Guardians of Ga'Hoole 10 - The Coming of Hoole

volcano. For the unsuspecting, it was a true death trap, but if one was ready, it was possible to ride it out and peel off in the nick of time. Could his mother with her crippled wing survive the ride? He couldn’t take the chance. Instead of leading the hagsfiends toward the channels, they would have to drive them from behind. He slowed his flight so his mother, Theo, and Phineas could catch up. Quickly, he told them the strategy. “Mum, stay close by. The idea is to push them from behind toward the channels.”
    The four owls then swept down on a trio of hagsfiends, and Hoole immediately started driving them toward the nearest channel that fed into the cool river of air. Theo and Phineas kept up a flanking pressure on either side of the trio. The hagsfiends wobbled in flight as soon as they hit the coolness and then they were swept into the river. They panicked utterly as they spun out of control.
    First one, then another, fell into the crater of boiling lava.
    “Port wing! Hoole, port wing,” his mother called out frantically.
    Hoole felt his gizzard seize up. There was a terrible hagsfiend flying right toward him now. A strange yellow glare emanated from his eyes. They were not in a cool spot but an intensely heated updraft. He could not stopstaring at the fyngrot. He felt it tightening around him, strangling him. He began to reel. His wings would not work. Suddenly, a shadow passed between him and the fyngrot. It was the shadow of an owl with a misshapen wing.
    “Mum, what are you doing?”
    “Hold steady, my prince. Hold steady.”
    Twice before, Siv had resisted the fyngrot, become completely impenetrable to its effects. The first time was in the Ice Cliff Palace when the hagsfiends had tried to steal the egg she had just laid. The second time was when they had brought her to ground on an ice floe. She had resisted by sheer will and the most intense concentration imaginable. She had focused on the scimitar of her noble mate the king, and she would do the same now. But this time she had two images in her mind’s eye—that of her mate and that of her son. The king and their prince. And Hoole watched as his extraordinary mother beat back the fyngrot, her scimitar raised and slashing through the yellow light.
    Hoole felt his own gizzard begin to unlock. The yellow seemed to be receding. The hagsfiend began to look quite ordinary to Hoole. The hagsfiends themselves seemed to sense how ordinary they had become to both Hoole and Siv.
    Fengo perched on his ridge, his claws digging into the dirt as he watched the battle. Red missiles from the eruptions scoured the sky while yellow flashes of the fyngrot soaked up great patches of darkness. Lord Rathnik, leading the Ice Regiment of H’rath, flew high above the flames. Their ice swords and daggers sparkled red in the reflections of the flames as Lord Arrin and his troops swarmed in to meet them. Below, the wolves howled their mad songs, and above, ragged clouds raced across the moon. It was a scene straight out of hagsmire, and the hagsfiends, drunk with the taste of blood, hoisted the heads of slain owls on their pikes in ghoulish delight.
    Hoole heard the Snow Rose shriek but paid no heed. From the corner of his eye he saw a splash of blood in the night. But there was something else that drew his attention more strongly. His gizzard began to tingle in a way he had never experienced. He felt as if he were being drawn, inexorably drawn, toward something wonderful. He flew toward a volcano that they had begun to call Dunmore and dissolved through a rip in a wall of flames. The din and the chaos of war seemed to have been left behind him. He was alone now flying over the crater of Dunmore and in the center of the crater he saw something sparkling as fiercely as a wolf’s green eye. But soon he realized that in the center of the flame was a lick of blue ringed by green.It was an ember floating in a cradle of lava. The sides of the volcano were beginning to turn transparent, and he could see the gleaming brilliance of this ember shining through it, turning the entire volcano a shimmering green with splashes of orange and blue. The grackling of the boiling lava seemed to grow still, the closer he flew. The ember beckoned him.
    Below, a curious silence had descended on all. The warring owls flew to ground behind their battle lines, and even the hagsfiends remained still and unmoving. Grank was awash in grief as he held the dying body of his queen. Dunmore whispered