Future Countdown

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

Doom has always known how to count. It has been counting down to every ending since before the world had anyone in it to witness those endings arrive. The countdown is not cruel, it is simply honest. Something is coming. This is when it arrives. Every living thing that has ever existed has been on Doom's countdown whether they knew it or not. Future Countdown simply makes one target aware of theirs.

When this spell is cast the posteramancer reaches through Doom and places upon a single target the awareness of a countdown that has already begun. The target cannot see the numbers. They cannot hear them. They simply know, with the particular certainty that Doom delivers, that something is coming and that it is getting closer with every passing moment. The countdown runs for exactly four rounds. Each round the weight of what is approaching grows heavier.

In the first round Anxiety takes hold; a tightening, a wrongness, the sense of something approaching that has not yet revealed itself. In the second round that anxiety deepens into Dread; the target's body beginning to understand what their mind is still trying to refuse. In the third round Fear arrives fully formed, the countdown close enough now that the target's every action is shadowed by what they know is almost here. In the fourth round all three press down simultaneously - Anxiety, Dread, and Fear at once - as the final moment of the countdown arrives.

What comes next depends entirely on the posteramancer. If they carry The Final Hour, the countdown was always a preparation, Doom having laid the groundwork for what is about to be unleashed. The casting difficulty of The Final Hour becomes Impossible Arcana +2 on the very next cast, Doom having cleared the path. If they do not carry The Final Hour, the countdown ends in something almost worse. The target, overwhelmed by four rounds of accumulated terror waiting for something that never fully arrives, faints, their mind and body simply unable to sustain the anticipation any longer. The target never knows which version of the countdown they are in. Neither outcome feels like mercy.