owl wrapped his seven talons tightly around a slender branch. His head was so muddled it was all he could do to concentrate enough to stay on the limb. He was completely disoriented and had been since he had flown across the small river at the edge of the Kingdom of Tyto. He could have sworn he was flying north, but then none of the stars seemed to line up properly. The Golden Talons, so beautiful this time of year, appeared to him upside down in the sky. And when he thought he was banking for an easterly turn, instead of flying into the glimmer of a rising sun at dawn, he was flying into the darkness of the west. He had known he might be going yoicks when for a trace of a second he thought, well, maybe the sun does rise in the west. And then he realized he had been flying around in circles for days. Finally exhausted, he had settled on the branch of a spruce, so confused he could hardly hunt. Luckily, the food supply seemed plentiful orhe would have starved. But summer had passed into autumn and soon autumn would be chased away by the first bitter winds of winter. He would starve, he supposed. One can never plan these things, he thought. He had always imagined he would get snuffed into a hurricane’s eye and spin around until he died or be sucked up by a rogue tornado wind—the kind they called a torque demon—that tore across the landscape and could pull up not just one tree or two but an entire forest. There was even a story that one torque demon had sucked up a raging forest fire and dumped it on another forest, igniting it as well. Ezylryb snorted. A fitting end for an old weather owl like me.
    Every day, and he was not even sure how many days had passed now, but with each day he grew more and more confused. Soon, he imagined he would be too confused to even hunt in the very small area that he was able to manage now. So this was what it had all come to. This was to be his death. He shivered as a cool autumn breeze with more than a hint of winter in it ruffled his feathers. He tried to be philosophical about it. He had, indeed, led a grand life—full of adventure, books, and young owls to teach—scholar, sports owl, lover of a dirty joke or two. There had been danger, yes, and heartbreak. He closed his eyes and a tear squeezed out as he thought of his dear Lil. But he had tried to serve well. He hoped, nobly. Now, hethought, in the deep winter of my life, I am on the brink of another winter, my last.
    Ezylryb tried to imagine what he would miss the most. Perhaps the peace of the dawn, the moment of twixt time that hung like a sparkling jewel between the gray of the night and the pink of a new morning. The young’uns—yes, undoubtedly, the young owls whom, throughout the years, he had brought into his chaw and taught to be fair navigators through any weather. Weather, he did like weather. He supposed that was what he did not like about this particular end. It wasn’t a torque demon, and it wasn’t the eye of a hurricane. It was in fact rather humiliating to die teetering and confused in a forest that he had thought he knew so well.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Nightmare Revisited
    T hat horrid old St. Aggie’s song began to worm its way into Soren’s and Gylfie’s brains.

We shall dissect every pellet with glee.
    Perhaps we shall find a rodent’s knee.
    And never will we tire
    in the sacred task that we conspire.
    Nor do our work less than perfectly
    and those bright flecks at the core,
    which make our hearts soar,
    shall always remain a mystery…

    This was the song that Soren and Gylfie had been forced to sing as they worked in the pelletorium of St. Aggie’s. Now it began to roar silently in their heads as they stood in the ruins of the castle and looked up at the empty shrine. Eglantine’s dreadful words, “the sacred flecks,” still rang in their ears.
    “The flecks!” Soren and Gylfie both exclaimed again and stared at each other. The other owls were silent. Finally, the mystery of the flecks, which they had never unraveled, had begun to reveal itself. The image of Skench storming into the library in full battle regalia came back to them in all its terror. They had been just about to fly out of the library, the highest point in the stone maze of