Lost Tales of Ga'Hoole

always entrenched in warfare. The military tradition there is strong even to this day. Clay and I were practically hatched with ice daggers in our talons. Weapons were both practical and symbolic to my clan. Why, it was even a family custom to bring the Mountain Claws to every one of our First ceremonies so that Da could tap us lightly on the wings with it when we completed our tasks. Jak kept them polished with the finest salt crystals from the Bitter Sea for just those occasions. It was just how things were, and a part of growing up in the Hollow of Snarth.
    I was all too proud of myself, of course, for outdoing my big brother in these physical feats. More than once I teased Clay for being the smaller, weaker brother, in the way that fledglings tend to do. My parents, however, were seriously concerned with Clay’s per for mance. “Clay should be doing better already, just look at Cleve,” I heard them whisper to each other once. Only when we were fully fledged did I realize how hard it must have been on Clay.
    One thing Clay always excelled at was aca demics. He devoured books on any subject in a matter of days and then could explain all their theories without missing a wing beat. He used to disappear into some secret place for nights at a time. It was moons before I realized he was off reading something that he just couldn’t put down. Otulissa reminds me a lot of him in that respect. He was also quite good at the arts. No one in our family appreciated music the way he did. Da and Mum thought this was all very well and good, but they thought Clay needed more brawn to balance out his brains. “Still prefers his songs over his sword,” Da would say, more than a little disappointed.
    I, on the other wing, was all brawn, not a thought in my head. Clay would call me “WPB” sometimes—short for “wet pooper brains.” I don’t want to sound boastful, but I was the strongest flier that Firthmore had seen in generations—was navigating the katabats within a moon cycle of my First Flight. Dare I say, I was the Ruby of the Great North Waters? Well, I might be exaggerating there, but I was good.
    So there we were, the two imperfect princes from the Hollow of Snarth. I overhead Mum say once that if she could just combine us into one owl, she’d have the perfect son. She meant well, I guess. I did learn later precisely why she wanted a “perfect son.” It was a bit more complicated than you might think.
    One night, Clay and I were sharing a nice fat mouse in our hollow. I remember it so vividly because it was a hard-won mouse. You know, when you’re on the hunt for what seems like all night, and the little creature seems forever to be a talon-grab away. At the end of it, Clay was so ravenous that he almost butted my head going after the last bit of meat. He apologized for his uncouth behavior, and explained that he was starving because Da had made him do extra ice dagger drills earlier, and wouldn’t let him eat until he could double his speed or power or something.
    “I can’t take it anymore, Cleve,” he told me after we finished the mouse. “I don’t know why Da is doing this to me. I hate it!”
    I was about to launch into a good old-fashioned brotherly ribbing when Old Pan started mumbling something peculiar.
    Old Pan, short for Pandorissa, was a Spotted Owl who had been in our family for generations. She was so old she was my grandda’s nursemaid. Some said, jokingly of course, that she was so old that she knew Hoole himself. Nobody knew her age, but we were sure there was none older in all of the firths. Old Pan was no longer a nursemaid for my family. We all figured that our family kept her around because she had nowhere to go. She would do the occasional tidying of the hollow and such, but mostly, she entertained the chicks with her stories. I first heard the legends spoken from her very beak.
    As I was saying, Old Pan mumbled something peculiar as Clay and I finished tweener. I didn’t even know what it was at the time, but now I know it was “ Iso Veikko tahto olla prinssi joka on lupaus .”
    The strangest thing was, she spoke not in Krakish, or in any dialect of Krakish I had ever heard of. It was a language so ancient and so obscure that it’s considered dead. Clay and I knew nothing of dead languages back then, but Clay would later figure out that Old Pan had spoken in the language of the ancient Northern Prophecies, the language that the Glauxian Brothers call Kratean. It was never