Quote Originally Posted by Keisatsu View Post
As for Fray being a real person, what I meant was, he was never real after we saw his corpse, we hallucinated him into existence while everyone else saw Fray as our shadow / us.
It's like from a point of perspective, A (the player) see's B (Fray) while C (everybody else) see's A (the player, but when Fray talks, it's the shadow talking) until the 50 quest where he becomes his own separate being as D (our shadow manifested)
While that's certainly a possibility given Fray's vague appearance in prior quests, in the 50 quest you go to Whitebrim and find "Fray" having already beaten the soldiers there into submission. They also recoil in fear when s/he glares at them, and Fray's body doesn't disappear when your shadow manifests itself; it just slumps to the ground.

So while the other ones are still a bit ambiguous, I'm pretty confident "Fray" was your shadow commandeering Fray's body during the 50 quest.