Elisa closed another crack.
It was the thirteenth.
Each one felt heavier than the last, as if the multiverse were beginning to resent every stitch she made with the invisible thread of her hat.
"I can't go on like this anymore," she murmured, her voice barely holding. "It's getting harder and harder..."
She summoned her still-half-rebuilt ship with her hat, opening a wormhole that she quickly deconstructed after her ship appeared, floating among the remains of a lifeless moon. Around her, stars died and were reborn in cycles accelerated by the dimensional distortion. Space had lost its rhythm. The music of the cosmos was out of tune.
Exhausted, Elisa entered her ship and collapsed into the cockpit. She took off her hat and held it in her hands. She couldn't remember the last time she had seen it without wearing it.
Even unlit, the object glowed with a faint light. A blackness that wasn't the absence of light, but something deeper: a presence of nothingness.
"I'm tired of this. I need to know what the hell this thing is," Elisa murmured, a mixture of curiosity and weariness in her voice. Yet she still didn't know how she could decipher it. She had already tried to analyze or search for information about her hat several times, but no machine could investigate it without exploding, and no being or planet she had encountered on her travels even knew of its existence until they saw it.
After a while of thinking, Elisa remembered one of the universes where she had sealed a rift and where perhaps she could find answers: the Mental Dimension.
"If that dimension could extract and create a planet from my memories... perhaps it could do the same with the hat."
Elisa hurried to try to open a portal to travel to that dimension, but... she couldn't. It was as if the hat didn't want her to discover its story, but Elisa was already completely determined.
With difficulty, but also with complete determination, he managed to force his powers and opened a portal through which he entered, eventually arriving in the mental dimension. Upon arriving, he placed his hat at the center of the planet of his memories, and at that moment, not only the planet but the entire universe changed to show him the memories of his object.
And the hat revealed its truth to him.
When the Guardians shaped the multiverse, they did so from two forces that no living being should touch: the energy of existence and the energy of non-existence.
The cosmos didn't emerge from everything, nor from nothing, but from the perfect tension between the two.
Existence built. It created worlds, laws, matter, and souls.
Nonexistence balanced. It erased errors, reduced excess, and restored order.
Together, they formed the very fabric of reality.
But upon completing their work, the Guardians faced a dilemma: There were remnants.
Pure fragments of existence and nonexistence that, if left unchecked, could interfere with the structural harmony of the new multiverse. They were so potent that even a misdirected trace could open rifts, merge realities, or devour them.
Thus, with hands that had created galaxies, the Guardians shaped two artifacts:
One made of pure nonexistence, created to enclose, seal, and extinguish.
That was the hat.
And another of pure existence, made to unite, amalgamate, and forge new realities.
That was the brooch
They were hidden in opposite corners of time and the multiverse, sealed with dimensional barriers and placed in a state of limbo. Their function was not to intervene, but to exist as latent equilibria, with the power to maintain or shatter the entire fabric of the multiverse and to be used if the seams of reality began to unravel.
"So..." Elisa whispered, "this was never just a tool... It was... a containment..."
The hat trembled gently on the floor, as if responding to her understanding. There was something profoundly sad about that object. As if it knew that, deep down, it had been created to reduce everything to nothing if necessary.
And then, another image was revealed to her.
Astrid.
Not in the present. Not even in this reality. But in another, in a distant and vanished past. A young woman different from the one she knew. More luminous. More innocent. With tears in her eyes for having almost lost her entire world.
And before her, the brooch: a golden core enveloped in living energy, pulsating like a newborn heart.
Astrid hadn't found the brooch by chance. The brooch had chosen her.
Just as the hat had chosen Elisa.
Two poles.
Two extremes.
Two opposing wills with the same purpose:
To create two new gods, identical to those of the first existence.
That night, already in another universe, resting beside the newest rift, Elisa contemplated the possibility of something she had never allowed herself to consider:
"What if Astrid is right?"
Uniting the dimensions... perhaps it wasn't so different from sealing them.
Both were ways to prevent the collapse; one was more unstable than the other, yes, but Elisa knew there were too many dimensions to seal on her own. If Astrid hadn't already mended some of those rifts by merging several universes, one might have already opened completely long ago. Perhaps by creating a single universe, even if a rift reappeared, she wouldn't have to travel across an entire multiverse to seal it, and she wouldn't have to worry about not closing it in time.
In the end, both wanted to prevent everything from collapsing, but while one was extinguishing the rifts... the other wanted to close them through fusion.
At that moment, a question arose in Elisa's mind.
What would happen if... both tools were used together?
Elisa shuddered at the idea. She didn't know if it was salvation...
...or if it could create a new kind of cataclysm.
In another dimension, while remembering her family and her world, Astrid felt it too.
She held her brooch over a sea of frozen fire, watching a rift that didn't close, but pulsed.
"Oh, so that was the connection between these objects. I think I should have seen it coming, but honestly, I'm more intrigued by you, Elisa. You're getting closer to the truth," she said softly. "But the truth won't save you."
And then she looked at the brooch.
"If you combine nothingness with everything... existence has no escape. Only one path.
A new birth.
One that won't repeat the mistakes of the previous one."
And as they traveled, each on her own path, the multiverse continued to slowly crumble.
The rifts weren't just becoming more frequent.
Now... they were being summoned.
As if something—or someone—on the other side was beginning to notice that the seal of the original error... could no longer hold.