Guardians of Ga'Hoole 05 - The Shattering

Eglantine said as she started cautiously down the hole. Too bad I’m not a Burrowing Owl, she thought.
    Eglantine was back in a short time. “It does!”
    “But then I suppose that means they could surround us and come in through both sides.”
    “Oh, Glaux! I never thought of that. I don’t want to be trapped.”
    “I don’t either, but we do have the egg,” Primrose said.
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Well, the egg’s worth a lot to them. We could trade them the egg probably and get out.”
    Eglantine blinked, then her eyes seemed to narrow and grow harder and even blacker. “I wouldn’t trust them in any kind of trade. And, besides, the egg is worth even more to us and all the owl kingdoms. With it, we can control the Pure Ones. We can’t give it up.”
    “You mean it’s a hostage?”
    “Exactly!”
    Now Primrose blinked at Eglantine. In that moment, she knew that Eglantine had changed. It was as if she had suddenly grown, not just up but much, much older. She would sacrifice her life for that egg. She would die to save that egg from the Pure Ones. Until that moment, Eglantinehad only thought about death as depriving her of something she loved—her mother, her father, the place she had once called home. But now Primrose knew that Eglantine realized that you could die for something. You could die for something you loved. You could die fighting against something you hated. You could die for freedom, the freedom of the owl kingdoms.
    “I see them, Primrose. I see them,” Eglantine whispered.
    The two owls huddled closer and pressed themselves deeper under the stump.
    The smoke was clearing. Nyra had her vision back and now she would use her powerful abilities to hear. She must find her egg. Thus, the moonfaced owl began to swivel her head in smooth and precise movements, scanning not for just any sound, but a very special one that only owl mothers were attuned to. She filtered out the sound of a mouse’s heartbeat as it skittered across the forest floor, and that of a snake slithering over a log. There was the labored breathing of a mother rabbit as she gave birth to a new litter. Bunnies, yum! Nyra thought, but then admonished herself to listen for only that one sound—those tiny stirrings and muffled pulses of an egg with an owl chick just beginning to grow. The chick itself, a tiny speck, floated in the hugeness of the liquid sea containedwithin that egg, that Sacred Orb. Oh, she had planned it so carefully. The egg was to hatch on a night just as she’d hatched on: the night of a lunar eclipse. Nyra had been named for the Nyra of ancient legends, born when the moon dropped from the sky and rose in the face of a hatchling. It was said that when an owl was hatched on the night of an eclipse, an enchantment was cast upon that creature; a charm, and that this charm was either good and led to a greatness of spirit or was bad and led to great evil.
    “Aaah,” she sighed and cocked her head once more to be sure.
    “They’re coming!” Primrose gasped. The two owls peered in astonishment from the hole. There was no way that they could be seen, but it was as if the squadron headed by Nyra had pinpointed their exact location.
    “We’ve got to get out of here,” Eglantine said.
    “Leave the egg!”
    “No!” she shouted. “Never!”
    The two young owls burst out of the hole.
    “There they are!” shrieked Nyra.
    “To the fire! To the fire! Eglantine, we must go back into the fire.”
    Eglantine knew Primrose was right. They didn’t know how to fly in fire, not like the colliering chaw, but theywere better at it than the Pure Ones and, more important, they could fight with fire—as expertly as the Pure Ones fought with battle claws.
    The two young owls rose in the night and raced in flight toward the flame-scorched sky.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“It Cannot Fail!”
    A gannet flying in the vicinity had pointed them in the direction that Gylfie and Digger were now flying. The gannet thought that he had seen something that might have been two owls flying low. So Gylfie and Digger were now skimming just above the ground. On occasion, Digger lighted down to walk, using his tracking skills to find any sign of the two missing owls. This was difficult work, for Digger was not simply looking for tracks of the two owls but “tracks” of Soren’s strange dream, as he had explained it to them. Ahead was a tree stump with a hole at its base. Could a hole be considered a clear space, too? Digger knew