Once it finally stopped moving, I lay back on the ground and stared up at the cloudless, starry indigo sky. The air still tasted of brimstone and chlorine, but the haze was starting to clear.

“Ulla!” Dagny shouted as she ran over and crouched beside me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m still breathing, so sure.” I looked up at her. “Is it over?”

“Well, the wyrm’s dead,” she said flatly. “But the portal’s still open, and all the Ögonen are crowding near the bridge.”

“All what Ögonen?” I sat up and looked to where dozens of the sinewy beings had gathered, their skin seeming to glow a dark golden ochre. “Where’d they come from?”

“The Älvolk caged them on the mountain, but now they’re free,” Dagny said.

“They did this,” I realized. “All of this . . .” My voice cracked as I thought of all the lives lost today.

I got to my feet and started to run as fast as my legs would carry me, racing toward the Ögonen.

85

Odyssey

They all had their backs to me, but I could see their eyes through their semi-translucent heads. Still, it was startling when the Ögonen whipped around to look at me—dozens of them in unison—all of their golden-brown eyes zoning in right on me.

I froze in my tracks a few feet away from them, and I realized dismally that I’d left my dagger in the eye of the dragon. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t move at all.

The Ögonen stepped closer to me, and it was Ur, the Ögonen who had done memory recovery on me in Elof’s lab. I didn’t recognize them, but it was something I knew when I looked into their eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted.

It’s best if we show you, an androgynous voice said inside my head.

And then—I was flying through the air before I came crashing down in a soft green meadow. The sky above was grapefruit pink with a trio of suns lighting up a lush meadow of vibrant flowers and fluttering bugs.

A group of Ögonen were lounging peacefully in the grass, outside the mossy burrows. Nearby, in front of the opening of the cave, were a small group of trollian beings. Álfar. They wore tailored clothes made of spotted kuguar hides with jewelry of bones and gemstones.

The álfar were excited, and they called for the Ögonen to join them. They had found something in the cave.

I followed the Ögonen as they quietly crept by a sleeping pack of wyrms coiled up together.

And there, in the darkest part of the cave, was a window to another world.

Áibmoráigi—the sky passage.

The Ögonen stepped through, and I cautiously reached my fingertips out to touch it. It seemed to be a shimmery pane of glass, and through it, all the color seemed to bow and pull toward it.