Terror Burning

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

Fear is not always quiet. Sometimes it is loud in the body. It can be insistent, physical, undeniable. The heart that hammers. The breath that shortens. And the heat. The terrible, source-less heat that climbs up from the chest and spreads outward until the skin feels like it is burning from the inside and the sweat comes in waves and the mind cannot focus on anything except the overwhelming certainty that something is very, very wrong. Dread does not need fire to burn someone. It only needs the body to believe it is burning.

Terror Burning is the timoramancer reaching through Dread and finding the body's own fear response - the ancient, involuntary machinery that was built to protect - and turning the dial far past what it was designed to handle. The target is not on fire. There is no flame, no heat source, no physical cause for what they are experiencing. And yet Psychogenic Fever takes hold regardless, the body generating genuine distress from nothing but terror, sweating and overheating and losing focus as Dread convinces every system that the threat is real and immediate. Fatigue follows naturally as the body exhausting itself fighting an enemy that doesn't exist, and 1d6 Vitality damage bleeds away each round as the phantom burning continues, the body paying a real price for a fear that was never real to begin with. It cannot be cooled with water. It cannot be treated with medicine. The fever has no physical source to address. Only the fear itself, if somehow quieted, takes the heat with it. When the spell ends and Dread returns to its watchful state within the timoramancer's runic soul, only then does the fever finally break and the target find relief.