Stranglehold

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

Pain learned something from Constrict. It learned that the most interesting part of wrapping itself around a living thing is not the damage, though Pain never objects to that, but the waiting. The particular quality of attention a living thing gives to something it cannot remove. The way they keep reaching for it, keep testing it, keep hoping that this breath might be the one where it loosens. It does not loosen. Pain has never loosened anything in its existence.

Stranglehold is Pain taking what it learned and applying it somewhere more precise. When the necromancer casts this spell Pain moves upward from wherever it was and finds the throat, that narrow, essential passage that everything depends upon, and closes around it with the focused patience of something that understands exactly what it is holding. The target can still breathe. They can still act and fight and do whatever they were doing. But Pain is there now, present and deliberate, and every round it maintains its hold it asks itself whether this is the moment. 

Each round a 1d20 is rolled. On any result but a 20 Pain simply holds, deriving whatever satisfaction it derives from the waiting. On a 20 Pain decides it is finished waiting. The grip tightens completely and the target is gone, not with violence or struggle but with the quiet finality of something that was always going to end this way once Pain took hold. The necromancer pays for this patience. Each round Stranglehold is maintained Pain takes 1d6 Soul from the necromancer. This is the cost of keeping something so focused and so hungry trained on a single point without letting it act. Pain is patient. Restraining it is not free.