Guardians of Ga'Hoole 05 - The Shattering

the Great Ga’HooleTree, there was an owl on the brink of a major gollymope. Otulissa bent over a plan she had made, a landing diagram for an attack on the Pure Ones. And now the divisions actually exist. And there really will be a platoon of Frost Beaks from the Northern Kingdoms! She sighed. It was hopeless. If only someone would listen to her—Ezylryb, Boron, Barran—even Bubo. The sounds of the celebration welcoming back Eglantine and Primrose drifted into her hollow.
    Madame Plonk flew by on an unsteady course. She had obviously had too much of the milkberry brew that the adults often drank at celebrations.
    “Am I the only one with an ounce of sense around here?” Otulissa said out loud to no one in particular.
    “Hardly!”
    Otulissa’s head spun around. She gasped as she saw Ezylryb poking his beak into her hollow. “I want you, Eglantine, and the band—no one else—down in the parliament chamber in a quarter of an hour.”
    Otulissa blinked in utter bewilderment. What in the world?
    “And, Otulissa, try to be discreet when you fetch them. Don’t go beaking off in your usual voluble style!”
    “Well…well…no, of course not, sir.” But she could have sworn she saw his squinted eye wink.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Living Dead
    T he Boreal Owl who stood guard at the entrance to the parliamentary chambers nodded for them to go in. The young owls had been here only twice before, and each and every one of them now felt a tad shameful about all the times they had eavesdropped on the parliament. The members of parliament were arranged in their usual positions on a slender white birch tree branch that had been bent into a semicircle. There was, of course, one vacant spot on this perch: the space that Dewlap had once occupied. But then all the young owls gasped as they simultaneously realized that the pile of dirty gray feathers in the corner of the chamber was attached to a bird, and that bird was the owl Dewlap. What in Glaux’s name had happened to her? She had once been a rich, lustrous brown color, shot through with steaks of white. But all of her brown feathers had turned gray and her amber eyes had turned the color of mud. Her head jerked in palsiedmovements, and she seemed to be muttering something unintelligible.
    Boron spoke first. His voice was gentle. He realized what a shock this was for the young owls, and he fervently hoped that this notion of the old Whiskered Screech’s was right. The band and Otulissa and Eglantine were bold. There was no doubt about that. But were they really mature enough for this? “Young’uns, she is not shattered. This has nothing to do with flecks,” the Snowy monarch said softly.
    “What, then?” Twilight asked in a barely audible voice.
    “Her gizzard has grown still,” Boron continued. “And her heart is broken.”
    “Broken?” asked Gylfie. The young owls had never heard of such a thing as a broken heart.
    “This is difficult to explain,” Boron said, looking at each of them and at the same time wondering how he would do it. “We owls experience most of our strongest emotions, as you all know, in our gizzards, but there are a few reserved for the heart. When an owl has been unfaithful, has betrayed a cause or a friend or, like Dewlap, the entire tree as she did by leaking information to the enemy during the siege, it has also betrayed its own heart. When such an owl realizes what it has done, its gizzard often becomes still and its heart tries to work harder to make up for the difference. But an owl’s heart cannot do what an owl’s gizzard is supposed to do, and it breaks. Not literally, but it breaks in a way that even though it still pumps blood, its spirit is broken.”
    “What happens to such an owl?” Soren asked in a scared voice.
    “Well, it becomes rather like its heart and gizzard. It grows still. It continues to eat and breathe, but it is helpless. It is as if the owl’s soul, its scroomsaw, has left its body, yet it is not dead. The owl is not a scroom. It is what we call the living dead.” The young owls were very quiet. They could not even imagine such a thing, but when they looked at Dewlap, they could believe it.
    “So what do you do?” Otulissa asked in a quiet voice.
    “Well, my dear, that is where you come in.” And the way Boron said “you,” it seemed that he meant Otulissa in particular. “We have a mission for you.”
    “Me?” Otulissa asked.
    “You, Otulissa, with the help of your friends