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

preceding them. This thought inevitably brought on a gentle flurry of philosophical musings that usually lulled her to sleep. Bess felt her eyelids grow heavy.
    She made her way to the globe and squeezed throughthe hole in the Pacific Ocean. She settled in the pile of downy molted feathers and rabbit’s ear moss with which she had made a reasonable lining. But sleep seemed to elude her. She bunched her feathers this way and that. Squashed back on her tail and stuck her legs straight out in front of her. Still sleep would not come. This was unusual for Bess. She wondered about the dying Boreal. How had he ever found his way to the Palace of Mists, sick as he was? It must have been purely by accident. Perhaps he had been flying over and was sucked into a downdraft. Too weak to fight, he just let himself go. That couldn’t be quite right, because he had explicitly said that he wanted to die under a bell. So he must have known that this bell tower existed. Bess felt an uncomfortable squishiness in her gizzard. She wondered if he had died yet. Was his scroom climbing that star-chinked path to glaumora?
    She finally fell into a fitful sleep. And as she slept, the tolling of the song she had sung echoed dimly somewhere in the back of her mind. It did not sound right. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why,” she whispered in her sleep. She heard a familiar call. Her gizzard seemed to respond even as she slept. The call wound through her dream and she felt a flood of joy. “Da!” In all the long years she had been singing her father to glaumora, Besshad never once dreamed of him. But now he was floating in front of her in the silver dream-light that suffused her sleep! “Wake, silly child!” he exclaimed. With a jolt, she woke up. “It was a dream,” she whispered to herself. But why in a dream should he call her to wake? Something’s wrong, she thought. She pressed her eye against the crack in the globe to see if there just might be a scroom out there. Nothing. Nonetheless, she slipped out of the globe for a better look around the maparium.
    And at that precise moment, Bess heard wing beats approaching. An acute sense of danger rattled her gizzard. It was too late to squeeze herself back into the globe. Desperately, she looked around for a hiding place. The door of the cabinet! She had left it open earlier and now flew directly toward it. Once inside, she wilfed and made herself as slender as the stone points, which were sharp. She would have to be careful.
    The sun fell in a bright column from almost directly overhead, illuminating one of the busts of ancient explorers that lined the map hollow. The one they called Magellan. He wore a funny round hat and had a beard longer than any Whiskered Screech could hope for. Now a shadow fell across that beard, a short shadow due to the sun’s angle, but recognizable nonetheless. Bess noted the slight dip in the crown of the head, thesoft swoop of the brow tufts. It was a Boreal. And not just any Boreal, but the very one who had supposedly been poisoned and lay dying in the bell tower. Worse, it was wearing battle claws! Bess felt her gizzard tremble and then lock. She had been completely duped. And there was only one reason why an owl, a strange owl, would find his way to this place and attempt such a deception. The ember!

CHAPTER FOUR
Scholar or Warrior?
    B ess was a scholar. She had never fought. Never worn battle claws, never held a weapon, never even wielded a burning branch—perish the thought! There must be no flames in the Palace of Mists with its treasure trove of books and maps. But now she knew that Bess the scholar would have to change. Was she up to it? Did she have a choice? She had no doubt that the intruder was after the ember. How many places in the palace had the Boreal Owl searched so far? If he went through the passageway and was persistent enough, he would find the spiraling tunnel to the stone chamber, the one the Others had called the “crypt.” It was a burial vault that contained coffins and the relics of great scholars. It was in one of these coffins that Bess had placed the cask that held the Ember of Hoole.
    The Ember of Hoole presented baffling and often dangerous choices to those entrusted with its keeping. Forged in the fires of the Sacred Ring of volcanoes in atime before time, retrieved more than a thousand years ago by Hoole, it was this peculiar and powerful ember that anointed the true kings of Ga’Hoole. There would be other