Field of Decay

This spell is a part of the Deconstruction spell chain and can be found in the Deconstruction rune stone.

There are places in Nor'Ova where the ground itself has given up. Old battlefields where the dead were never properly buried, swamps where things have been rotting for so long that the rot has become the landscape, ancient places where something terrible happened and the earth simply never recovered. In these places the air is wrong, the ground gives beneath the foot in ways it shouldn't, and everything that lingers too long begins to feel the weight of what the soil has been holding all this time. The Worm knows these places well. They are its home. Its larder. Its proof that given enough time, it wins everything. When the seniumancer casts Field of Decay they are not creating something new. They are inviting something very old to come closer.

The seniumancer reaches through their connection with The Worm and pushes its hunger downward, into the ground of a chosen area. The earth does not transform dramatically. There is no sudden swamp, no theatrical eruption of rot. The change is subtler and in its way more disturbing. The ground simply becomes wrong. A faint discoloration, a smell that wasn't there before, a softness underfoot that suggests the soil has been this way for a very long time. The cursed field spreads across a 4x4 space and remains there, patient and waiting. 

The Worm makes no distinction concerning anyone who enters or remains within it, friend or foe. The poor fools find the decay working into them immediately. For each round spent on the cursed ground they lose an amount equal to the seniumancer's Runic Power worth of their current Vitality, Soul, and Power as the field feeds on whatever passes through it. Their Offensive and Runic Power is also diminished by the seniumancer's Arcana per round for 1d6 rounds after, the rot following them even after they have left, clinging to their strength the way the smell of a swamp clings to clothing long after you have walked away from it. The seniumancer alone is spared. The Worm does not feed on the hand that calls it.