Guardians of Ga'Hoole 15 - The War of the Ember

glaumora was a profound violation of this unwritten code. So she helped the owl, dragging and pushing it as gently as possible, to the spot beneath the bell where her own father’s bones had once rested. “What is your name?” She asked. But the sick owl had sunk into a delirium and was speaking gibberish. So now for the second time that evening, Bess rose and flew in the deep shadows of the bell’s hood.
I am the chimes in the night,
    The sound within the wind.
    I am the tolling of glaumora
    For the souls of long-lost kin.
    I shall sing you to the stars,
    Where your scroom shall finally rest
    ’neath the great bell of the sky
    In a tower of cloud crests.
    When she came to the last verse for this nameless owl, she felt none of her usual hope. It was hard to singfor an owl one did not know. But she sang on. He would be dead by morning, she was sure, but she would have done her duty. After finishing the ritual song she alighted near the Boreal’s still form. The unknown owl roused himself and spoke in a low voice, “Go. Let me die alone, in peace.”
    Bess spent the night as she spent most of her nights, deep in study of ancient texts of the Others. Tonight her study was more solemn, shadowed by the thought of the dying owl. She had just begun her translation work for the fourth volume of the fragmentum, which was composed of scraps pieced together from the remains of some of the Others’ great literary works. At the moment, she was working on some beautiful love sonnets attributed to the playwright known as Shakes. In between her scholarly labors, she took breaks to stretch her wings and fly the wonderful, swirling, misty gusts of the falls. As the night thinned, she went out to catch one of the plump water rats that scampered around the rocks at the falls’ base. Then, before she turned in, she went to the bell tower to see if the owl had passed on.
    He had not, but she was sure it would not be long. Bess could hear the owl’s ragged breath from where she perched. She kept her distance as she watched, for once the final song had been sung it was customary toleave the owl so that there was no shadow other than the bell’s cast upon it. The moon had long since slid into another world, but twixt time was nearing and the long shadows of morning would soon be upon the Palace of Mists.
    She headed for the nest in the map hollow of the Palace of Mists where she now slept. It was not as comfortable as her previous sleeping place had been, a splendid hollow in the headless statue of an Other. Well, not quite an Other. It was a creature she had discovered through her research that the Others called an “angel,” which was shaped like the Others—with the addition of huge wings. Whether or not angels truly ever existed, Bess could not determine. But the whole idea of the Others fashioning a likeness of themselves with wings struck Bess as rather poignant. She had found comfortable lodging in its right shoulder.
    These days, however, she slept in the maparium. Bess almost dared not think about the reason for this change, as the secret was so vital to the well-being of the owl world that she feared merely thinking upon it could somehow put everything in danger.
    In this chamber there were cabinets of ancient navigational instruments and strange artifacts. Its walls were honeycombed with deep, narrow cubbyholes. Inthose cubbyholes lay maps furled in metal tubes, a system which seemed to preserve them very well. The first time Bess tried sleeping in the maparium was during a spell of particularly awful weather. She had tried out more than a dozen sleeping places. First, the cubbyhole slots, which she hated; then she tried the case of a sextant, an instrument used by the Others for celestial navigation. But it was too shallow to get comfortable in. She had finally nested in a strange spherical map the Others had called a “globe.” It had a rather large hole in it in the middle of an ocean labeled Pacific.
    Upon entering the maparium, Bess, as she always did before settling into her new nesting place, perched for a moment in front of a collection in one of the largest cabinets. On the back wall of the cabinet, a map was mounted, and fixed to the map were a half dozen stone points, “arrowheads” the Others had called them. They seemed to be arranged on the map according to the regions the stones came from. The cabinet and its simple weapons suggested to Bess that the Others, now gone, had made a study of others