Elisa was a galactic traveler, but not just any ordinary one. Her spirit burned with an insatiable curiosity, and her ship, propelled by profoundly enigmatic objects known as cosmic pieces, seemed to respond not only to science, but to her own will. Those fragments of stellar energy, trapped in impossible geometric shapes, didn't just propel her vessel; their vibrations whispered ancient secrets in dreams she could barely comprehend.
She traveled through nascent constellations, visited civilizations meditating on the death of suns, and exchanged words with beings who couldn't remember if they had ever been anything more than incorporeal entities. Each encounter distanced her further from her humanity and brought her closer to a greater understanding of everything...or rather, of nothingness.
Until one day, like a slap of reality, her routine and bubble shattered.
Her ship was attacked by unknown entities. It wasn't a battle; it was a surgical procedure. The cosmic fragments were extracted without violence, as if they had never belonged to her. Without them, her ship was completely depleted and began to collapse, plummeting to the ground. Elisa crashed onto a desolate planet: Thymia, a world without history or future.
With her ship completely powered down and destroyed by the impact, and with no answers as to what she had just experienced, all she had left was her magic hat, an absurd relic in appearance, but one that allowed her to travel briefly through the folds of space. Each jump cost her something: memory, energy, emotion. The journey ceased to be an adventure and became a penance.
During her search, Elisa heard echoes of the truth: the stolen fragments were not ordinary energy, but nodes of the universal fabric. Using them was like plucking notes from a cosmic symphony to play a personal song. The universe wasn't angry; it was out of sync.
Finally, she found them. In the dark heart of a forgotten galaxy, the thieves revealed themselves: the Guardians of the Eternal Vault. Beings that were not exactly matter or energy, but rather concepts: Equilibrium, Causality, Entropy, and one who called himself Silence.
"You have taken what kept the universe beating," they said, in voices that were not words. "Your desire to explore accelerated the structure's agony."
Elisa initially didn't understand what they meant, but with a single touch to her forehead, the guardians made her see the origin of the cosmic pieces and their purpose: to maintain the universe's stability.
Every time Elisa propelled her ship with the energy of the pieces, every time she used the pieces to travel to another galaxy, she caused the universe to deteriorate.
Elisa refused to accept this truth. Her journey, her quest, her passion... were they an act of destruction?
"I didn't know what they were," she replied. But now that I know... I can't just leave it like this.
So, the Guardians decided to test her. Not with words, but with actions.
In a dimension beyond time, where the laws of physics were merely a suggestion, the Stellar Judgment was unleashed. Elisa fought enveloped in determination and power, her hat spinning like a ring of Saturn above her head granting her impressive fighting skills, in addition to abilities she was still unaware of. The Guardians hurled collapsed constellations, storms of probability, and sentient darkness at her. She responded with blasts that shook the entire universe, almost as if the universe itself were groaning and wincing in pain from the fight; nearby stars paled, and a distant satellite disintegrated simply from its proximity to the battlefield. With each attack Elisa launched, she could feel her entire being surge with strength. With each blow, her power and resolve increased, and with each strike she received, though it hurt, she felt her very soul burning with ever-increasing willpower.
However, the guardians did not back down either. They used the stars to form weapons and transformed space into bonds to restrain Elisa, but she responded to every movement. She formed force fields to repel the blows, created energy explosions to destroy the chains, and moved while leaving trails of power in her wake. The fight intensified, and although the guardians fought with perfect synchronization, even if they brought down the very sky upon Elisa, even if they created black holes or entire suns to defeat her, they were simply falling behind. Meanwhile, with each passing second, Elisa burned ever brighter with fighting spirit, almost as if she relished every attack she launched and received, creating explosions that outshone nebulae, hurling her hat like a comet, striking with the force of a supernova. It was as if the guardians were no longer fighting a person, but rather a completely indomitable being.
The fight finally reached its climax, and both Elisa and the Guardians channeled all their power into a devastating final attack, hurling them against each other and creating an explosion that made the entire dimension they were in glow with light. And at that moment... at that precise instant, something ignited within Elisa. In a moment of lucidity, brief as a blink of the infinite, she saw herself as she truly was, what she had become: a fractured vessel of ancient power, a spark of the primordial essence that was the form of nonexistence. From the moment she found that hat and interacted with those pieces for the first time, she became something more. She forged a bond with the object on her head, a bond that, thanks to this entire fight, had grown stronger and could continue to grow and evolve. Now, the ability to disintegrate planets burned in her eyes. Not because she wanted to... but because she could.
The Guardians stopped.
"You are more than a traveler," Silence said. "You are an echo of that which formed the All. Your existence cannot be judgment or guilt, only choice."
And then came the choice.
The guardians realized the immense power Elisa had obtained and that they could no longer stop her; the fate of their universe now depended entirely on her. She could take the pieces back, rebuild her ship, and continue traveling, even though she knew that each jump weakened the universe. Or she could return them, accept her role not as a traveler… but as the vessel she now was.
Elisa wept. Not from sadness, but from the realization of the burden she had carried from the beginning.
She chose to renounce it.
The pieces were returned to the heart of the universe. The ship never again sailed the skies. But the hat remained with her, vibrating gently, as if reminding her that the journey was not yet over.
From then on, Elisa traveled between worlds on foot, listening to the whispers of galaxies in her soul and watching the universe slowly recover. Wherever she went, she could see things improving. Plants bloomed in deserts, ideas were born in dormant minds. No one knew if she was human, a goddess, or something in between. Some worshipped her. Others feared her.
Only this much was known: once, a woman walked among the stars. And if she had wanted, she could have erased them. But she chose not to.