Guardians of Ga'Hoole 07 - The Hatchling

flames. The songs of theFire Cycle wove through her brain. Her gizzard twitched madly. But even in this daymarish sleepscape, Otulissa struggled to remain rational and calm. This is just a bad dream, she told herself. It has more to do with indigestion than dreaming. It must have been that sugar glider they served at tweener, or the roasted bat wings. You know you can’t eat roasted bat wings, Otulissa! she scolded herself in her sleep. It always upsets your stomachs—both of them. I must go tell cook not to take offense if I don’t eat the bat wings. I do love that barbecue sauce, though.
    Only Otulissa would think of apologizing to the cook in the midst of a bad dream!
    When the dream finally ebbed, and she at last escaped into sleep for the few hours of the day that were left, it was still not a peaceful sleep. And when she rose before tweener, she felt completely exhausted and for the first time ever she could almost remember the blurry outlines of her dream. She peered at herself in the fragment of looking glass. “Great Glaux, I look a sight!” she muttered. Well, perhaps a good tweener would set her up. Thank goodness, she had her lesson prepared for the young’uns. But then she remembered what the lesson was: the Fire Cycle, part two. “Racdrops,” she swore softly. Otulissa hardly ever swore, but she was definitely not inclined to discuss the Fire Cycle this evening. She had had enough of it during her turbulent sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Spirit Woods
    O tulissa! That is the name! Her name is Otulissa.” And with that, Nyroc broke from his hollow, which had become thick with smoke in the blazing forest. He rose through the columns of flames, finding drafts on which he could surge upward. And although this young owl had never been trained as a collier, he had all of the instincts of one. He rode the hot spires of air that sliced like knives through the night. He had a natural sense of where the air suddenly cooled to what colliers called a “dead drop,” which could drag an unobservant owl straight down to the ground.
    Then an ember whizzed by and he caught it in midflight, an amazingly difficult feat that took most colliers many seasons of experience in forest fires to master. If an old collier had seen him, he would have exclaimed, “By Glaux! You’d think he’d been trained by Grank himself.” For indeed, he had what was often called a Grankish styleof flight, slicing the air with wings hunched slightly forward and angled down. This was called the “reverse Grank sheer” and could help a collier spin around the fringe of a rising crown of embers and snap off the best ones.
    But it was all instinct with Nyroc. He did not even know the terms for what he was doing as he flew through the flames—reverse Grank sheers, catching the ember crowns. No, he was not even thinking about this. He was looking down into the flames and thinking about the Spotted Owl named Otulissa. Once she had dissolved from his dream like dewdrops in the morning sun, but now he could almost see her, feel her. At first, he was sure it was she and she was calling to him. But then he realized it was another Spotted Owl, an elderly one. And he saw the image of this older one clearly now in the flames. Could she be a scroom? He had never heard of a good scroom before. But this one he could trust. He sensed it deep in his gizzard. He was seeing her in the flames. He was reading her. She was no hagsfiend, no hagsmire-bent scroom. No, this scroom was all goodness, glaumora-sent.
    Follow me! Follow me! the scoom’s voice sounded in his brain.
    He looked down. The fire had vanished, but the voice guided him on. Indeed, he was no longer in Silverveil.They were northeast of Silverveil. He could see the Sea of Hoolemere. Was she taking him to the Island of Hoole, to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree?
    No. The clipped but kindly voice filled his head.
    He looked down. They were flying over a peninsula and beneath them was a very strange forest. Nyroc had not seen many trees or forests in his short life, but even he could tell this one was most peculiar. All the trees had white bark and not one tree had a single leaf on it. It was a dark and moonless night. But it might as well have been day, for this forest with its white-barked trees seemed to glow. Then within the glow of these woods an eerie intensity gathered into a luminous shape. And within that luminosity there were brighter points of light that twinkled with a shimmering beauty.