Flashback

This spell is a part of the Flashback spell chain and is found in the Flashback rune stone.

The praeteriamancer's first contact with Rumination is rarely comfortable. The dark symbol of past magic does not introduce itself gently. It surfaces, the way all things that have been pressed down too long eventually surface, with a force that is proportional to how long they were held under. Rumination has been holding a great many things under for a great many people. It is very good at it. And when the neophyte praeteriamancer first learns to reach for it, what they find is a symbol that was already reaching back.

Flashback is the most basic thing Rumination knows how to do. It takes a memory - something the target experienced, something real and specific and their own - and simply brings it forward. Not gradually, not with any warning or transition. One moment the target is here, present, engaged with whatever is happening around them. The next they are there, wherever that memory lives, experiencing it again with the full and undiluted clarity of something that feels entirely real because it was. The present disappears. The target is dazed (for the round) as their mind scrambles to reconcile two moments simultaneously with the past demanding their full attention and the present refusing to wait. There is a 1 in 20 chance (rolling a natural 20 on spell cast)  that the shock of the resurfacing is complete enough to stun the target entirely for one round, Rumination holding them in the past a moment longer than the mind can manage without shutting down briefly.

Rumination does not pick the memory. It does not search for the worst one or the most painful one or the one most likely to cause damage. It simply takes whatever is closest to the surface . The memory is whatever the target has been carrying most recently. Sometimes that is devastating. Sometimes it is merely disorienting. Rumination finds both acceptable.