Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

was not seeing eyes.
    “You see it, don’t you?” Fengo said.
    “I see something but I am not sure what.”
    “It is an ember.”
    So it was in the eyes of the dire wolf Fengo that I caught my first glimpse of what would come to be known as the Ember of Hoole. I felt its power immediately. I sensed that it could be a dangerous thing to let loose in the world. But it also held the promise of great good.
    “You came to learn about fire, did you not?” Fengo asked.
    I nodded. I did not ask how he knew this. I understood that in many ways this wolf was like me. He was a flamereader. He had firesight. And he knew much, for he lived in a world of constant fire here in the Beyond.
    “I can help you,” he said. “I can teach you some things, but not everything. And you will soon learn more than I can teach, and know more than I can imagine.”
    This puzzled me. “How can that be?” I asked.
    “You can fly,” he said simply.
    “But why should this help me learn more?”
    “You are able to fly over the craters from which the fires leap. You can look into the heart of the volcano. On the wing, you shall catch the hottest coals.”
    “Catch coals?”
    “Yes.” Fengo nodded. “Catch coals and then make fire and see what can be made from fire. With that, I might be able to help you for I have explored the effects of flames on certain materials.”
    “It doesn’t just burn things up?” I asked.
    “Not always. Sometimes it changes things.”
    I was intrigued and was wondering what these changes could be when he interrupted my thoughts.
    “And perhaps one day you shall see where the ember lies buried.”
    “Do you mean the wolf ember?” I asked him, for that was how I thought of the ember I had seen in his eyes.
    “It is not the wolf ember,” he said quietly. “It is the owl ember. Make no mistake. It is the Ember of Hoole.”
    “That cannot be!”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it has been told that Hoole was the first owl: In that time when all birds were alike, the first one to become an owl was called Hoole. It was even said that he was a mage. That he possessed good magic. But it is just a story from a time long ago when there were no high kings, no kings at all. The word ‘Hoole’ now means first of a kind.
    “And in our wolf language the word ‘Hoole’ simply means owl. You see, my friend, it was the spirit of a Hoole that I followed when I led my kind here from our icelocked land.”
    “The spirit of an owl? Not a real owl?” I asked him.
    “Oh, she was real all right. But long dead.”
    “You mean a scroom, then.”
    “Yes, a scroom, if that is what you call the spirits of the dead.”
    “Hoole,” I repeated the word softly. It had a lovely sound that seemed to spin out into the darkness like that wild and untamed song of the wolves when they howled into the night. “Hoole,” I said it again. Like a silvery filament of moonlight, it whispered through the dark.

CHAPTER FOUR
BONK!
    A lthough it had been only a reflection in Fengo’s eyes, I became haunted by my brief vision of this ember. I sensed a power in this coal, power far beyond that of my visions, of being able to see the present in distant places where I was not flying or roosting, and events in a time that was not my own. On my subsequent trips, I flew over the five volcanoes countless times trying to figure out where the ember lay buried. It burned in my dreams, in my gizzard. Its power both fascinated and frightened me.
    I learned much from Fengo at this time, much about fire and flame. He showed me how to start fires from the cooler embers that lay in the glowing coal beds that flanked the sides of the volcano. He showed me how nuggets of silver and gold could be melted by fire and shaped as they cooled. But more exciting to him than silver or gold were the rough rocks in which something he called the “deep metals” were locked. Fengo felt that there might be a way of extracting these metals if a hot enough firecould be built. But for that kind of fire, one had to retrieve coals before they hit they ground. They were the hottest of coals. Every time Fengo talked of this, his eyes gleamed.
    “Grank, if we can make strong metal and learn how to shape things from it”—he paused—“well, it is almost unimaginable how our lives might change.”
    Fengo needed me to retrieve the coals, but I needed Fengo to craft the metals, for the wolf was amazingly skillful. With his teeth he gnawed intricate designs on the surface