The troll’s daytime dormancy and fear of sunlight

The Troll’s daytime dormancy and lethal vulnerability to sunlight govern the timing of the final rescue: Apollo and Emma survive the night by waiting for dawn, and the sun ultimately turns the creature to stone. A pattern first understood as a limit on the Troll’s activity becomes the means of destroying it and freeing Brian Kagwa.

The Rule of Day and Night

The characters understand that the Troll sleeps when the sun is up. Apollo and Emma therefore stay in the cold until morning rather than confronting it in darkness, when it is active and dangerous. The distinction is stark: daylight offers a period of safety, but the night leaves them exposed to a creature powerful enough to threaten them and Brian.

The Troll’s dormancy is not merely a convenient pause in the danger. Its sleeping place becomes the scene of its return to action. As it pulls itself from the hole where it has been sleeping, Apollo is trapped in the mist of its breath and feels a wave of nostalgia so powerful that he nearly calls out Brian West’s name. The creature’s emergence thus joins physical peril to Apollo’s painful history, even as its known weakness gives him a possible way to survive.

Waiting for Dawn

Near morning, Apollo hides among pignut hickory trees as the Troll searches for him. It tests the trees with its head, then spits out green jelly and coughs. Apollo recognizes that daylight is close and that the Troll will turn to stone when the sun rises. He uses the remaining darkness to draw it away: in a clearing, he places the cooked sheep’s head in its serving lid, exposed as bait, then climbs into a scarlet oak on the opposite side.

The plan makes the day–night rule part of Apollo’s rescue strategy. He does not simply wait for sunrise in shelter; he keeps the Troll occupied and directs its attention away from Emma and Brian. The hours of pursuit and concealment carry the danger to the threshold of morning, when the rule can finally take effect.

Sunlight and the Troll’s Destruction

After Emma and Apollo pull Brian, still alive, from inside the Troll, they crawl away as quickly as their exhausted bodies allow. The sun rises and true daylight reaches them all. The Troll trembles, stiffens, and loses its sickly greenish color as it turns to stone. Its last sound is a whimper that nearly resembles relief; moments later, its enormous body breaks apart into what looks like a mound of boulders, a small hill in the Northern Forest.

The ending confirms the rule in irreversible form. Daylight does not merely send the Troll back to sleep: it petrifies and destroys it. Brian’s survival makes the difference especially consequential—the creature has swallowed him whole, but he is still alive when his parents pull him free, and the Troll’s destruction removes the immediate threat to the family.

Narrative and Emotional Significance

The alternation between darkness and dawn turns the final sequence into a race against time. Night belongs to the stalking, the mist, and Apollo’s forced flight; morning brings the exposure that the Troll cannot survive. The characters’ knowledge of its daytime sleep supplies the plan, while the arrival of sunlight completes what human strength alone could not.

For Apollo, the stone body also becomes more than proof that the threat is over. He touches the stone where the Troll’s blind eyes had been and presses his forehead against it, feeling that he is burying what haunted him since childhood—not his father, but his fatherlessness. The daylight that ends the Troll’s life therefore closes the confrontation on two levels: it destroys the creature, and it allows Apollo to approach the shape of an old wound as something that can finally be laid to rest.