Dread's Concealment

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

There is no shadow here. No darkness, no concealment, nothing physically obscuring the timoramancer from the world around them. They are standing in plain sight, visible to anyone who looks. The problem is that no one can look.

Dread's Concealment works on a principle that darkness never could - not by hiding the timoramancer but by making the act of perceiving them unbearable. The timoramancer reaches through Dread and lets it settle over them fully, and what any observer finds when their eyes land on the timoramancer is not a person but a feeling. It is the particular feeling of looking at something their deepest instincts insist they should not be looking at. The eyes slide away. The attention refuses to hold. Every attempt to focus on the timoramancer meets the same wall of instinctual refusal, the mind redirecting itself before it can fully process what it saw.

Attacking something you cannot make yourself look at directly requires a Hard Mental Balance check to even attempt to look their way and locate them as a target. The timoramancer moves freely, acts normally, exists completely in the open, and remains effectively invisible to anyone whose fear is stronger than their will. As fear compounds and conditions worsen, Dread's grip on the observer's attention tightens accordingly, with Fear giving a -4 penalty and Anxiety a -2 penalty.