Encroaching Darkness

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

There is no darkness here. The sun has not moved. The torches still burn. The world is exactly as it was a moment ago - lit, visible, unchanged. None of that matters. Because Dread does not need real darkness to make someone afraid of the dark. It only needs the mind.

Encroaching Darkness does not touch the battlefield. It touches everyone on it. The timoramancer reaches through Dread and plants a single, wordless certainty into every mind within range, that the light is failing. That something in the darkness is getting closer. That vision, reliable until this moment, can no longer be trusted. And the mind, being what it is, obliges. The edges of sight begin to dim. Shadows that aren't there deepen and spread. Each round the hallucination tightens, the perceived darkness closing inward, Perceive penalties mounting as Dread insists more and more forcefully that they cannot see - until those who cannot resist it are effectively blind, surrounded by a darkness that exists nowhere except inside them. Perceive Checks start at Hard and each round -2 is added. 

No light source dispels it. No spell that touches the physical world touches this. The darkness is not out there. It cannot be pushed back by a torch or countered by a light spell. Only Terror Sight cuts through it - the timoramancer's own understanding of how Dread distorts vision turned inward as a lens of clarity. The timoramancer stands in the middle of it untouched, and yet not entirely unaffected. They know it isn't real. They cast it. But they are surrounded by minds drowning in genuine terror, and they feel every one of them. Anxiety settles over the timoramancer for the duration, unbidden and unavoidable. The empath's price for wielding Dread this broadly.