The First Existence, sealed by the Guardians, now floated like an astral corpse. No other reality could reach it. No consciousness could perceive it. It was now a rotten multiverse, confined to eternal darkness.
Inside it, time no longer flowed. Physical laws were faded memories. Gravity repelled instead of attracting; space folded in upon itself. Everything was deformation, entropy, and decay. And at the center of that prison stood Lyra and Zefaniel.
At first, they tried to resist.
They attempted to recover the calm and harmony that had once defined them. They sat upon platforms of antimatter suspended by their own will. They spoke. They dreamed. They remembered the stars they had shaped together, the planets they had caressed with their power, the universes they had watched over like proud parents.
But those memories began to hurt. They became soft blades that cut without drawing blood. Because they could not return. Neither they nor existence were the same; their own corrupted souls had corrupted everything else.
Each day—if such a thing still existed—their thoughts grew more erratic. Zefaniel, whose essence was creation, began to create out of desperation. Deformed worlds, creatures born from incomplete pulses, beings without eyes that could weep. Everything he formed unraveled within minutes, as though reality itself rejected their existence.
Lyra, meanwhile, began to erase. Her power of nonexistence grew ever more voracious. She dissolved entire stretches of reality on impulse, trying to calm an anxiety she did not understand. The silence she once loved had become torture.
Madness did not arrive all at once. It was a slow erosion of sanity.
Zefaniel began speaking to his failed creations, giving them names, convincing himself they understood him. He told them stories, pretended they were his children, laughed with them… and wept when they inevitably vanished.
Lyra became withdrawn. She would sit for centuries without moving, contemplating the surrounding blackness. Sometimes she muttered nonsense. Other times she laughed manically. And when Zefaniel tried to speak to her, she answered with phrases that disintegrated sound itself.
They were both broken. But most tragic of all was that, even so, they still loved one another.
When the bursts of madness intensified—when one threatened to destroy everything or retreat forever into themselves—the other would be there, clinging to the little love that remained.
One eternal night, as the prison trembled from a spontaneous antimatter storm, Zefaniel collapsed. He fell to his knees before Lyra, his light flickering, his eyes filled with despair.
"Lyra… why are we still alive? The only purpose for which we existed is now nothing but a vague memory. We were meant to be harmonious beings who cared for and sustained existence—but now existence and we are… this."
She did not answer at first. She remained silent for several minutes, then responded with meaningless sounds that Zefaniel could somehow understand. He saw the tears falling from her face—tears that caused the entire universe around them to wither—filled with pain and resentment.
In that moment, something inside Zefaniel shattered completely.
He rose, and with uncontrollable fury extended his hand toward the prison. His energy of existence erupted, forming an agonizing sun that lasted only a second. His screams echoed through every corner of the sealed universe.
"They made us with purpose, with consciousness… only to torture us! They used us as tools and discarded us! I do not want to remain in this hell! If this is the life we have, I don't want to live it!"
Without speaking, Lyra embraced her brother. Though she was just as broken, she held him with all her strength so as not to lose the only being who prevented her from losing every trace of humanity.
Hatred began to be the only emotion they still preserved. Their souls could only grow more corrupted.
Thus began the complete transformation.
Zefaniel no longer created with love. He began forging monsters deliberately, screaming to the heavens for the Guardians to watch. Grotesque creatures, deformed abominations that shrieked in impossible languages—their mere existence was enough to corrode entire universes. And Zefaniel unleashed them throughout creation to spread decay.
Lyra, for her part, became a devourer of existence. The fury within her consumed everything, unraveling with a gesture any structure, creature, or space she encountered. Her reasoning was simple:
"If I cannot have peace… nothing else should."
The multiverse began to deteriorate entirely. The Guardians, still observing from afar, maintained the seals, terrified of what they had unleashed. They knew they could not intervene. Not even they, natives of Nothingness, could confront the absolute power of these two beings now freed of all moral restraint.
Yet in their desperation to keep the Second Existence they were creating stable, they devised a plan.
They would use the fragments of energy they had stolen from Lyra and Zefaniel during their confinement and concentrate them into two relics.
The residue of Zefaniel, of pure existence, would be forged into a brooch: the Brooch of Union. With it, reality could be extended, dimensions joined, paths created where none had existed.
The residue of Lyra, of pure nonexistence, would be woven into a hat: the Hat of the Void. Capable of sealing, of closing, of reducing everything to what never was.
Both objects would be inert. Without consciousness. Without soul.
The Guardians had learned from their mistake. Never again would they grant independent thought to the incarnations of their energies. This time, they would be nothing but tools.
And thus, upon finishing the creation of the relics, the Second Existence began.
A more limited multiverse, weaker because it was formed from the remnants of the prior existence—and because the incarnations of existence and nonexistence were now merely empty objects without consciousness or soul, which greatly limited reality… but made it more stable.
A cosmos where balance depended not on consciousness, but on control. Where fragments of gods now lived as harmless objects. And where the memory of Lyra and Zefaniel was erased from all history.
But within the First Existence, madness continued to grow.
Zefaniel no longer had a face. His body was a vortex of incandescent light, shining so intensely it burned everything around him. When he spoke, his voice fractured into thousands of echoes, as though his soul had accidentally multiplied.
He dreamed of life that repudiated him, blamed him for its creation. He saw the creatures of his worlds condemning him, calling him monster, begging him to kill them and end their suffering.
Lyra no longer walked. She dragged herself as a field of liquid darkness, leaving behind a trail of disappearance. Her body was now barely recognizable—a silhouette of void so thin it seemed made of smoke, constantly collapsing into an indistinct amalgam. She did not dream: she remembered. Fragments of her mind she had tried to erase clung to her like specters. She attempted to erase the memories, even memory itself—but they always returned in dissonant pieces: voices of children never born, laughter she never lived, faceless names.
Her mind no longer distinguished between real and impossible. Sometimes, due to these constant erasures and returns, she forgot even who Zefaniel was—attacking him, or falling into a vegetative state, remaining motionless for decades as her mind became entirely blank. Yet despite everything, she always tried to hold on.
"Zef…" she whispered, her voice distorted. "Do you think that once—even before we became this—we were… happy?"
Zefaniel did not respond. His gaze was fixed upon the warped horizon of the prison universe. There, the walls of reality trembled as if ready to yield. But they would not. The Guardians would not allow it.
Lyra sighed—or something like it. Her breath erased a dead star.
"I remember… the first planet. Do you? It had seas that sang with their waves. Why did they sing?"
"Because you wanted them to," Zefaniel replied, laughing briefly, his laughter shattering into echoes. "And I told you that was ridiculous. But then… I liked it."
A pause. A blink of eternity.
"When did we stop being us?"
Lyra lowered her gaze. Her shadow shrank.
"I think we never were…" Zefaniel answered.
They fell silent. For years. Decades. Or perhaps a second. Time became useless when no mortals remained to need it.
But then, something changed.
Zefaniel felt a sting within himself. A minute vibration, like an off-key note in a symphony that had not sounded for ages.
Lyra felt it too. Her silhouette trembled.
"What… was that?"
Zefaniel closed his eyes—if he still had them. He focused his consciousness. It was a call. Not toward them, but… toward their essence. Something out there was resonating with their former energies.
"The brooch," he said at last. "And the hat."
Lyra did not respond immediately. But when she did, her voice was different. Clearer. Almost… human.
"The Guardians made them. They emptied us, plundered us. And with our remains… created soulless objects."
Zefaniel nodded. A flame of wrath began to ignite within him.
"They took everything. Our purpose. Our identity. Our love. And now… they use our ruins as tools to manipulate what we once upheld with care."
Lyra extended her spectral hand. A vortex of shadows spun in her palm.
"I can only think of destroying them."
It was not a cry of hatred. It was a quiet plea. Devastatingly serene.
Zefaniel did not argue. He did not try to dissuade her. Because he felt it too. Not only rage—but pain. Loss. The need to reclaim something denied to them.
"If there is a way to reach them," he said, "to break the seals… we must try."
Lyra looked at him, and for an instant, she was as she once had been. The sister who laughed at newborn constellations. The goddess of Nothingness who wove beauty from silence. Her silhouette briefly regained an almost human shape, as though memory itself rebuilt her.
"Zef… if we do this, if we manage to escape… will you stay by my side?"
Zefaniel stepped closer, beginning to regain his human form as well. He extended his energy around her without harming her, with a tenderness that seemed impossible in that mad hell.
"Always."
And in that instant, the prison trembled.
Not from a crack, nor from a flaw in the Guardians' seals.
It trembled because a will had awakened again.
The dead universe could no longer contain them.
Meanwhile, in the Second Existence, far from that sealed prison, two objects slept within the flow of the multiverse: a black hat and a golden brooch.
Both vibrated in unison, though no one touched them.
They had no consciousness.
But in their deepest fragments, something remembered.
And something answered.