Soren and Gylfie then befriend her, and find out that Hortense is sneaking out eggs stolen by the owls of St. Aggie's and is returning them back to their parents with the help of two eagles, Zan and Streak.

After a long period of time passes, hundreds of owlets are found abandoned in the middle of an uninhabited forest, all of them "babbling of the purity of Tyto".

Then, during the time of copper-rose rain (the name for Autumn at the Great Tree), the band sneaks away during a week-long festival to go talk to the Rogue Smith in hopes they will not be noticed missing.

The chaw picks up branches and sets them alight so that they can fight with fire, and part way through the battle, Martin, and Ruby, a short-eared owl, arrive.

As the battle reaches its end, Metal Beak reveals his identity to the Chaw, now including Martin and Ruby, as being Kludd, Soren's evil brother.

Taking place immediately after the end of The Rescue, Kludd/Metal Beak has his mask still ablaze and he crashes into a pond near the hollow of Simon, a brown fish owl and a pilgrim from the Glauxian Brothers' Retreat.

Before alighting from the island, Dewlap finds Otulissa reading Fleckasia and Other Disorders of the Gizzard and sentences her to the Flint mops, which is the Great Tree's way of punishment.

Ginger, a reddish barn owl taken in during a Pure Ones attack, has become friends with Eglantine and Primrose, despite her still harboring their brutal ways (such as when she is caught toying with a mouse).

After brushes with pirate owls and polar bears, and most dangerously Ezylryb's treacherous younger brother Ifghar, the Guardians return to the Southern Kingdoms and Twilight kills Kludd in battle.

During the early parts of the book, Nyroc awaits the tupsi ceremony that will make him a true Pure One, which it turns out is the murder of his dearest friend, which he must perform himself.

Back in Hoole, rumors spread of Nyra's death, which she uses to her advantage and kills the rogue smith of Silverveil, stealing her things and impersonating her, which gains her valuable bargaining chips for one of her plans from a gullible magpie.

At first, the ember puts Grank into such a deep trance that after receiving visions of Hoole's parents, King H'rath and Queen Siv, in danger from Lord Arrin, a traitorous owl seeking to steal their egg and raise their hatchling, he does not go to help.

This culminates in a prison hollow being built in the Tree, which escapes Otulissa's knowledge until she is arrested for hiding a precious teacup Madame Plonk asked her to keep.

Coryn grows excited when the Band tells him that they get to go to the Palace of Mists (Bess' secret location) first, a place very few owls know about, and even fewer have gone there.

Gwyndor, father of the Rogue Smith Gwynneth and one himself, hears the relay and flies to the Great Ga'Hoole Tree to inform them of this imminent danger to the Hoolian world.

Just as she is about to doze off, she hears a loud bang and peers out to see the supposedly 'dying' owl, now wearing deadly battle claws, obviously searching for the hidden Ember of Hoole.

Meanwhile, Coryn, back at the tree, dispatches Otulissa and Cleve to the location provided by Dumpy, and Tengshu to the Middle Kingdom to ask the H'ryth for sanctuary to the Ember of Hoole.

A prologue and an epilogue were added to each book—in which Ezylryb instructs the Band to read the Legends hidden in a secret room before dying in his hollow—so as to tie the books together with the main series.

While searching for his foster mother (or "second Milk Giver"), he meets Gywnneth for the first time, who convinces him that despite the hardships he will face, he must return to the other wolves and join a clan.

Faolan is not well-received, and is often regarded with suspicion and fear because of his bearish ways and an odd marking on his deformed paw, a spiral, that further sets him apart from his fellows.

He begins clan life in the lowliest possible position, a gnaw wolf, and is subjected to verbal and physical abuse, along with minimal shares of food.

A year later, a neverending winter ushers in famine, and many wolves are driven mad by starvation, forsaking their clan history and sense of self under the thrall of a death cult that offers to speed them to the Cave of Souls (heaven).

To further decimate the failing wolf population, both the Beyond and much of the Owl Kingdoms are mostly destroyed by a cataclysmic earthquake, flattening the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, and ending the service of the Watch Wolves, whose natural deformities are miraculously healed.

The travelers are helped along their way by some common puffins, narwhals, and banded woolly bears across a massive ice bridge over the sea, to a land called the Distant Blue to begin a new life.

Set during the Age of Discovery (specifically the early 1520s), it is a trilogy about a group of domestic horses who escape a human Spanish galleon leaving Cuba, led by a young filly named Estrella, who become feral.

Following the North Star, they travel far and wide up through the southern part of the continent - finding Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula, Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico (witnessing La Noche Triste), the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt pine-oak forests of migrating monarch butterflies, and even abandoned Puebloan cliff dwellings.

At the end of the third book, Wild Blood, when the crowd of animals finally reaches the legendary Valley of the Dawn, after being led the whole time by the spirits of an Eohippus, a human girl called First Girl, and Tijo's deceased wise stepmother Haru of the Burnt River Clan People, a connection is established to the ending of the sixth book in Wolves of the Beyond: Star Wolf, where Faolan, now back in his kind's (the dire wolves) original homeland, tentatively called the Distant Blue, with his team of fellow dire wolves and other animals, finds a narrow green valley inhabited by American bison and horses.

At the same time, the Grand Patek (the leader of the clock-worshipping bears) devises a master plan to even enslave the lands beyond the Nunquivik, even the Northern Owl Kingdoms.

At one point in the first book it is revealed that Svenna knows the deceased Lyze of Kiel, or Ezylryb, and wonders what has happened back in the Owl Kingdoms since his death.

Zack Snyder directed the film as an animation debut with Jim Sturgess, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Barclay, Helen Mirren, Ryan Kwanten, Anthony LaPaglia, and David Wenham voicing the characters.