The injuries and casualties were far more than we were prepared for, but I couldn’t let that knowledge overwhelm me. I kept my head down and moved quickly, doing as much as I could as fast as I could.

While Minnie cut away the fabric around a wound, I went to grab an elixir for the pain from a nearby cart, the way Rikky had shown me. By the time I made it back, Minnie had stopped her frantic work and just stared down at the wounded troll.

“Minnie, what are you doing?” I asked.

“He died.” She nodded at the motionless body on the cot in front of her. “While I was trying to help him, he just died.”

“You did what you were able,” I said, but any more words of comfort I might’ve given were overridden by someone shouting from outside the tent.

“Can someone help me?” he shouted, and I ran out through the tent flaps and saw Rikky’s friend Pan struggling to bring more wounded to the tent.

Rikky had sent him off with a stretcher and a medic kit, and he’d returned with two burnt soldiers in blue strapped to the stretcher, and a large Omte with an arrow in his back was leaning on him.

I rushed over and put my arm around the Omte and let him put his weight on me. He was a big guy with broad shoulders, and he somehow managed to be even heavier than he looked. I struggled to hold him up but I managed.

“Sorry,” he said when he stumbled.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you,” I said, digging deep to hold him up. “What should I call you?”

“Knut,” he said in a low grunt and tried to stand up straighter.

Try as we both did, we weren’t moving fast at all. Even Pan, pulling two soldiers with only the petite Minnie helping him, was ahead of us.

As we walked, I could hear the wyrm roaring, and I looked up toward the sky. I couldn’t see the creature through the haze, but the mountain wall was close enough that I could see the cages made of stone and iron, filled with bizarre beings with trollian eyes and extended hands.

“What in the world do they have caged to the mountain?” I asked.

Pan looked up, and his expression changed to confusion. “Those are Ögonen, but I don’t know what they’re doing up there like that.”

I had heard of the Ögonen before, but I had never seen them. Merellä rarely extended invitations to the Kings and Queens, and I hadn’t yet had the pleasure. The official briefings I’d had on the Ögonen described them as cousins of trolls, more in tune with nature and plants. They volunteered their powerful psychokinesis to help protect our kind and our way of life, which Merellä and the Mimirin institution professed to be their true purpose.