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Today was it.
Coronation day.
It would officially mark the end of a long, brutal war between the largest countries on the continent; a day which everyone eagerly and cautiously awaited with baited breath.
It was a day that would, hopefully, herald peace for years to come.
Corrin stands on the dias with the rest of the royal family, silently surveying the scene. His siblings are by his side, chattering quietly amongst themselves, but he makes no move to join the conversation. The throne room is alive with activity; retainers, nobility, foreign dignitaries, all rushing to somewhere they have to be.
And yet, surrounded by his friends and family, even in this crowd, he feels alone.
Where are you? He asks himself.
It is a game Corrin plays sometimes, especially when he gets nervous or unsure of himself. He’s played it ever since he found out about the theory of the multiverse from one of his old books. The idea has always intrigued him. The theory posits that a person’s life isn’t linear; that every decision is actually a tree. Every decision, every branch, every deviation — a single choice could result in an infinite number of possibilities.
He likes to think there could be hundreds of him, living simultaneously in just as many universes. Maybe, there is some version of him standing on this very same dias, but with a different coloured shirt. Or maybe there is another Corrin in a distant universe who never was a prince, but instead a farmer living in a peaceful rural village, untouched by war.
Or, he thinks grimly, maybe there’s a universe where his mother is still alive. A universe where his father had not perished in a hail of arrows, cut down in cold blood. A universe where an entire country is not in shambles because of the decisions he had so callously made.
For the hundredth time, he wonders if maybe there's universe out there where two of his siblings are not dead and gone; a universe Azura where doesn’t vanish before his eyes; a universe where, when he greets his sister “good morning”, and she wipes her tears and replies “mourning”, she actually did mean the time of day.
Could there be a universe where he had not declared for one family and forsaken the other? Surely, there had to be a universe somewhere - separated by a lifetime of decisions - with a version of his family that isn’t broken. He is sure that there is someplace, lost in the abyss of time and space, where everything is fine and alright and it’s definitely not all his fault.
(oh, a little voice hisses in his mind, but it is, it is, it is all. your. fau — )
A bell rings somewhere in the distance, and he blinks back into reality. Someone calls for silence in the hall, and he inhales deeply to push the bitter thoughts out of his mind. He stands a bit straighter, and exhales sharply as he asks himself the question again: Where are you?
It is a game he plays sometimes, to remind himself that although there are a million places where he could be, this is exactly where he is meant to be.