Time blurred in the crawl between chambers. When the others slept, Aramis’ mind kept him up. His mind constantly running theories. The labyrinth didn’t care for his logic, but he measured it anyway, a stubborn defiance against the unknown. He spoke rarely, his voice becoming hoarse from disuse while he saved words for questions that might matter. None of the answers ever felt right, but the asking kept him steady.

By the time the corridor opened into the mirrored hall, his thoughts had narrowed to focus. The reflections made the room feel endless, each surface throwing the group’s shapes back a hundredfold. Silver-veined runes climbed the pillars like veins of light, pulsing faintly with their own rhythm.

Aramis stayed where he was, a few paces behind Evie and Locke. He didn’t trust this place enough to drift. But his eyes compulsively tracked the nearest pillar all the same, almost against his better judgement, squinting through the soft layer of dirt lingering on his lenses to follow the shapes of the etchings.

He adjusted his glasses, leaning just enough to catch the details, angles, intersections, and symmetry. Every line looked intentional. He breathed out slow, quiet enough not to break the medic’s negotiation. His lips moved soundlessly, tracing patterns, testing them against the web of arcane languages and glyphwork stored in his head. A thought surfaced, and he murmured under his breath, mostly to himself: “...Do I.. know you?”

The sweetness in the air thickened until it coated the back of his throat. Aramis swallowed, slow, the motion deliberate. Power offered so freely had a taste — always pleasant first, always cloying after. Kavros’ voice echoed through the mirrored hall, heavy with promise. The runes flared with it, pulsing in quiet agreement, and the mist curled low at their feet like it wanted to listen. The scholar in him wanted to listen too — to take it apart, piece by piece, to see how it worked. The rest of him remembered what happened to people who couldn’t stop at curiosity.

He didn’t step forward. Didn’t even shift his weight. The others had already tightened formation, and he wasn’t about to be the one to break it. He let the staff rest upright against his shoulder, eyes fixed on the reflection of the throne rather than the thing that sat in it. He felt safer that way. The offer gnawed at him all the same. Secrets. Knowledge. Power. It was exactly the kind of bait that hooked people who read too much and thought too little. His fingers flexed against the wood, the thought finding its way out in a low voice meant for no one but himself:

“Shortcuts leave gaps,” he murmured, the words rough as gravel. “And gaps get people killed.” He wasn’t sure if he was reminding himself, or answering the offer. Maybe both. He adjusted his glasses, eyes flicking once toward Evie, then Locke, then Yumi’s stillness reflected a dozen times over. Everyone was braced, measured, waiting for the first wrong move. Aramis exhaled through his nose, quiet but steady. “There’s no wisdom in learning fast,” he added softly, the faintest edge of disdain curling the last word. And with that, he fell silent again — not defiant, but immovable. Whatever power sat on that throne would find no eager student here.

The hall bucked and groaned like it had a spine as the Mammoths feet thundered within the chamber. Light fractured across a hundred mirrored surfaces, every reflection of the beast twisting into new impossible angles. His mind twisted between two facets of his job as support, help the charge and to take down the beast or… Evie’s voice still rang in his ears through the noise — “Find and crush a rune node.”

Crush it.
The words looped in his mind, but his instincts pushed back almost immediately.
What node? There was no network here, no visible lattice to break. Everything about this room was feeling before form. A physical field responding to emotion, to will — to memory.

Kavros’ earlier words slid through the cracks in his concentration.
The walls remember what I desire.
They remember every lie.

He blinked behind his fogged glasses, the world catching up to him in flashes — the runes pulsing, the mist thickening when Kavros spoke, the floor itself shifting like it was breathing in his commands. The realization came fast, almost violent in its clarity.

He could almost feel the weight of it: centuries of thought and grief pressed into glass, repeating because no one had ever taught it anything new. The Domain didn’t attack them out of cruelty — it was imitating the will it knew best.
And Evie’s order — “find the node” — wasn’t wrong, not really. The node wasn’t a place. It was a mind.

His heart kicked hard. His thoughts blurred and reformed around a single, dizzying hypothesis:
If the Domain obeyed the will of whoever impressed themselves on it… then maybe it could be impressed again.

He grounded his staff, the sound ringing sharp against the mirrored floor, and drew a slow, steady breath, closing his eyes. Every part of him wanted to overthink it — equations, mana flow, harmonic interference. But the truth of it wasn’t math; it was meaning. The Domain remembered Kavros’ hunger, his sorrow, his dominance. It could just as easily remember something else.

Aramis reached for the quiet places in himself that had kept him alive this long — a calm cup of lavender tea, the quiet that balanced panic, the silence that made study possible, the stubborn belief that understanding was always better than ignorance. He shaped that calm into intent and fed it into his magic.

”Remember… purpose,” he murmured, voice trembling but clear.
“Remember peace. Remember thatt you were meant to cleanse, not that which you’ve become.”

The staff answered with a low hum, vibration climbing up through his arms. He let it run, threading his own mana through the ambient pulse — not to dominate it, but to blend, like ink seeping into water. He used the same careful focus he applied to enchantments: intention as pattern, patience as anchor.

Light rippled around him, faint but visible, as he offered the Domain a new rhythm — slower, steadier, built from understanding rather than fear. Whether it listened or not was beyond him. His job was to try.

The staff’s hum deepened once more before fading. He exhaled, eyes opening to the mirrored hall.
“If you remember everything,” he said softly to the air itself,
“then remember this.”