Rachel was pale, her hands gripping the blanket so tightly her knuckles were white. She was looking at her mother as if for the first time, the pieces of a painful, nonsensical childhood suddenly, horrifically, clicking into place. The brutal training regimens, the impossibly high standards, the relentless emotional starvation… it was all reframed through the lens of a parent's absolute, mind-shattering terror.
"The vision broke me," Isolde confessed, her voice thick with shame. "I was weak. I was terrified. And I took that terror, all that horror and weakness, and I aimed it at you. I thought… in my madness, I believed that if I could make you hard, if I could make you cold and strong and utterly self-reliant, that you might survive the hell that I had seen. I thought if you didn't love me, you wouldn't mourn me when I was gone. I became a monster because I was too afraid to be a mother."
