Halmarut was the Ascian/Ancient who specialized in plants. The bit at the end about Winters trying to avoid "the withering" was interesting. I read one interesting theory that since most of the Convocation have real names that match Greek gods, Halmarut might be Demeter. The myth of why winter happens is the one where Hades steals Persephone (who is Demeter's daughter) to bring her to the underworld to be his wife and when she eats the pomegranate seeds, she is forced to stay down in the underworld for a number of months, at which point Demeter gets depressed and you get winter.
While I doubt the game will be literal in that sense, the theory did bring up that Demeter resented Hades in the myth because Hades took something valuable from her. Given Emet = Hades and he was effectively the head Ascian, the theory goes that Emet did something that ruined something Halmarut was working on and caused her to go off and do her own thing. Since the Rejoining was super important to Emet, if Halmarut had a beef with Emet, she probably wouldn't have been keen to help him out.
Calyx clearly seems to be someone important to Halmarut and therefore we can assume Calyx's plan was something that would have furthered Halmarut's plan. All we know about his plan right now is he wanted to turn people into Endless, which are basically just memories given life by aether. Travel through reflections is also limited without a special portal and Halmarut reminds us that normally you can only travel as pure aether, but small fractures between the shards allows for small amounts of matter to also be transported. So there is a possible connection there.
Perhaps with Hydalean dead, the reflections are now unstable and some other outside force will cause them to wither. She talked about hearing something where "the will of the star used to be" and Hydalean was the will of the star, wasn't she? So maybe Halmarut's ultimate goal is to basically create some manner of trans-rift "bunker" that will allow those who can enter it to weather the coming calamady, whatever it may be.
outside of that...how old do Lalas get? Krile's parents lived centuries ago because of time dialation, which means Krile's aunt would have to be centuries old
