Okay, I failed.
The place were Ralph attempted to trap the elf is the dead end I intended.
After rushing to get the entire climax in, it was so close to the deadline that I didn't test the game in its entirety again (as I would normally have done, of course) and failed to realize that a condition was set wrong. As a result, it skips over half the game including the mandatory line of dialogue, and the final battle is apparently unwinnable as you're missing the most powerful attacks. In other words, I pancaked up. :-(