"I am suffering hallucinations," Griffith says, looking up at him with guarded honesty. He wouldn't offer as much to anyone but Guts, but to offer less to Guts at this point would be an insult. The others might believe Griffith skittish, sleepless, distracted, but Guts sees past that to the black corruption sickening him. "Nightmares emerged into my waking world. The visions of them I can ignore. The stench, the whispering, their touch..." Griffith curls his lip and looks aside, disgusted by the horrors he has seen and disgusted at himself for being unable to ignore their imagined touches.

"It began that first night we entered the castle. Improved. Now it is worse." Griffith looks up and regrets it. The dog-creature curls its long shadow tongue around Guts' throat in an obscene caress. Griffith's hands twitch with the urge to launch an attack. He glares at it, fixated, and forces himself to stay still. "They're outside the castle, too, when I ride out into the fields and forest. I can discern no pattern."

And if he cannot discern a pattern, he cannot track a source. The visions have demonstrated no threat other than torturing Griffith. Ghosts of the dead, maybe, rising from that strewn battlefield to stalk the mastermind of their destruction. "They had a necromancer. This may have been set as a curse to afflict any conqueror. Post-mortem revenge."