Guardians of Ga'Hoole 07 - The Hatchling

me your story. You promised.”
    Phillip had always felt that his own story was a sad one. But he now realized that Nyroc’s story might be even sadder as he quested for the truth about his parents.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Phillip’s Story
    W e came from Silverveil, one of the most beautiful forests in the entire owl universe.”
    “Full of trees with green leaves?” Nyroc asked.
    “Yes, and green needles, too, like spruce and fir and pine. You’ve never seen so many trees in all your life.”
    “I’ve never seen any trees in all my life,” Nyroc replied.
    “I suppose not. Well, Silverveil is one of the most beautiful forests. But there was the occasional forest fire.”
    “That’s awful,” Nyroc said, thinking of his experience of living in the barren, burnt-out canyonlands.
    “You’d think so. But fires can help a forest to grow. They clear out old dead trees. With pine trees, it takes years for their cones to open up and release seeds for new trees. But when there’s a fire, the cones pop and the seeds spread.”
    “Don’t the seeds burn?”
    “No. It’s like a miracle. Out of the destruction comes new life.” Phillip paused and then whispered to himself, “For some.”
    Nyroc tipped his head and blinked. “For some, Phillip?”
    “For my family, it was the end. It was in a forest fire that I lost my mum, my sisters and brothers, and, really, my father.”
    “But you said you came here with your father.”
    “He might as well have been lost,” Phillip answered bitterly.
    “I don’t understand.”
    Phillip sighed deeply. “My mum and da were quite different from each other. My mum, you see, had aspirations.”
    “What are aspirations?” Nyroc asked.
    “Hopes, dreams. She came from a very old family of Silverveil, one of the oldest, a noble family from the time that Silverveil had kings and queens. If they had still had them she would have been a princess. Sometimes my da even called her princess. She liked that.” Phillip’s eyes softened as if he were dreaming of something long ago.
    “But my da was different. He was a meat-and-insect kind of fellow. You fly out. You get the vole, the mouse, the occasional small fox—very occasional. My father was not happy when he had to pick off that baby fox. I mean, Da, he had his standards. Oh, that he did!”
    “What do you mean by standards?” Nyroc asked.
    “Oh, you know, rules—rules you make up for yourself, not the ones that others give you. When you decide for yourself what’s right and wrong.”
    Nyroc was intrigued. “What do these standards do?”
    “Do?” Phillip was puzzled. How could he explain this? It wasn’t as if these standards were practical. They didn’t “do” much in the practical sense. “They aren’t rules like the Pure Ones have—like you can’t carry a certain kind of weapon if you’re not of a certain rank or like all the rules against us Sooties. These kinds of rules, standards, well, they just make you a better owl.” That, Phillip suddenly realized, had been the tragedy of his father. He had been a better owl at one time, a really fine owl. Before he joined the Pure Ones.
    “Oh,” Nyroc said quietly. “But what happened when the forest fire came? You said you lost your father. But he didn’t die then.”
    “I’ll try to explain. The fire broke out in the daytime. It was so fierce that it jumped the Silver River. The smoke was terribly thick. It was impossible to see. Smoke stung our eyes and filled our throats so we could hardly breathe. We were all together fleeing our hollow in a part of Silverveil called The Brooklets.
    “Somehow my da and I got separated from Mum and my brothers and sisters. I begged my father to go backand look for them. He said no. It would be useless. He was probably right. But soon enough, I could tell that he regretted that he had not gone back. After the fire burned itself out, there was nothing left of The Brooklets. We went back. But we found no sign of Mum or the rest of the kids. We looked everywhere, flying from one part of the forest to another.
    “I could tell that my father regretted more and more each day that he had not even tried to rescue them. He stopped hunting for a while and just moped about. Worst case of the gollymopes I’d ever seen. I was really hungry. You have to understand, I was younger than you are now. I had no hunting skills.
    “But it was something worse than just the gollymopes with Da. He had this terrible anger. He would strike out