Before she came back Lucina studied, everything she could about that other country called "the past" - the way her father loved her mother, the starting signs of the apocalypse, the people her father had called soldiers and her friends had called parents, the politics weaving through the continent – and in the end, they triumphed.

Decades laters, she wonders if she’d studied wrong; like the leader of a guerilla, for all that she called upon herself the memory of the Hero King, and not as one who would rule a country.

She remembers, in the midst of Plegian discontent and veiled distrust from Regna Ferox, her father’s words about his father – the tyrant, the conqueror; and she looks at her continent’s maps, and the way Ylisse’s frontiers expanded under her mother’s skillful advice, sweeping in what used to be Plegia with the justification of her mother’s heritage, and she thinks of a time-traveller’s dilemma – perfect hindsight, lacking foresight.