Guardians of Ga'Hoole 07 - The Hatchling

murderer—of Kludd.
    Of course all such talk of the Great Tree was strictly forbidden. Under the threat of the most severe punishment, no owl of the Union was ever to speak of the Great Tree, or the legends of the Great Tree. Knowledge of the tree was considered “spronk,” the owl word for forbidden.
    It was with added excitement that Nyra viewed the aerial displays of her son, for they proved he would indeed be their redeemer and the one to wreak vengeance on Soren. He had been told as much since birth. And hisgizzard quickened to the task. At twixt time, when the last gray tatters of the darkness dissolve into the pale pinks of the dawn, when owls finish their night’s work and get ready for sleep, his mum had told him stories of how his da, Kludd, had died at the fiery talons of his uncle Soren. It was their twixt time ritual, a kind of prayer they chanted together now, for Nyroc knew the words so well.
    The lives of owls were filled with ceremonies that marked important events from an owl’s hatching to its death and the Final ceremony. Nyroc had already performed many of these rites. He had gone through the First Meat ceremony, when an owlet eats something other than a worm or a bug for the first time. This had been quickly followed by the First Fur ceremony, when Nyroc first ate his fresh-killed meat with the fur still on it. Next was the First Bones ceremony, when the young hatchling had been deemed mature enough to eat his meat with the bones. Then came the all-important First Pellet ceremony. The fur and bones were packed into a tight little bundle in the gizzard of the owl and then it was “yarped” or expelled through the beak. Because of this neat way of ridding themselves of most of their waste materials, owls considered themselves to have the noblest digestive systems in the bird kingdom. They commonly referred to all other birds as wet poopers.
    Today’s First Flight was one of the most important of all the ceremonies and because Nyroc had passed it with such astounding success, he would be permitted to go on to the next ceremony, First Prey, then finally the one that was mysteriously called the Special, or sometimes “Tupsi.”
    Cries of “Perfect! Perfection!” rang out. “This is the most perfect example of what our young P.O. Youths should be.” The other young owls wilfed again as they heard their elders exclaiming over Nyroc’s performance.
    But there was one, a small Sooty Owl, who did not wilf. Indeed, he seemed to experience quite the opposite reaction. He puffed up and appeared especially pleased with the hatchling’s performance. This owl was known as Dustytuft. In the rigid ordering that defined the Pure Ones’ society he occupied one of the lowest ranks.
    Any owl who joined this odd Union of Barn Owls, who claimed to be the purest owls in the entire owl universe, soon learned that some Barn Owls were considered more pure than others. Of the many kinds of Barn Owls, the purest were thought to be the Tyto alba, the Barn Owls with the heart-shaped white faces like Nyroc, his mother, and Uglamore and Stryker. Beneath them in the social order of the Pure Ones were the Masked Owls whose heart-shaped faces were not pure white. Then came the Grass Owls, with even darker heart-shaped faces. Towardthe bottom of the rankings were the Greater Sooties, like Dustytuft, and lowest of all, beneath the Greater Sooties, were the Lesser Sooties.
    Dustytuft, like all Greater Sooties, known more formally as Tyto tenebricosa, looked as if he’d been sprinkled with coal dust, leaving only a few white spots flecking his darker upper parts. His face was not precisely heart-shaped but looked a little more squashed.
    It was Dustytuft’s particular misfortune in life to have been born into this second-lowest order of Tytos. Indeed, until the hatching of Nyroc, Dustytuft thought himself to be the most miserable owl in the world. He had never wanted to join the Union. It had been his father’s idea. After the great forest fire in Silverveil in which the rest of his family had perished, his father had gone a bit yoicks and felt their future lay with the powerful and mysterious group of owls known as the Pure Ones. His father had then gotten himself killed in his first battle, a minor skirmish with a small group of Ga’Hoolian owls.
    It was not long after his father’s death that Dustytuft began to understand how truly awful it was to be a Sooty Owl within the Union of the Purest. His formal name