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This wasn’t real. But how could he know? The Iron Bull shifted his grip on his drawn axe, blood dripping with a heavy splat from the edge, and ran his fingers over the worn edge of his eye patch. Scar tissue branched out beneath his touch and it grounded him, even as the boundaries of the world flickered.
Demons. He hated demons.
It wasn't just the danger they possessed. Saarebas were treated as threats for a reason under the Qun. Mages were kept under a Templar's watch even if the system had sickened and collapsed in on itself.
It was the way they invaded your mind, drawing out every weakness, every thought pushed down and covered until they had hold of you.
"Oh great, more spiders," Lavellan groaned, his face pale beneath the twisting vines of his vallaslin. He'd told Bull, sheet wrapped around his waist against the evening chill, too content to move from his bed, about the time spiders had attacked his clan, a seemingly never-ending swarm until their corpses threatened to blot out the sun.
It was a small thing, his moment of hesitation before he removed a spider scuttling around the fortress, watching it leave to forest with such a sad look. But Bull saw, Bull remembered.
He wished he could help Lavellan through the horrors he was seeing. Reach out, ground the elf to the here and now. But he couldn't. He couldn’t move.
Mouth dry, blood frozen, ringing in his ears.
He had to run, couldn't run, wouldn't run.
The Iron Bull watched numbly as Tal-Vashoth rebels, like him but not like him, slipped out of the shadows, teeth bared, and horns filed down, their vitaar splashed like warnings over their grey skin.
Not again, he couldn't- not again.
There was no Ben-Hassrath to pull him out of this madness this time, no salvation from the horrors of his own mind, and would he even want them to? Would The Iron Bull who came back be the same man he was now?
His Chargers... They would follow him back to the Qun, would follow him even here into the Fade if he had let them. But they were not Viddathari. The Qun would break them, crush their spirits until they were unrecognisable, and it would be his fault.
Bull swung at a rebel, axe easily passing through their torso and he welcomed the spray of blood, warm against his cold skin. Every second he was fighting was another second he was alive, another second, he was still here.
In the quietness afterwards, in the moments of stolen breath between one fight and the next was when the madness snuck in, a thief in the night, a demon in the dream. Bull would keep fighting for as long as he was able, and hopefully even still afterwards, a mad thing, no longer Qunari or Tal-Vashoth, just a weapon.
Bull stared up into familiar green eyes. He'd last seen those eyes staring blindly up at him as he pulled his axe from her chest, madness stabbing its nails between his eyes as he surveyed the carnage in Seheron.
This wasn't Seheron. He just had to keep reminding himself that and hope the madness stayed at bay long enough to escape.
If not, Bull feared he would die in terror, on his knees like a wild animal, screaming at a sky that was no longer whole.