Pain's Fear

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

The necromancer understands something about fear that most living creatures spend their entire lives avoiding. Fear of death is not the fear of pain, not the fear of loss, not even the fear of the unknown. It is something older and more precise than any of those things. It is the sudden, absolute certainty that everything you are - every thought, every memory, every small and private thing that makes you you - will simply cease. Not change. Not transform. Cease. The necromancer has sat with that certainty long enough that it no longer frightens them. But they have not forgotten what it felt like before they made their peace with it. And it is that memory they reach for when they cast this spell. Pain's Fear does not simulate the process of dying. It does something more specific and in many ways more terrible. It gives the target a single, perfect, inescapable moment of understanding. Pain's Fear is what happens when the target realizes, truly realizes, that their time has come. Not eventually. Not someday. Now.

When Pain's Fear is cast, the target does not see images or hear voices, nor is there is a theatrical vision of their own death. There is only the knowing. It descends upon them between one heartbeat and the next, and suddenly they are not a warrior or a mage or a soldier in a battle. They are a living creature that has just understood, with perfect and terrible clarity, that it is mortal. That it will end and that the ending may be very close. Every instinct in the body reads this not as a thought but as immediate physical truth, and the body responds accordingly. For the duration the target is consumed by this fear. Each round the following occurs:

• The target must make a Hard Mental Balance check at the start of each round or be paralyzed with absolute fear, losing all actions that round as the body refuses to move against what feels like the inevitable
• Should the target pass the Mental Balance check, they may act, but their movement is halved and they cannot willingly move toward the necromancer, for every step in that direction is a step toward the death that is calling them
• The target's Offensive, Bow, and Runic Power are reduced by half as the body's resources are diverted entirely to the ancient, overriding priority of survival
• Any ally of the target that makes physical contact with the target, be it by laying a hand on them, speaking directly to them may grant a +3 to that round's Mental Balance check as the presence of the living pushes back against what the spell insists is inevitable

The target's own willpower determines the shape of the spell's hold. It does not tighten as the spell lingers. It simply does not let go until the duration runs its course or until the target is no longer able to fail. Those with exceptional mental fortitude may find it loosens sooner. Those without may find each round worse than the last, the certainty deepening rather than fading, as though the fear knows exactly how much room it has to work with. When the spell ends, the fear releases cleanly. The target remains exactly as they were before it came over them. Upon the spell's ending Pain will extract its cost from the necromancer, this time the cost it a round of fear.