Guardians of Ga'Hoole 13 - The River of Wind

said.
    “Look down. There are bodies,” Soren said, breathing heavily. Blood spread in the snow, and in the midst of the red glared a bright metal mask.
    “Great Glaux, it’s her!” Soren exclaimed. The four owls lifted into flight and began to hover in descending circles over the carnage. A few seconds later, they landed.
    “So much blood,” Twilight said. “I thought these fellows were not about blood. The danyk said that to tear with talons was considered an ignoble way to win at combat.”
    They looked at one another, perplexed. “Who did this?” Coryn asked.
    “Oh, no.” Soren was slowly walking around the slaughtered owls. Gingerly, he put out his talons and turned the blood-streaked mask over. There was no face beneath it. “There are only three bodies.”
    “She got away?” Twilight said.
    “I tried,” a voice spoke quietly. It was the blue owl, the one who had so suddenly appeared.
    “You tried,” the danyk swooped down. “You call this trying? This is an affront to the entire meaning of Danyar, the way of noble gentleness. This is ignoble.”
    The blue owl wilfed. “I am not ignoble. I am not!” He wept. Other owls were gathering. The pikyus gasped in shock at the blood, the torn wings. “It’s death, isn’t it?” the blue owl asked in a trembling voice tinged with desperation.
    The H’ryth alighted. “It is death unclean, death with greatest pain. You acted selfishly. You did not kill but murdered. You struck those fatal bloody blows not from the innermost part of your gizzard but from your pride and your anger.”
    “But Holy One,” the blue owl now collapsed before the H’ryth, “I have done honorable things.”
    “He has,” Doc Finebeak said. “He rescued Bell.”
    “Bell?” Soren said. “Bell—what happened to Bell?” Then it came back to him. The terrible dream he had had at the Panqua Palace. That urgency that had coursed through him in his sleep, the feeling that he had to return immediately, that someone very dear to him was in danger.He blinked at the owl and remembered the blue feather that had in his dream floated near the desert floor.
    “She is fine now. She is safe, thanks to this blue owl,” Doc Finebeak said. “And not only that, he guided us here.”
    The H’ryth winced at the word “guided.” “He is no pikyu!” the H’ryth spoke harshly. “He is an escaped dragon owl.”
    “What?” The Guardians looked nervously at one another and began to mumble among themselves.
    “But he saved an owlet,” Soren said passionately. “He saved my daughter.”
    “Phonqua byrmong ping tsay phrak.” Slowly, as the H’ryth spoke, the words formed meaning in Otulissa’s mind.
    “He says this owl believes he has broken the wheel of life, has made a shortcut to change his fate,” she translated the speech softly to the others.
    “I have…I have…” the blue owl said in a shrill voice.
    “You are still Orlando,” the H’ryth spoke now in Hoolian.
    “Call him what you will, but he is a good and decent owl,” Soren continued to protest. Orlando seemed to swell a bit from his wilfed state.
    “I thought his name was Striga,” Doc Finebeak said.
    A new light burned in the blue owl’s eyes. “The Striga,” he said softly.
    The H’ryth felt a deep agonizing twinge in his gizzard. He turned his gaze on the dragon owl. “You are still a dragon owl. Time will tell if you have satisfied your fate, your phonqua.”
    “May he come with us?” Coryn asked.
    The H’ryth turned to address them. “You are all noble owls. We have expected you for hundreds of years. And we have the deepest respect for you. We see in you many of the traits of our beloved Theo, our first H’ryth. We have all tried to live up to the values that the first H’yrth, Theosang, taught and practiced. We know you do not understand phonqua, but we do understand that Orlando has proven valuable to you. He is not a noble owl. Nor is he in this phase of phonqua an evil one. It is your decision if he is to go with you to the great tree. But know this: His phonqua has not been satisfied, has not come full circle.” With that, the H’ryth spread his wings. Slowly, majestically, he rose in the air and soared above the icy peaks, spiraling higher and higher until he reached the highest hollow of the Mountain of Time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
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    T he Aurora Glaucora was playing across the sky as the returning owls flew across the Sea of Hoolemere. All the owls of the tree would be out