Elisa sealed another rift.
It was the thirteenth.
Each one felt heavier than the last, as though the multiverse itself had begun to resent every stitch she made with the hat's invisible thread.
Elisa dropped to her knees from exhaustion, gasping for air. The pain in her chest intensified with every rift she sealed, and though she kept moving forward, she could no longer avoid feeling overwhelmed at times.
"Every time it gets harder…" she muttered with a weary sigh.
She summoned her still half-reconstructed ship with the hat, opening a wormhole that quickly deconstructed itself once the vessel appeared. It floated among the remains of a lightless moon. Around her, stars died and were reborn in accelerated cycles caused by dimensional distortion. Space itself had lost its rhythm.
The music of the cosmos had gone out of tune.
Exhausted, Elisa stepped into her ship and let herself collapse into the cockpit. She removed the hat and held it in her hands. She couldn't remember the last time she had looked at it without wearing it.
Even dormant, the object glowed faintly.
A blackness that was not the absence of light, but something deeper:
A presence of nothingness.
"I'm tired already… I need to know what the hell this thing really is," Elisa murmured, curiosity and frustration mixing in her voice.
And yet, she still had no idea how she could uncover the truth. She had already tried countless times to analyze the hat or search for information about it, but every machine that attempted to examine it exploded, and no being or planet she encountered during her travels had ever even known such an object existed—until they saw it.
After sitting in thought for a while, Elisa remembered one of the universes where she had sealed a rift.
The Mental Dimension.
"If that dimension could extract and create an entire planet from my memories… then maybe it could do the same with the hat."
Elisa hurried to open a portal and return to that dimension.
But she couldn't.
It was as though the hat itself did not want her to discover its history.
But Elisa had already made up her mind completely.
With difficulty, but also absolute determination, she forced her powers forward and tore open a portal. She stepped through it and arrived once more in the Mental Dimension.
The moment she arrived, Elisa briefly remembered the conversation she had shared with her younger self. She remembered how there had been times when she looked at the hat with resentment, as though it were the source of her tragedies.
But she decided she would never see it that way again.
"No matter what I see, I promise I won't hate you. I found you for a reason, and I'm going to accept you. I… don't hate you."
Elisa felt the hat calm down slightly.
She placed it at the center of the planet.
At that moment, not only the planet, but the entire universe around her changed, revealing the memories of the object itself.
And the hat showed her its truth.
When the Guardians shaped the multiverse, they did so using two forces that no living being should ever touch:
The energy of existence.
And the energy of nonexistence.
The cosmos had not emerged from everything, nor from nothingness, but from the perfect tension between both.
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 itself.
But once their work was complete, the Guardians faced a dilemma.
There were remnants left behind.
Pure fragments of existence and nonexistence that, if left free, could interfere with the structural harmony of the newborn multiverse. They were so powerful that even a poorly directed trace could open rifts, fuse realities together, or devour them entirely.
And so, with the same hands that had created galaxies, the Guardians forged two artifacts.
One made from pure nonexistence, created to contain, seal, and extinguish.
That became the hat.
And another forged from pure existence, created to unite, amalgamate, and shape new realities.
That became the brooch.
They were hidden in opposite corners of time and the multiverse itself, sealed behind dimensional barriers and left waiting. Their purpose was not to interfere, but to exist as dormant balances, possessing the power to preserve—or shatter—the entire fabric of the multiverse should reality's seams ever begin to tear apart.
"So then…" Elisa whispered. "This was never just a tool…"
"It was… containment…"
The hat trembled softly on the ground, as though responding to her understanding. There was something profoundly sorrowful about the object. As though, deep down, it knew it had been created to reduce everything to nothingness if necessary.
And then another image was revealed to her.
Astrid.
Not in the present.
Not even within this reality.
But in another, long-extinguished past.
A different Astrid from the one Elisa knew.
Brighter.
More innocent.
Tears filled her eyes after having just lost her entire world.
And before her floated the brooch: a golden core wrapped in living energy, pulsing like the heart of a newborn star.
Astrid had not 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, equal to those of the First Existence.
That night, already within another universe while resting beside the most recent fissure, Elisa allowed herself to consider something she had never dared think before.
"What if Astrid is right?"
Perhaps uniting dimensions was not so different from sealing them.
Both were ways of preventing collapse.
One was more unstable than the other, yes, but Elisa knew there were far too many dimensions for her to seal alone. If Astrid had not already stitched some of those rifts shut by merging universes together, some of them might have fully opened long ago. Perhaps if a single universe were created, then even if another rift appeared, Elisa would no longer need to cross an entire multiverse just to seal it before it was too late.
In the end, both of them wanted to stop everything from collapsing.
But while one extinguished the rifts…
…the other sought to close them through fusion.
At that moment, a question formed in Elisa's mind.
What would happen if both artifacts were used together?
Elisa shuddered at the thought.
She did not know whether it would bring salvation…
…or create an entirely new kind of cataclysm.
In another dimension, while remembering her family and her lost world, Astrid felt it too.
She held the brooch above a sea of frozen fire while staring at a rift that did not close, but pulsed.
"Oh… so that was the connection between these objects. I suppose I should have seen it coming," she said quietly. "But honestly, I'm more intrigued by you, Elisa. You're getting closer to the truth."
"But the truth won't save you."
Then she looked down at the brooch.
"If you combine nothingness with everything… existence itself has no escape. Only one path."
A new birth.
One that will not repeat the mistakes of the last.
And while both of them continued traveling along their separate paths, the multiverse went on slowly crumbling apart.
The rifts were no longer simply becoming more frequent.
Now…
They were calling to them.
As though something—or someone—on the other side had begun to realize that the seal upon the original error…
…was no longer holding.