This spell is a part of the Flashback spell chain and is found in the Flashback rune stone.
There is a particular kind of justice that the law cannot always deliver. It is not the justice of punishment, not the justice of consequence, but the justice of understanding. The understanding of what it actually felt like to be on the receiving end of what was done. Courts can assign sentences. Rumination can assign something considerably more direct. Suffering Returned was developed not as a weapon but as a reckoning. The praeteriamancers who created it had studied enough of what people do to each other to know that the most effective correction was never physical. Physical pain is endured and forgotten. What stays - what Rumination knows better than any symbol how to make stay - is the feeling. The terror. The helplessness. The particular quality of suffering that belongs specifically to those who had it inflicted upon them by someone who chose to do so.
When this spell is cast Rumination reaches into the past and finds every instance of suffering the target has caused - every person they harmed, frightened, broken, hurt, lied to - and returns it. Not to those people. To the target who originally caused it. Every victim's psychological experience flows back through Rumination into the one who created it, the full weight of what was done arriving in the mind and spirit of the one who did it.
The target is overwhelmed. Each round they must make a Hard Mental Balance check as the accumulated psychological suffering of their victims presses in, the fear they caused, the pain they inflicted, the helplessness they created in others now sitting entirely in their own chest. Failure means the target is stunned for that round, the weight too complete to function through. With each passing round Rumination adds more - a cumulative -1 penalty to the Mental Balance check as the suffering compounds, every failed save bringing more of what was done flooding forward until the target either breaks or the spell finally releases. When the duration ends Rumination withdraws. What was done cannot be undone. But for a time the target knew exactly what it cost.
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