Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning

skogs are Snowies. It was unusual for a Short-eared Owl like myself to be selected. But my clan was rather small.”
    “So why aren’t you still a skog?”
    “There are no more stories to tell. No more songs to sing.”
    “What?” Gylfie blinked. “I…I don’t understand.”
    “Except for myself, my clan was completely wiped out, massacred.”
    “No!” Gylfie gasped.
    “Yes, massacred in the War of the Ice Claws. Ifghar led the attack. It was wanton murder. He need not have killed them all. But he did, even the owl chicks.”
    “But why have you served him all these years?”
    “I became a Glauxian Sister and I learned that to forgive one’s enemy is the highest Glauxian duty an owl can perform. And when I forgave, I truly began to heal.”
    “But look now what has happened. Ifghar hasn’t changed.”
    “That’s not the point. I have. I am healed. He is not.”
    Gylfie peered hard at this remarkable owl. The gold she had painted on her feathers had been worn away by the flight. There were just a few glinting streaks left.
    “Now fly off, little Elf Owl,” she said to Gylfie. “Remember the song I have given you. The words will power your flight as heartily as your primary feathers.”
    Gylfie stood at the very tip of the branch and spread her wings. She began to sing softly the first words of the song and, indeed, it was as if new billows of air gathered beneath her wings. She was not even aware of having flapped them, but she was soon airborne.
    The song seemed to swell in her breast and propel her onward, even through these katabatic winds. It wasn’t long before she saw a tendril of steam swirling up from the choppy waters. She flapped hard toward the ocean smee hole singing the song for the second time. But as she came to the end of the first verse she stopped singing. Dream? Believe in your dream? Now what does that mean? What is my dream?
    Suddenly, all the words in the song took on a new and deeper meaning for Gylfie. When she had sung the song the first time she had felt that the song was one simply to help her get home, back to the great tree, back to the band, back to Soren. But now it seemed as if the song were challenging her in some way to do just the opposite. She felt herself rising on the thermal updraft from the smee hole. It was warm. It was comfortable. She could fly on the crown of this thermal for a long time, toward Hoolemere and home. But why was she hesitating? The words of the song seemed to dare her to break out of this thermal, to set her wings to the sea wind. Am I being dared to dream?
    Gylfie began to feel an odd sensation in her gizzard that she had never experienced before, not a quiver of fear, but perhaps one of excitement. But I am not one to dream. It is Soren who dreams. Soren has starsight. What Soren dreams about often happens. There were tiny holes in the cloth of a dream that Soren could see through. But right now, Gylfie hadthe oddest sense that she, too, was seeing through a hole in a dream. It might even be the same hole in the same dream as Soren. How perfectly strange, she thought. Except it seemed to Gylfie as if they were both peering through it from opposite ends.
    Soren, she whispered. Soren, be patient. There is still something I must do. She had to turn back. She had to get the Frost Beaks, because even though Gragg and Ifghar knew little, they knew enough to tip off the Pure Ones and that would be complete diasaster. Somehow, she had to convince the Frost Beaks, the Glauxspeed divisions, and the Kielian snakes—parliament or no parliament—to take part in the coming invasion. So the tiny Elf Owl broke loose from the downy warm comfort of the thermal and headed straight into a katabatic wind. She would fly to Dark Fowl Island, katabatic winds or not. For Soren, for the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, she would fly to hagsmire and back.
    Somehow she found tunnels through the fierce winds and the ragged edges where the katabat was shredded and weak. Somehow the little owl kept going. And on the highest cliff of Dark Fowl, the skog Snorri caught sight of Gylfie and began a new song. It was a song about the rarest of flowers in the Northern Kingdoms, the Issenblomen, or the Ice Flowers.

At the edge of the avalanche
At the glacier’s icy rim
Grows the flower of the snowfields
Trembling in the wintry wind.
    It dares to live on edges
Where naught else would ever grow.
So fragile, so unlikely
An owl slices through this blow.
    She dares the katabats
Her