Age's Curse

This spell is a part of the Bio Instability spell chain and can be found in the Bio Instability Rune Stone.

There are those who fear death, and then there are those who have watched someone they loved lose themselves long before death ever arrived - piece by piece, memory by memory, until the person they knew was simply gone. This is the cruelty of age at its most devastating, and it is this very cruelty that Age's Curse seeks to replicate. When the seniumancer casts this spell, they reach inward and rouse The Worm from its dormancy within their runic soul. The Worm does not consume flesh here. It consumes something far more intimate - the mind. Directed at the target, The Worm's decay seeps not into the body but into the thoughts themselves, quietly eating away at the threads that connect intention to action, memory to moment, feasting at the very things that builds a person and gives them meaning - memory. The target does not feel it happen. There is no pain, no dramatic collapse. There is simply a growing and terrible confusion, a reaching for something that is no longer there.

For the duration of the spell the target is afflicted with Forgetfulness, requiring at least a Normal Insight check each round to perform any action. Should the target fail their Insight check, they lose their turn for that round as their mind reaches for what it was doing and finds nothing. Furthermore, for each round the target remains under the spell's effect, their Arcana decreases by 1 as the decay quietly hollows out their mental acuity. When the spell ends, The Worm retreats and the Forgetfulness fades. The lost Arcana, however, does not return until the target rests.