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The garden was making him irritable.
“Everything makes you irritable,” said Aiden’s bright voice in his head, and Lambert gritted his teeth against the wave of grief. He wanted the constant reminders to stop, wanted the pain to stop, but he also wanted them to never go away. Someday, if he lived long enough, which was a fucking big if, those memories would fade into the distance. He wouldn’t remember the sound of Aiden’s voice, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. He was always fucking smiling.
He forced his mind away from the memories to scan the garden again. It was objectively quite lovely, with mulch paths lined with square yellow bricks winding through the vibrant greenery. But amidst the greenery were statues, and statues made Lambert nervous. A garden full of statues was a great place to hide a golem. None of the statues particularly looked golem-shaped, so far, but they were still setting him on edge.
The contract for disappearing people had been unassuming at first. But none of the traces he found matched any monster’s pattern. No tracks, no blood, just people vanishing. That left very few possibilities, none of them pleasant. Lambert wasn’t sure if a Higher Vampire or a mage would be worse, but he was really not looking forward to dealing with either, and those were pretty much his only two possibilities at this point. Creepy statue garden was pointing toward the mage option.
Lambert wished he had Aiden to watch his back. They always worked better as a team. Fuck, he missed him. But there was nothing for it, he was alone now. So he made his way through the creepy garden, sword drawn, waiting for whatever was pricking the hairs on the back of his neck to fucking happen already.
Just as he was thinking it, something did finally happen. The nearest statue, a delicate spiral of tentacle covered in plants that was curling out of a rock-lined pond, moved. Lambert had been watching for golems, but no, this mage - definitely a mage, not a vampire - could apparently whatever fucking shape they felt like. The stone tentacle whipped through the air to Lambert’s left, and Lambert cursed and threw himself to the side.
“Fucking stone should not move that quickly,” he muttered. The tentacle drew back and struck at him again. This time, Lambert blocked the blow with his sword. The elemental oil seemed to be working on the fucking weird tentacle golem, at least, since his sword did actually take a chunk out of the stone. As the tentacle drew back, shedding leaves from the plants clinging to its unexpectedly mobile back, Lambert saw movement out of the corner of his eye and whirled to face… oh thank fuck, a regular, golem-shaped stone golem. Never thought he’d be glad to see one of those, but apparently there was a first time for everything.
Lambert swung at the golem, landing a flurry of hits that sparked blue as his oiled blade chipped at the enchantment along with the stone, and then had to leap back to parry the damn tentacle. Another tentacle reared up out of the water, this one half again as thick as the verdant one and dripping water from its pitted stone surface. Dammit. Clearly he was heading in the right direction, though, so he pulled a dimeritium bomb from his belt and backed away from his three stony opponents. If he could just get them all within range… Yes, there! He lobbed the bomb in the center of the mass of approaching golems, and it exploded perfectly. The tentacles started writhing wildly as they fought the cloud of silvery slivers, leaving Lambert a path to get by them and run toward the center of the garden.
The center was, unfortunately, full of even more creepy stone statues. These ones were thankfully immobile at the moment, but Lambert didn’t trust them to stay that way. He saw yet more tentacles and another regular golem, but also several more human-shaped figures, including two of winged women covering their faces with their hands as if they were crying. Those ones gave off a particularly strong sense of malevolence, Lambert rather thought, though it was difficult to say for sure since most of his attention was on the man standing in between the two weeping statues. This was definitely the mage. The incredibly impractical robes and eerily symmetrical face gave it away. Keira wasn’t the only mage with a penchant for chest-baring, apparently, because this mage’s robe was open to his navel, showing off what on anyone else would have been an easy opening for an attacker but on a mage might as well have been solid armor.
“Ah, a witcher,” said the mage.
“Who are you and what have you been doing to the people you’ve been stealing?” Lambert demanded.
The mage shrugged one shoulder, affecting boredom. “Oh, the same thing I did to the other witcher. Same thing I’m going to do to you.” He gestured to the statues flanking him. “Feed them to my friends.”
An icy chill went down Lambert’s spine. So the mage had already bested a witcher. That was a very bad sign for Lambert’s continued existence indeed. “What do you even get out of this?” he demanded.
The mage smiled. “My friends and I have an arrangement,” he explained. Good, these arrogant types always wanted to tell you how clever they were. If he could keep the bastard talking, maybe he could find a way to get a warning out to whatever unlucky witcher took this contract next. “They feed off temporal energy, you see. I bring them food and offer them protection, and in exchange, they let me take the chaos their feeding process generates. It works out quite well for all involved, really.”
Lambert snorted. “Everyone except the people you’re fucking murdering,” he pointed out.
The mage laughed. “Oh how quaint. As if the lives of a few peasants make any difference to the world. I thought witchers were above such feelings. Pity. Still, you’ll make a good feast for my friends. The last witcher was so badly injured I barely got a drop of his chaos. You look like you have years of potential life in you.”
The mage was practically rubbing his hands together in glee. Lambert felt sick. Fuck, he really was going to die, wasn’t he. Just like whatever other witcher had gone up against this mage before. He wasn’t going to get a chance for Aiden’s memory to fade, it seemed. Small mercies.
Lambert hefted his sword with his right hand and shaped a Quen with his left.
The mage just laughed. “Oh that won’t help you,” he said. He turned his back on Lambert and walked between the weeping statues. “They’re faster than even a witcher's speed. Just one piece of advice, little good though it will do you: don’t blink.”
Lambert swore as his eyes shut reflexively against the light of the mage’s very dramatic portal. Fucking asshole, telling him not to blink and then making a bright flash of light. When he opened his eyes, the statues were still standing there, covering their faces. Weird, but he wasn’t dead yet, so that was something. Wait. The statues had moved. They’d gotten closer, moving several feet in the space of a blink. Carefully, he blinked as fast as he could. The figures got closer. So… don’t blink. Got it. Well, he was a witcher, he could go a long damn time without blinking if he had to. He started backing away, keeping his eyes fixed on the statues and feeling for each step on the dirt path. Maybe, if he could make it out of this garden before he had to blink, he’d be able to get out of this.
He’d forgotten about the damn tentacles. They had apparently escaped the dimeritium cloud while he was talking to the mage, and were waiting for him. As he stepped carefully backward, the leafy tentacle snapped out and wrapped around his torso, effectively immobilizing his sword arm, while the watery tentacle wrapped around his legs. Fuck.
Lambert managed by sheer force of will to keep staring at the two statues. He couldn’t keep this up indefinitely, but maybe he could stare long enough to figure a way out of the tentacles’ hold. He struggled, but try as he might, the stony limbs held him firm. There really was no getting out of this. He swallowed hard, eyes burning, and blinked. Fuck, they were moving faster now. A few more blinks and they’d be in arm’s reach of him. He hated staring death in the face. Much rather fight fast and dirty and be done with it. Watching and waiting for the inevitable, holding off his death just long enough to watch it coming… fuck, no.
Lambert took a deep breath and pulled up all his happiest memories of Aiden. At least he’d die without having forgotten the way Aiden smiled.
“Fuck you,” Lambert told the statues, and closed his eyes.
Lambert did not expect to open his eyes. Was he still, somehow, alive? Then his eyes focused. No, he was definitely dead. Luckier than he’d ever thought he’d be though, because that was definitely Aiden running toward him. Without his armor, and with impressive scarring across the left side of his face, but that was Aiden . Fuck.
Before Lambert could really process the sight, or his apparent death, Aiden had caught up to him and slammed him into a hug. Huh, apparently the tentacles were gone. Another point in the being dead column. Aiden wrapped his long arms around Lambert and squeezed. Lambert buried his face in Aiden’s neck and breathed in his scent. Definitely dead and not in some mage-induced hallucination. There was no way the bastard could recreate the smell of his lover’s skin. Or, well, he was pretty sure, anyway. He would worry about that later, he decided, as Aiden squeezed him harder and then pulled back to look at him.
“Lambert? How the fuck did you end up here?”
Lambert drank in Aiden’s face. Whatever had left the scars had taken his left eye entirely, fuck, that must be the wound that killed him. But he was still smiling that smile Lambert never thought he’d see again, and Lambert had never seen a prettier sight.
“Same way as you, asshole,” he said when he recovered slightly from the smile. “I fucking died.”
Aiden shook his head. “I’m not dead, Lambert. Neither are you.”
Lambert just stared at him. “Of course you’re fucking dead! I fucking mourned you, you idiot. That bastard Karadin fucking had you assassinated and I…” Lambert choked on a sob. “I couldn’t even find your fucking body, Aiden, but I avenged you. I promise I avenged you before I died.”
Aiden wrapped him back into a hug. “Fuck, Lambert, no, I’m not dead. Karadin had me shot, yes, but he sold me to a mage, and the mage fed me to-”
“The statues!” Lambert interrupted, pulling away from the hug. “You’re the witcher the mage was talking about!”
“Statues, yes,” Aiden agreed. “I don’t remember much of it, I was kind of dying at the time, but the statues didn’t kill me, they sent me here. And then apparently sent you here, too.”
“Where is here, anyway?” Lambert asked, realizing that if this wasn’t the afterlife, he had a lot more questions.
Aiden shrugged. “No idea. Not anywhere on the Continent, far as I can tell. But there’s a little settlement now, from all the people the mage keeps feeding to the statues, and there’s monsters to fight, some I recognize and some I’ve never seen before. It’s a life.” Aiden reached out and touched Lambert’s cheek, his expression softening. “And now it has the only thing it was missing,” he said.
“You fucking sap,” Lambert said, and kissed him.