“I’m happy that I got to know you at all,” she sniffled. “Do you think I’ll ever see you again?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’ll always remember you.”

She let go and looked up at me, her bottom lip trembling. “I’ll never forget you, Ulla. I promise.”

“Eliana!” Sumi yelled, sounding more panicked. “They’re going through the waterfall! We have to go now!”

“Go,” I told her, and Eliana sobbed as she took a step back. “I love you, Eliana.”

“I love you, Ulla.” And then she turned around and ran to Sumi.

Sumi grabbed her hand and they ran across the bridge. Pan and I stood at the edge watching them go, and when they made it halfway across, the bridge started to collapse. It was a slow rumble, with stones plummeting down into the epic cavern. Sumi and Eliana ran faster, and they barely made it across in time.

Once they made it over, Eliana waved at me once more, and then she and Sumi disappeared into the waterfall.

Epilogue

In the weeks that followed the wyrm’s devastation of Áibmoráigi, change rippled slowly through the kingdoms. All of the five tribes had suffered severe casualties, and the Älvolk were almost entirely wiped out, with only a handful of children and thrimavolk left to pick up the pieces.

All of the Ögonen had made an exodus back to Alfheim. Even the ones that had been in Merellä. Nobody saw them go—they were there the morning before the wyrm came crashing through, and gone the next.

Underneath the mourning and sadness was a feeling of restlessness and reevaluation. Trolls for so long had thought of ourselves as higher beings, something inherently superior to humans because of the possibilities of our blood. But the Ögonen had used a vision to show the truth to me, and their absence showed the truth to everybody else.

Once, trolls had descended from the álfar and humans, but we were now so far removed that we were basically humans ourselves. Only, we had been siphoning magic from the Ögonen, who truly were the powerful beings we only pretended to be.

The issues that the tribes had been facing—the infertility, the weakening of powers, even the deleterious effects that the psychokinetic powers left on us (like Tove’s and Wendy’s premature aging)—were because we were not meant to have the powers we had. Our bodies were those of humans, but the abilities were stolen from the more powerful Ögonen.

After I told my friends about the vision, Wendy launched an investigation to make sense of what was happening. A long time ago, Frey had helped the Älvolk—he’d had to siphon the Ögonen’s power to create such a powerful spell to keep the door to Alfheim closed. But they learned to twist the spell, to drain the power and push it into their children.