The rift sucked them both in; Elisa floated among fragments of time.
She wasn't walking. She wasn't flying. She was simply moving between moments. A frozen second could last an eternity or vanish like a breath. The hat guided her aimlessly, as if reality itself were trying to recall a forgotten path.
The rifts she had sealed until now were small, barely perceptible gaps. But this was different. It wasn't a cut, it was an abyss.
A cosmic throat that not only pierced dimensions, but seemed to touch something beyond anything she had ever known.
Elisa descended slowly. Her feet touched nothing. Her body cast no shadow.
And then she felt it.
A dual presence. Not a voice, not a being. It was something deeper: a primal memory of the multiverse.
Something that had been locked away... before time even existed.
As she descended the edge of the chasm, the walls of the void began to reveal themselves: blurred, distorted scenes, like thoughts projected by a sleeping god.
An impossible universe, within a reality that breathed.
A chorus of creatures singing entire galaxies into existence.
A sun casting shadows.
Elisa clutched her hat. The power that dwelled within it protected her from madness, but even that protection was beginning to crack.
It was there that she heard it for the first time.
Not a scream.
Not a roar.
But an idea. A foreign memory whispered directly into her soul:
"We are what came before."
"The spark that failed."
"The gods of the original mistake."
Elisa stepped back immediately.
She didn't need anything more.
She knew she shouldn't be there.
Minutes later, when she managed to escape the rift using the hat as a dimensional anchor, Astrid was waiting for her.
"You went in too deep. I don't understand how you escaped. I barely made it out myself," she said, without judgment, but with a certain gravity in her voice.
Elisa, trembling, was still panting.
"What...what on earth was that?"
Astrid didn't answer immediately. She stared at the starry horizon as if searching for something she didn't want to find.
"Do you know what a draft is?" she finally asked. "When someone tries something for the first time, and they do it wrong. And not just a little wrong. They do it so wrong that it breaks logic itself. That's what you saw."
"The first creation..." Elisa murmured, "the first failed attempt at a multiverse."
Astrid nodded slowly.
"And the worst part...it was never destroyed. It was only contained. Like a tumor encased in glass." But the cracks that have begun to open... also connect to that existence.
Elisa shuddered. The cold she felt didn't come from her body. It was a cosmic, existential fear. A terror that cannot be explained with words.
"Who...are they? Those who are there..."
"They must not be named," Astrid replied. "The Guardians tried to erase even the memory of their existence. They failed. They only managed to encapsulate them. They were the first gods. They were born of instability. Of disobedience to the laws of being."
"And if they get out...?"
"Nothing will remain. Not dimensions. Not time. Not ideas. Only them. And the repeated mistake."
Elisa looked at her hat, and for the first time, she didn't feel confident.
She felt burdened.
Responsible.
These cracks that are appearing, which she herself caused in her fight with the Guardians and which she was now sealing, are fissures, small connections to the first existence. They were created in the fight Elisa had with the Guardians, a fight so intense that it fractured the fragile structure of the multiverse, creating these fissures. If she doesn't seal them... if she leaves even one of the cracks open, it could cause the second existence to merge with the first, and they could emerge.
Astrid approached and knelt beside her, without aggression.
"I know you don't trust me," she said. "But I want to prevent that. My way of doing this may seem extreme... but it's not because I want to destroy. It's because I've seen what happens when we do nothing. By using the cracks, I can merge universes, and with time and a few more cracks, I can create a single universe."
"Uniting all dimensions into one... is your solution?"
Astrid didn't answer. She just stared into space.
"Velhara died because no one acted in time," she murmured. "I won't let that happen again. By uniting all the universes into one, I will not only strengthen the fragile structure of the multiverse, but I will also prevent any similar problems from occurring. My world was annihilated, and the guardians couldn't do anything because they couldn't worry about a single universe when they had countless others to protect, especially mine, since it was broken from the start anyway. Its elimination was even convenient for them; after all, they would be getting rid of a poorly designed prototype. They would only have to seal the rift once my universe died. But if I create a single universe, that won't happen again. No world will remain dead and forgotten like mine. There won't be a world that can't be saved because they will all be one."
Elisa didn't answer. She didn't know what to say.
And then Astrid left, opening a portal to another universe.
Elisa stood alone among the shattered stars, gazing at the abyss toward which the multiverse was slowly approaching.
She couldn't help but feel that perhaps Astrid was right, but...something troubled her. The rifts in the universes that Astrid had joined weren't sealed, but rather stitched together, suppressed along with those universes. Tiny, almost imperceptible traces of the rifts remained, even to her, but she knew that however minuscule they were, they were still dangerous. She knew what could happen if any of those rifts were to reappear, or if the structure of the universe Astrid wanted to create were to break, being composed of so many dimensions.
She knew that each rift she sealed was like extinguishing a spark in a field of gas.
But she also knew that sealing them was the only way to truly end this.
Because something, deep inside, had already awakened.
And the only thing keeping the gods of error locked away...
...was the time remaining before one of those rifts opened completely.
And she quickly sealed the rift in Astrid's universe; she didn't want to merge her universe with another anyway. It brought back too many painful memories.