Rapid Aging

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

Everyone is aging. This is not an observation the posteramancer makes with any particular cruelty - it is simply accurate. Every living thing moves through time in one direction and the direction leads to the same place. The body accumulates the journey. Joints wear. Muscles thin. The speed that came easily at twenty requires effort at fifty and becomes memory at seventy. Doom knows this trajectory intimately, has watched it play out across every life that has ever been lived, and understands precisely where each body is headed.

Rapid Aging is the posteramancer borrowing a portion of that future and placing it on the target now. When this spell is cast a temporal distortion settles across the target's body - visible, unmistakable, the particular quality of accelerated time clinging to them like something that was always going to arrive, just not yet. The target ages. Not completely, not permanently, but enough. The body that was capable a moment ago finds itself operating under the constraints of decades it hasn't earned yet. Offensive and Bow Power reduce by 25% as the strength that fighting demands becomes harder to summon. Movement rates drop by 25% and Evasion halves as the reflexes that once moved without thinking now require thought. All traits decrease by 1 as the accumulated wear of a future that hasn't happened yet settles into every system at once. When the spell ends the future retreats. The target returns to what they were. They are younger, faster, themselves again. Doom does not keep what it borrows. It simply makes sure the target knows what is coming for them eventually.