Elisa landed in a world devoid of touch. There was no ground, no gravity. Only a surface of solidified thoughts, where emotions formed structures: towers of guilt, bridges of anxiety, seas of nostalgia.
It was a mental dimension, a collapsed reality where time flowed backward and memories were entire worlds. A rift floated in the center, slowly rotating like an open wound in the nonexistent sky. From within came a thick hum, a vibration that made her gag with anguish.
The hat, as if understanding the atmosphere, grew heavier. Elisa fell to her knees.
"No... I can't take it anymore," she whispered, feeling for the first time that the burden was greater than her soul.
Images surfaced in the rift before her. Her childhood. Her home planet. Aetheris. Her mother laughing. Her father showing her constellations. Her first love. Her ship... the cosmic pieces. Everything she had been.
Elisa could only try to reach them helplessly, as if she wanted to return to those moments but couldn't. Despite being so close, they were also too far away. She broke down for a moment, shedding several tears and covering her eyes as her memories materialized into an entire planet made of those memories.
After some time she finally stood slowly and raised her hat. This time, she didn't just seal the rift. She cleansed it. She purified the memories trapped within, returning them to the natural flow of time, but not before seeing them one last time and shedding a few final tears.
The place fell silent. A pure silence. As if the dimension had exhaled after centuries of holding its breath.
Later, Elisa traveled to a new universe and found an anomaly.
It wasn't a rift.
It was a scar. Like those left after surgery, there was no doubt it was one of Astrid's dimensional junctions.
Elisa touched it and tried to erase it.
And then the world changed.
A flash. A roar. The light was sucked in. The hat shone brightly, trying to steady the impending fall. But it failed.
It fell...it fell again.
It awoke in a room.
It was small, cylindrical, made of dark glass. Everything was slowly rotating. There were no doors. Only a window, overlooking a sea of dead space and stars.
Elisa, completely confused, just asked where she was.
And a voice answered her.
"You're in my own little dimension, a place I created to escape the world sometimes."
Elisa turned around and saw Astrid, and then asked her how she got here.
"Because you tried to erase the scar and did it wrong, honestly, you took me by surprise too when you appeared here" Astrid said, sitting across the room. "But as I said, that wasn't a crack. It was a bad seam."
"Did you sew it?"
"I tried. I failed. It happens sometimes when I try to merge worlds."
Elisa moved closer, but Astrid raised a hand.
"I don't want to fight. At least not yet. I want to talk."
"Why are you doing this?" Elisa asked, her voice breaking with the emotion of someone who no longer understands the world.
Astrid sighed.
"My dimension was the first to fall. Not because of war, or natural collapse. It was a design flaw. The fabric was unstable. The laws of physics danced without rhythm. We existed by mistake. And everything I loved was erased."
"I'm sorry…"
"No, don't be. That's why I'm doing this. If all the dimensions were to merge… if they became one, solid… maybe it wouldn't happen again."
"But that would destroy the individuality of each one." Chaos is part of order.
"And how many more must die for you to keep justifying this 'chaos'?"
A tense silence filled the room.
"Your hat closes. My brooch unites. We are opposite ends of the same purpose," Astrid said, lowering her gaze. "Perhaps that's why we're destined to fight."
"And what if we don't fight?"
Astrid smiled sadly.
"We're already fighting, Elisa. Every crack you close is a new world I try to create."
And at that moment, the room cracked.
Not the wall.
The reality.
Astrid decided to undo the place and opened a portal that started to sucking them both into different places, Astrid touched her brooch. Elisa her hat. Time stretched, and they both disappeared in a new leap.
Elisa emerged in an ancient forest.
One she had dreamed of before.
She recognized it.
But she didn't know from where.
The moon in the sky was scarred. And in the air, she could smell the smoke of collapse.
A crack opened in the distance. Gigantic. Throbbing.
Elisa swallowed.
She knew what it meant, she didn't understand why, but she knew what that crack was.
That crack was an entrance to that failed existence.
Where things waited. Nameless things. Lightless things.
She shouldn't go near.
And yet... it was her duty.
She was the only one who could.
And someone had to look into the abyss, if no one else would.
Note: I changed my mind. I know this is my first story and everyone (including me) hates waiting, so now I'll upload chapters much more often, at least every 3 or 4 days.