#after adamant...

"It's not really you, though, is it?” Loghain mutters, more to himself than to the very life-like apparition of Stroud standing before him, mustache and all. 

“Of course not.” Loghain answers his own question and turns away from the hallucination. “My mind has begun to go, it seems...I suppose it won't be long now..." 

He continues trudging along, muttering to himself and following Maker-knows-what sense of direction he’s got left down here. He hasn’t decided if he’s trying to avoid the Darkspawn and the inevitable for as long as he can, or rush headlong toward them for a quick and brutal end. But he can’t seem to pinpoint the direction the Archdemon’s song is calling him to, so he supposes it doesn’t matter, anyway.

"Did you hear the one about the Grey Warden who packed up everything and moved to the Deep Roads?" the imaginary Stroud-ghost asks.

Loghain stops.

"He said it was his --"

"Don't," he whispers, shaking his head.

“That got a laugh out of you once.”

“The last thing I need down here is a Spirit -- or...or...whatever you are -- following me around and retelling his worst fucking jokes.”

"It's me, Old Man."

He finally turns back, peering at him again through the darkness. He seems more solid than before, but Loghain still doesn’t dare to reach out and try to touch him. 

"My brain could have easily just conjured you up with the same terrible sense of humor that the real you had," he sneers.

"So what difference does it make, then?”

“Well, one of you was real, for starters.” 

Stroud chuckles, and it’s perfectly infuriating, just as he remembers it. “A long time ago, I promised you that we'd do this together, didn’t I?"

"And you broke that promise when you decided to play the hero and stay behind in the Fade."

"You knew that I was already hearing my Calling then. I wouldn’t have been able to keep that promise, even if I hadn’t stayed behind." Stroud thoughtfully strokes his mustache. "But while I was there, I met some...spirits, I suppose. Justice. And he introduced me to Devotion...and Patience.”

Loghain watches him, looking for any kind of break in the illusion.

“How long has it taken you to catch up to me, Mac Tir?”

"Fifteen bloody years…" Loghain grumbles.

"Oh."

"Yes."

"And you've been alone this entire time?"

"Of course I have!"

"Loghain…” Stroud reaches for his hands, whispering, “I'm so sorry."

Loghain stares at his hands, being held by a ghost. A ghost whose thumbs rub circles into him the way Stroud always did whenever he had gotten lost in one of his many rants.

"I'd have taken care of you, you know?" Loghain blurts out.

Stroud smiles. "I know."

"I’d have held you through the nightmares. Force-fed you mush if I had to. And talked as much sense as I could into you for as long as you’d let me. And when the time came..."

"I know." He nods, pulling Loghain into the very real-feeling steadfast sturdiness of his embrace.

*This Stroud got left behind in the Fade, but like, IDK...who’s to say he, or at least some part of him, didn’t make it out of there somehow? Not me. I don’t know how any of this works.

The rest of this is just going to be them bickering and lots of bewildered letters from Orlesian Wardens regarding two old men seen fighting Darkspawn together before disappearing into a half-collapsed tunnel.