Misstep

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

Doom does not always announce itself. This is something the posteramancer learns early and finds endlessly useful. The dark symbol of future magic does not require catastrophe to be effective. Sometimes Doom is simply a quiet hand on the shoulder, a small inevitability introduced into an otherwise ordinary moment. A guarantee, modest in scale but absolute in character, that things will go slightly wrong.

The posteramancer reaches through the Time Ripple they have already learned to create and focuses it with new precision, this time not a broad wave of temporal disturbance but a targeted and very specific interference with how a single target's steps interact with time. The result is subtle, almost gentle by the standards of what time magic can do, and deeply, persistently frustrating to experience.

For every two steps the target takes in any direction, time nudges them one step back in the opposite direction. Not forcefully. There is no visible magic, no dramatic effect, nothing that announces itself. The target simply finds that their forward progress keeps being slightly undone, two steps gaining ground and one step losing it, the body moving with full intention while the feet arrive slightly behind where they ought to be. To observers it looks like someone who cannot quite commit to the direction they are walking. To the target it feels like the ground has a quiet opinion about where they should be going and that opinion is consistently contrary. Doom selected this particular outcome from among all the possible futures and decided it was the one that would happen. As always it was right.