"Every time I tried to solve a problem, the vision moved forward in time by years or decades, showing me what would happen when people came to depend on my work," Isabell explained as she gazed into the flames of the hearth in Ashlynn's tower.
The warmth of the room and the smell of the fish soup simmering in the hearth helped to ground her in the present as she processed her memories of the visions, sifting through them to extract the nuggets of wisdom as best she could without clinging to much to pain that wasn't real, no matter how real everything had felt at the time.
The things she'd seen and done… they hadn't really happened, and as long as she reminded herself of that, she could treat them as lessons rather than nightmares that would haunt her just as much as her memories of the Emerald Kingdom's Civil War did.