"~~~..."
As ripples spread like waves across water, the scene before Roland kept warping and changing, like a recording being rewound.
Time flowed backward, and the image of Atali getting up suddenly appeared before him.
That had happened this morning.
The female knight's graceful figure was bathed in a white radiance resembling holy light, shrouded as though in clouds and mist, making her difficult to see clearly. Everything in the image moved in reverse, continuing the spectacle of time flowing backward as the temporal point shifted further into the past.
The surrounding light dimmed. It had returned to last night.
Then came the day before yesterday, and the day before that.
Time continued to rewind, faster and faster, the successive scenes dazzling his eyes.
Roland saw the happy times he and Atali had shared here, the servants coming in to clean up afterward, and day alternating with night as light and darkness cycled.
Combining this with the information he had on hand, he gradually worked out the spell's basic principles and proper usage.
It took his present point in time as its origin and flowed backward in one direction.
As its name suggested, it was called Retrocognition, not future prediction.
Depending on the user's proficiency, Retrocognition could reach back days, months, years, or even decades, millennia, and tens of thousands of years.
Generally speaking, however, the more distant the point in time, the blurrier it became, and the harder it was to control its precision.
Everything he saw had been recorded by mana. Fundamentally, this was a means of sensing the world through resonance.
That suited his current path of development, which relied primarily on his Wisdom attribute.
According to the arcane schools, mana was the mysterious spirituality permeating the sky, earth, water, soil, trees, stones, and indeed all matter.