Doom's Blade

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

Doom does not arrive all at once. That is perhaps its most misunderstood quality. People imagine doom as a single catastrophic moment, a wall that is simply there and then strikes. But the posteramancer who has studied the dark symbol of future magic long enough knows better. Doom is a process. It builds. It accumulates. Each step toward it makes the next step easier to take, each blow landing with more weight than the last because the destination was always the same regardless of how many stops were made along the way. Doom's Blade is that understanding given a cutting edge.

When this spell is cast a sword of black temporal energy materializes before the target. The blade is not forged from metal or magic in any conventional sense but pulled from the future, specifically from the moments just ahead in which this weapon is used and its damage accumulates. The target takes it and wields it in place of whatever they were carrying, and the moment they first strike with it Doom begins its work. The blow deals 2d20 damage plus the wielder's Runic Power, and leaves behind a poison that takes 1d4 Vitality from the struck target each round, Doom's first foothold, small but present. Each subsequent strike against the same target adds another 1d4 to that ongoing drain, the poison compounding as Doom grows more confident, the future it was always building toward arriving a little faster with each hit. The blade reaches 2 spaces, Doom's arm being longer than most expect. It always is. When the spell has ended, the target that wielded Doom's Blade is struck with Loss of Self for the next round, feeling at a loss for the doom they know is coming. That is of course as long as the target isn't the posteramancer. The posteramancer knows well the coming doom and is not phased by it and therefore will not bear the Loss of Self effect.