Mouth of the Void

Cost: 50m
Target: Area

The caster brandishes a specially prepared, bonehandled, obsidian knife in three occult patterns, then pricks himself at various point of the body where strong flows of Essence and blood coincide. What flows from the character's wounds is not blood, but cold black oil. Indeed, he feels no pain, just the numbness of Oblivion seeping from his veins. The black oil races outward from the necromancer, ignoring gravity, until it covers a 40-yard radius around him. Then, like water spilling over the edge of a birdbath, the inky Essence falls up, eliminating all light within its range.

Within the perfect darkness, obscene voices whisper about joyful torture and mutilations, chill hands with sharp claws caress the living and cold, lifeless teeth nibble at their flesh and their delicious souls. Mundane sounds are muffled, and screams occasionally rip through the darkness. One frozen moment later, the perfect shadows seep away through the cracks in the world, taking with them people's life and Essence. Every living creature within the shadow except the caster (who might not qualify as a living creature anyway) suffers 30 levels of aggravated damage. Where the thick darkness lay, the ground now rots and dies, and it is strewn with pitted chunks of strangely shaped obsidian—the transformed remains of creatures the spell kills.

In war, this spell can be cast in long ticks. The black death moves to envelop any unit engaged with the caster's unit and inflicts 30 levels of damage on that unit. The spell inflicts the same damage on the caster's unit, however, unless the unit consists entirely of the dead or the caster is a solo unit.