Guardians of Ga'Hoole 10 - The Coming of Hoole

times on young polar bear cubs left while their mothers went hunting. She had swooped down on a fox’s kit that had scampered from its den. And nothing was more delightful than a nest full of soft newborn bunnies. The pathetic mewlings of the mother before Ygryk would rip out its throat, the wide-eyed disbelief of those babies as she slowly ate them one by one, too stupefied even to run. But this fascination and thrill of power over the innocent had turned to something else when she had met Pleek and had thought of a chick of her own—half-owl, half-hagsfiend—a dear little creature. She had imagined it for so long. The chick would have, of course, two darkbrown tufts that rose on top of its head, just like Pleek’s. And she pictured its plumage mostly black but shot through with some of the grays and tans of a Great Horned. Its eyes would be the lovely amber of Pleek’s. When she’d begun to realize that this was not going to happen, that there would be no chick, she tried to remember some old nachtmagen spells that she had heard about from an ancient crone of a hag who lived deep in the Ice Narrows. She had visited the hag. Kreeth was her name, and Ygyrk had looked at some of the peculiar birds Kreeth had produced from her experiments with puffins, which were prevalent in the region. Some had called the resulting birds monstrosities, but Ygryk found them quite charming.
    “It can de done,” Kreeth had told her. “Better not to get an egg though. Better to get a hatchling or even a young owlet just learning to fly. Then if you set your half-hags around it and say the first spell, it will make the chick resistant to the poison. After that you must move on to the second spell.”
    “And what is that?” Ygryk asked.
    Kreeth waited to reply, then spoke. “You won’t like it, but it must be done. You must trust the spell. It is called the nacht blucken.”
    “What is it? I’ll do anything.”
    Kreeth had looked at her carefully. Yes, she believed this desperate hagsfiend would do anything. The passion was there. “You must pluck out one of its eyes,” Kreeth said.
    “What?”
    “You heard me. You must pluck out one of its eyes.”
    “But how will it see to fly?”
    “Fear not. It will grow another eye very quickly but where the eye was, the powers of the fyngrot will enter.”
    “It will have fyngrot even though it started as a simple owl?” Ygyrk was stunned.
    “There is nothing simple about an owl. Nothing at all. And if you get a special owl, one of great lineage and powerful ancestors, you will have created a most magnificent creature.”
    When Ygyrk had told Pleek about this, their desire to find a chick that they could make their own became an obsession for both of them. And then when they had heard that Siv had laid an egg, the obsession became an all-encompassing passion. To steal the egg of King H’rath and Queen Siv, and when it hatched to ensnare that chick into the web of spells she had learned from Kreeth—why they dared not even imagine the possibilities! Their powers would exceed those of any living thing not just in the N’yrthghar but in the entire universe of owls, no, of all creatures.
    A half-hag flew up to Ygryk and reported that a thread of down from the target owl had been detected amidst uneven air currents leading to the region just south of the Bitter Sea, near the Ice Dagger.
    Ice Dagger! Bitter Sea! thought Ygryk. Open water! But nothing would stop her. Her passion, a mere spark in the beginning, was now raging inside her like a fire. She would fly through any wind, any storm, over any sea! The heat of her passion would keep her dry. She would become as impervious to seawater as hagsfiends were to the poison of their half-hags. She would get this chick. She would be a mother. A mother ! The word screamed in her head. And if she had had a true gizzard it might have shattered from the tumult of her feelings.
    Some time earlier, Siv had lifted off from the Ice Dagger where she had taken a good long rest. Her wing felt much restored and, with the wind dying, she hoped to reach the Bitter Sea by moonrise. If, indeed, she would even see the moon tonight. There was a thick cloud cover, which she blessed. Her disguise was good but still, as she flew, she took care to bury herself deep within any clouds. She tried to imagine what her chick might look like. Would he have her eyes or maybe H’rath’s, the amber sparkling with bright glints of gold? Would he haveinherited her