This spell is a part of the Flashback spell string and is found in the Flashback rune stone.
There was a praeteriamancer once who had studied enough battlefields to understand something that most people who celebrate war never have to confront - that the stories told afterward are not the ones that happened. The glory, the heroism, the clean and meaningful deaths of soldiers who fell for something worth falling for - these are the memories that survive because they are the ones people choose to keep. The other memories, the ones nobody wants to carry forward, settle into the ground and the air and the fabric of every place where enough people suffered, and they wait there for someone with the knowledge and the willingness to find them. This praeteriamancer found them. They built a spell around what they found, not as a weapon - or not only as a weapon - but as a testimony. A way of making the truth of war impossible to ignore for anyone who experienced it.
When this spell is cast Rumination reaches into the accumulated suffering of every battlefield the past holds and draws forward the injuries that never made it into the stories. These are the wounds that hurt but didn't kill, the damage that soldiers carried for hours or days before the end, the price paid in flesh and pain by people whose suffering was considered unremarkable because they survived it long enough to suffer more. That suffering descends upon the target, recreating itself round by round. 1d8 Vitality damage each round for the duration as the target experiences, in sequence, the cost that war extracts from the bodies of those who fight it.
It does not feel like magic. It feels like what it is - the truth of what happened to people, delivered without mercy or editorial, exactly as Memory preserved it. The spell's creator hoped it would make people think twice about the glory they assigned to conflict. Whether it ever did is something Memory has not yet confirmed.
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