Living Nightmare Spell

Carcelli, Parchment Background by Zeta Gardner

-Carcelli the Arcane Priestess

 

"The School of Aether, better known as the School of Illusion, does not have a lot of combat spells until you reach the Mastery and Archmage level, but what we do have is terrifying.   The apex of Illusion based attack spells is a spell called 'Living Nightmare' and the name is not an exxageration. It can end a fight with a single casting. Some claim the spell is merciful because it incapacitates an opponent without causing any physical harm, but anyone who experienced the spell says otherwise.

  From the outside it doesn't look that different from the Enchantment spell, 'Cerebral Paralysis'. In both cases, the target can't move and their face looks like they are in pain. But this is a different level of pain. Like a dragon to a little lizard.   A target of Cerebral Paralysis is aware that a spell is keeping them from moving and if their will strong enough, they can break the enchantment at great cost. The target of Living Nightmare is not aware he is the subject of a spell, at least not usually. If it's cast in a large battle, the target is still fighting the battle in his mind. If the target was hit by the spell while strolling through the market place, the target still thinks he's strolling the marketplace. Then things get really bad, really fast.   In the target's mind, whatever they hate and fear becomes real. A vain person might contract a disfiguring illness. A compassionate person has to watch his loved ones die, a greedy person experiences horrible deprivation and poverty.   Based on accounts from survivors of this spell, this is a case where being strong-willed is a detriment not an asset. A strong person might have a better chance of resisting the spell initially than a weak-willed person, but once the spell breaks through it will hit them that much harder.   Strong willed people have deeper and stronger fears than simple-minded people and they have the imagination to come up with more horrifying scenarios for themselves. A simple minded person might see themselves hanging upside down chained to a dungeon wall and they are hungry and thirsty. A strong-willed person might see themselves chained to a dungeon wall while they are watching their loved ones get tortured.   For the victim of the spell, time is distorted so one minute in the real world is roughly 100 minutes in the victim's head. Maybe longer.   Normally, the intent is to cast this spell on someone to incapacitated and then while they cannot fight back, slit their throat or slap manacles on them. You don't want to cast this spell on an enemy and let the enemy get away. They will never forgive you.   Often this leaves lingering psychological scars. There have been cases where targets of this spell have confronted their fears and emerged from the ordeal stronger, but even in this happy case, the subject of the spell is not going to look favorably on the mage who hexed him.   The subject of this hex has no way out of the living nightmare unless they can survive until the end of the spell duration, but this is spell is relatively easy for outsiders to remove. It can removed with Purification theurgy or Abjuration disepels just like any lesser hex.   A lesser known remedy is to bonk the target on the head or drug them. If the target is knocked into a natural state of unconscious, this will replace supernaturally augmented nightmares with ordinary nightmares which is a mercy.   No I don't have the spell myself...yet. I'm not an Archmage yet. I want to have it as a last resort. I'm just a little gnome girl and I might not always be able to talk my way out of trouble."