This spell is a part of the Flashback spell chain and is found in the Flashback rune stone.
Rumination has always had one defining cruelty: it does not let go. It does not select. It does not weigh one memory against another and decide which ones are worth keeping. It holds everything - every wound, every failure, every loss, every moment the target has spent years trying to put behind them - and it holds all of it with equal, merciless grip.
Tortured Past is not an attack. It is an opening. The praeteriamancer reaches through Rumination and simply unlocks what is already there - every bad memory, every painful event, every moment the target has carried quietly into the present - and releases it all at once. Not one at a time. All of it. Simultaneously. The target does not experience a sequence. They experience an avalanche.
The battlefield disappears. The sounds of combat disappear. Everything in the present disappears, because the past has become louder than all of it. The target is not here anymore, not in any meaningful sense. They are somewhere else, many somewheres, all at once, none of them safe. They cannot act. They cannot defend themselves. They can only endure. They are stunned, unable to move under the weight and shock of having to relive it all all at once, for the duration of the spell.
When the spell ends, Rumination retreats. The present rushes back in. The target finds themselves standing where they were, surrounded by a fight that continued without them - changed, perhaps decided, while they were gone. Rumination releases what it took. But it does not forget. It never forgets. It will hold those memories just as tightly as it always has, waiting for the next time someone asks it to let them out.
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