Real. It's real. The robe in his hand, the pulse against his skin, the ache in his bones that he can't shake that has nothing to do with actual pain and everything to do with what he can still recall of the warped life he'd gone through over and over in the fade. It can't be true- he is not worth coming for.

"You've come before." An bought him, or broke him out and bled out on the backs of arrows while Zevran watched, gagged on venom that Zevran couldn't prevent- begged for a knife that Zevran turned on himself. The mages hadn't known who. Who didn't matter. "And it wasn't- It didn't-"

Only that they put forth shades for him to watch, shades for him to kill.

Shades he couldn't.

His voice catches in his throat around a helpless crackle of laughter high and faintly hysteric as the last few shards of that distant wall came crumbling down, leaving him a raw, overworked nerve. Nothing, and they've come. They've truly come. Eyes stinging with heat- and while it does not see it can weep- Zevran tried and failed to swallow back a sob. Shudders his way through it with a great rattling of his bones so intense he feels as though he is to shake apart. "Prove it."

He cannot take another lie. He can't.