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Aiden was born in the middle of summer in Toussaint. Even for such a warm country, that summer was hot. Everyone sweltered in the beating sun. Aiden screamed his first breaths with cold feet which would refuse to leave him for the rest of his life. His parents worried about him, thinking at first that it must be an illness. When his feet remained cold, regardless of the outside temperature, they decided that he must be possessed or cursed. As a poor family, there was little they could do about this, so they kept him and treated him with suspicion.
When Aiden was three, he was claimed by the law of surprise and taken to Stygga keep in Ebbing. It was even warmer there than Toussaint, being further south. Even as he sweated his way through Witcher training, his feet and sometimes his hands, remained cold to the touch. The Witchers, being significantly less superstitious than the average peasant couple, just gave him extra socks and worked him as hard as anyone else. There was no explanation for his oddity, but he made it through the trials and that made him a Witcher, the same as the rest.
Lambert was born in the depths of a Kaedweni winter blizzard. The snow was so thick and deep that the midwife didn’t make it until long after the birth was over and he was swaddled to his mother’s chest under any scrap of fabric they could find to keep him warm. He squirmed and squealed and eventually began shrieking as he grew warmer and warmer. They unwrapped him, layer by layer and he finally drifted to sleep, content under one thin blanket.
As he grew, he never felt the cold. He would run around comfortable in his short trousers and shift, regardless of the weather. His father called him a demon child and threatened to abandon him regularly. Lambert decided that he really wouldn’t mind, if it meant getting away from the arsehole.
Eventually, his father got his wish, and Lambert was taken to Kaer Morhen where he was handed a sword and remade into something new. Even still, he was warm. The keep was in the depths of the Kaedweni mountains, one of the coldest places on the continent, and yet Lambert never needed more than a jerkin to be comfortable. His peers often grumbled at him from beneath their piles of furs. In the end, he stood alone in the snow, burning from the inside as his yearmates burned on their pyres.
Neither of them noticed the aches and pains until they started walking the Path. Witcher training sometimes felt like one long bruise and they certainly never had time to be anything other than exhausted. On the Path though, they could stop and rest when they needed and, although they practiced their sword forms daily, they weren’t often bruised outside of a hunt.
During hunts was another matter though. Injuries were common. Even the easiest hunt often left them with aching muscles and heightened senses from the potions. Neither of them made it back that first winter without scars. Lambert had a set of claw marks around his left bicep, while Aiden had a deep scratch down one leg.
The confusing thing for them both, were the phantom aches. They came from nowhere, blossoming into being and fading slowly. At various times they both experienced the pull of a muscle stretched to the edge of ability or the burning eyes of Cat potion in the light. Lambert found himself curling into a pained ball one day as his leg burned. He gripped it tight, expecting his hand to come away bloody, but there was no wound to be seen. Aiden dropped his sword, halfway through his morning forms on an otherwise unremarkable day as he felt his flesh being rent. Still, when he looked there was nothing wrong. While those were the most dramatic of incidents that year, they were hardly the only ones. Neither Witcher knew what to make of them. Research turned up nothing and no one, Witcher or Mage had any ideas.
In the end, they learned to live with the phantom pains. They learned the signs, feeling the creeping toxicity of a potion they hadn’t taken, noticing the stretch of a muscle they hadn’t moved. They learned to pay attention, to notice and to avoid putting themselves in a vulnerable position. They survived and they thrived, despite the challenges.
Lambert remained in the North, never venturing further south than Temeria, where the weather began to warm enough to make him uncomfortable. Aiden ranged wider, but tended to stay further south than Redania and Kaedwen, not wanting to risk frostbite on his perpetually cold extremities.
The years rolled on and they each learned and grew and survived.
Lambert was sitting by his campfire when it happened. He had travelled hard and stopped a little early, so that he could make camp while there was still light in the sky. The fire crackled merrily and he turned the rabbit he was roasting so that it cooked evenly. It was as nice a night as you could get on the Path. He had no pressing business anywhere, although he had rumours of a lucrative contract a few days away. The day was cool enough that he didn’t feel overwarm and he had plenty of food to eat.
He leaned forward to turn the rabbit again, and the world exploded into pain. There had been no build up, no warning. There wasn’t the trickle of potions or the aches of a body in frantic motion. One moment, there was nothing and the next, he felt everything. His head was spinning and splitting all at once. The pain started in his eye and radiated out, taking his sight, then his balance, then his consciousness with it. Echoes of the fire danced behind his eyes as he slumped to the ground.
He awoke.
His head was still attached. That was the first thing he noticed. The second was the pain. It wasn’t as encompassing as it had been, but it was still there, sitting behind his eyeballs waiting for him to open his eyes so that it could pounce. He considered just staying where he was, but he was a Witcher and he had learned young never to be vulnerable if he could help it. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious or what had caused it. Slowly, he pried his eyes open. It was still light, although much closer to nightfall than it had been. The fire had burned down a little but the flames were still flickering. He focussed on the details of what he could see, his mind skittering away from the truth. He blinked, then closed his eyes for a long moment and opened them again. He pushed up to sitting, feeling the pain begin to drain away. By the time he was upright, it was gone.
He couldn’t see out of his left eye.