Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

occurs but a state similar to that of yeepness. In any case, I was prepared. My ice sliver was tucked under the knobby suface of my third toe, ready to be slipped into the gizzard. I just had to get near enough to the Glauxess to use it.
    But then something strange began to happen. It felt as if the air in the burrow was vibrating. I knew immediately what it was. Two powerful forces of magic were grazing up against each other: the nachtmagen of the hagsfiends and my magic, for which there was not yet even a word. Invisible sparks between these two forces began to fly. Suddenly, an overpowering flare burst from the eyes of the Glauxess. The burrow flashed with yellow light. She stepped closer. She is trying to blind me, I thought. I will not flinch. I must let her come closer and closer. I felt myself going yeep, but I was not flying. How could one go yeep if one was already on the ground? It was my gizzard. Glaux, no! Not my gizzard, I thought. Panic welled up in me. I felt myself slipping into some sort of trance. I blinked. This was oddly similar to that strange time in Beyond the Beyond when Iwas entranced by the ember. I had sworn I would never let that happen again. I had failed to act then.
    But now something even stranger happened. In my head, there flashed a vision of Fengo and the ember as I had first seen its reflection in that dear wolf’s beautiful green eyes. The glare of yellow in the burrow began to dim. Now! I thought. Now is the time! And I lunged toward the Glauxess with my ice sliver and plunged it deep. And then the yellow receded, the world darkened, and I fell unconscious.

CHAPTER TEN
My Best Intentions
    W as I dead or was I dreaming? I seemed to be flying outside my body, high in the winter sky. Where? I was not sure. I do remember seeing the moon suddenly obliterated by what at first I thought were bats in flight. But their wings were too big, and their feathers too long and shaggy. They had to be hagsfiends, yet I felt no fear. When I looked down I saw that they were hurling themselves from the Island of Elsemere. And then I woke up. I was in a burrow. The burrow of the Glauxian Sisters on that same island. I looked around. It took a while for my eyes to adjust. They burned as if they had been seared, as sometimes happens to warriors who fight in daylight and encounter ice glare. But this I knew had not been the case with me. I blinked several times and was soon able to make out dark lumps scattered across the floor of the burrow. My Glaux! I thought. The sisters are dead! The hagsfiends have killed them all. As if proving this, the heavy stenchof crow suddenly assaulted me and here and there a black bit of feather floated down from the burrow’s ceiling.
    But then I heard a stir from the owl closest to me. It was the Glauxess. She raised her head, then dropped it again with a small gasp. I saw the glint of the ice sliver. Cautiously, I approached her. “Rorkna?” I whispered gently.
    “Yes, I answer to that name. What has happened to me? What has happened?” She raised her head again. Then, looking around her, she gasped. “Oh, my dear sisters!” She gave an agonizing cry.
    “Don’t worry, don’t worry. They are not dead,” I assured her. “If you are not dead, they are not.”
    “I have the most awful pain deep in my gizzard.”
    “I can help you,” I said. I hoped I could. I knew I would have to try to remove the ice sliver or else her shattered gizzard would never heal properly.
    “Here,” I said, grabbing a small rock. “Put this in your beak and bite down hard while I remove this ice sliver.”
    “An ice sliver!” She gasped. “Why am I not dead?”
    “I’ll explain later. Just bite down now.”
    She did, and quickly I nipped at the tip of the ice sliver that protruded from her gizzard through her flesh. She gave a yelp of great pain and swooned. But as she did so, I heard the first rustling of the other owls. The Nacht Ga’ had been broken for all of them. They were rousingthemselves now, one by one, shaking their heads as if they had been in a long, deep sleep. As the Glauxess was restored, so were they. She had been the key upon which the Nacht Ga’ turned.
    “How many moons have we been gone?” asked one.
    “Gone?” asked another. “I think we have just been asleep.”
    At that moment, the Glauxess came out of her swoon. She was as perplexed as the others. “Something strange has happened here,” she said.
    Now, Dear Owl, I was faced with a