06/15/2026: Victory and a Puzzle

The Armen do not charge. They advance — measured, deliberate, wearing Arman’s face across every iteration, each one belted with the Giant’s Strength that makes even a clone of a changeling into something genuinely dangerous. The staffs they carry hum with the same force as the one Arman took from Lawrence. Arman himself stands apart from the fray, watching his own face multiply through the chamber, and does nothing. He cannot make himself raise a hand against them. They are him. His allies are also him. The arithmetic of violence here is one he cannot solve, and so he steps back, folds his arms, and lets the others work.

Borark surges forward, swinging the Drunkard’s Cudgel in a wide arc — and misses, the blow whistling wide of one of the Armans, who retaliates immediately, landing a solid hit that rocks the barbarian back on his heels. Blood on his teeth. Borark doesn’t hesitate. The Amulet of the Drunkard is at his throat before he’s finished staggering, and its magic pours into him — warm, rushing, generous. His wounds knit. His vision swims. The healing works precisely as intended, which is to say it also does something else: a creeping, golden fug settles behind Borark’s eyes, and he realizes with the particular clarity of a man who has just made an error that he is, unmistakably, drunk. He squares his stance. He will manage.

From the rear, Vali’s voice cuts through the din — sharp, surgical, precisely cruel. The Vicious Mockery finds its target and burrows in, and one of the Armans throws back Arman’s head and screams in psychic fury, a sound that has no business coming from that face. Kiki vaults cleanly over the prone Arman on the floor, fluid and unbothered. Her Catapult flings a javelin with enough force to bury it to the shaft. Thunk is already moving with the quiet efficiency of a bugbear who has decided something must die. His Spirit Guardians bloom into being: small, silver, celestial things that drift in lazy arcs through the air and are absolutely merciless. Three of the Armans fall within their globe of light. The tiny figures shred them without expression. Three fewer faces in the room.

Then one more face goes still.

The real Arman folds to the floor between the remaining combatants, and no one who is not Reklaw knows they are watching the real Arman die. To the rest of the party he is another clone, another copy, one more Arman among many. Reklaw knows. Reklaw sees.

Borark, magnificent and listing slightly to the left, charges the final two Armans and drops them both, the Cudgel finding targets now that it had denied him before. He stands over the wreckage, breathing hard, the room quieter than it has any right to be. At his feet, one of the downed Armans wears a Belt of Giant Strength. Borark reaches down, unbuckles it, and hauls it around his own waist with the satisfied economy of a man who has earned a thing. The belt clicks home. The body it came from quietly ceases to exist.

“He’s here,” Reklaw says, and points.

Thunk drops to his knees and lifts the changeling’s head, and before he can reach for a spell Kiki’s magic is already there, restorative and golden. Arman’s eyes open. He blinks up at the chamber — at the empty space where his reflections had been, at the faces of his companions ringing him from above — and sits up slowly, like a man who has earned the right to be tired. The healing has reached his wounds but not the exhaustion beneath them, the bone-deep kind that sleep alone cannot address. He finds the nearest bench with a changeling’s unerring instinct for the path of least effort and lowers himself onto it without a word.

The remaining bodies vanish with the healing of their source — and there on the floor, staggering to his feet, is only one Arman. The real one, and the only one.

⚔

At the center of the maze, two iron golems stand at two doors, and the party would very much like to rest.

They will not permitted to do so.

“No rest.” The voice that comes from the nearer golem is hollow and enormous, the voice of something that has never needed to breathe. “You must answer our riddle, or return to the maze.”

What follows is, in the technical sense, an explanation of the rules. One door leads forward — to Maladomini, to the next descent. The other leads nowhere any of them want to go. One golem tells only truths. The other tells only lies. One question. One chance.

The golems do not seem interested in elaborating further. They establish what they will answer — questions about the doors, nothing else — with the patient repetition of entities that have been here for a very long time and expect to be here for considerably longer.

The party begins to argue.

The argument covers, in roughly equal measure: who should ask the question, what the question should be, whether the correct logical formulation has been correctly recalled, and whether anyone actually remembers how this is supposed to work. Arman rubs his eyes on his bench. Borark, still somewhat drunk, offers a contribution that is sincere but structurally unsound. The golems wait.

They will keep waiting. They have nowhere to be.

Beyond the two doors, somewhere ahead in the sulfurous dark, Maladomini holds its breath — and if the party chooses wrong, it will not need to hold it long