Returning to Vita was like stepping into the page of a book that was burning from within.
Astrid descended upon her native world with slow steps, each movement measured by a mixture of fury and nostalgia. The planet she remembered—crystal towers, seas that sang, plazas where people argued and laughed—no longer existed in the form her memory cherished. Another landscape stood there now: one the Reset had left behind as an echo, a cold reconstruction, exact, too perfect.
The streets were aligned, the plazas symmetrical, the flags waving with a neatness she found unbearable. The order of the Second Existence shone proudly on every corner. Everything she had loved now seemed like a well-placed statue in a museum of lies.
She had not come to talk.She had not come to negotiate.
She had come to burn the museum.
Her hands, steadied by the brooch, did not tremble when she touched the first column in the central plaza. The stone vibrated, cracked, and at a gesture of hers turned to dust. Cries rose when the façades collapsed as if a terrible impatience had swept across the world. Where there had once been parks, black fissures burst open. Where there had once been laughter, the wind now carried ashes.
It was not destruction without meaning: it was a ritual of purification.
Astrid did not want the false relics of the past to survive. Every arch, every statue, every mural proclaiming the glory of the new existence burned and disintegrated under her will. She felt that with every building that fell, something latent within her calmed, as if each truth torn from the world was a bandage being pulled from her eyes.
And then she saw her.
Her mother came running, cutting through alleyways, her skirt filled with dust and her eyes overflowing with disbelief. There was no fear yet on her face—only confusion and a raw pain that sat like a tumor in her throat.
"Astrid, please! What are you doing?" her mother's voice trembled, trying to understand the impossible. "Daughter… please, I don't know what's happening to you, but I beg you to stop this."
Astrid looked at her, and for a second she saw the image of the woman who had once rocked her to sleep as a child—with rough hands and the smell of bread—and it pierced her like lightning. It was a sharp vision of tenderness and guilt.
But it vanished as quickly as it appeared.
"You are not my mother," Astrid said, the words coming out cold, carved into her jaw. "You are nothing but a cheap copy."
The woman stepped forward, hands open in a pleading gesture.
"Please, daughter, whatever is happening to you, we can fix it," she insisted. "You and I—we can try. We can rebuild, remake things, search for solutions. We need you!" Her words were real; it was true: the bonds of everyday life could still try to build bridges over the fracture.
Astrid spat out a short, bitter laugh.
"Fix it. Fix what?" she replied. "The shadows of what once was? The ashes of what already died? You don't want to understand… because if you did, you would see that nothing can be repaired. What you call 'remaking' is erasing. It's replacing. My world did not return. They killed it and hid it beneath ashes. You cannot repair what they took from me. Nothing can be repaired."
Her mother took another step, a tear running down her cheek, carrying a pleading love that could not grasp the scale of the loss.
"Please, daughter… I beg you," she murmured. "I know this isn't you. You're not the Astrid I know. I don't want to lose you."
Astrid looked at her with a hardness that barely fit inside flesh. For a moment, her eyes softened, and a faint trace of sadness crossed her face—there was a glimpse there of what might have been. But the inner chasm was wider than any affection.
"That's right…" she said, in a voice that no longer seemed like her own. "I'm not your Astrid, and you are not my mother. You never will be. Because my home burned in a fire where you did not exist." Astrid said it without hesitation. "And let me tell you this once: it's much better if you know absolutely nothing… about me."
With those words she raised her hand, and the ground trembled. The plaza split apart once more. The woman fell to her knees before the thunder of what she called her daughter.
There were no explanations that could stop her.No pleas that could extinguish her determination.
Astrid continued, and with every gesture her tragedy grew larger, more public. Buildings fell, fountains dried up, trees turned into embers. The inhabitants fled; some begged, others tried to stop her with weapons that dissolved as they neared her aura.
At the summit of the old promontory where the city library once stood, Astrid stopped and looked at the ruins spreading around her. The destruction was no longer the culmination of pain—it was her answer. Her way of returning what had been stolen from her, of erasing any remnant of a reality that dared call itself consolation.
Yet even so, deep down, a part of her could not help but feel sorrow for what she had just done.
"AHHHHHHHH!!!!! DAMN IT!!!!!!!" Astrid screamed, a mixture of contempt and melancholy in her voice, as the entire galaxy trembled from her cry.
The desolate landscape before her reminded her too much of when she had lost Vellhara, and she could not stop a single tear from falling—but she wiped it away quickly.
"All of this is nothing but a lie. It doesn't deserve my tears," Astrid said, trying to harden herself inside.
Meanwhile, at the edges of the sky, a dome of shadows began to vibrate. The Guardians, restored by the new goddess to safeguard the Second Existence, had felt the transgression. They were not human entities; they were incarnated concepts arriving with the gravity of destiny itself. Their forms gathered behind clouds that were not clouds: silhouettes of balance, causality, entropy, and silence filled the firmament like the jury of an era.
They descended without haste, aware that their mere presence imposed order upon the situation. Their voice was not truly a voice, but a vibration that touched the plaza.
"Astrid," said Causality, the word trembling in the air. "Stop this. There are other ways. Do not destroy what has been rebuilt. The world you longed so much to recover has been restored. Why destroy the second chance you sought so desperately?"
Astrid looked at them. There was no fear in her expression—only sustained contempt. Her fury was an ancient fire, and the arrival of the guardians would not extinguish it.
"My second chance?" she replied, her voice sharpening every syllable. "And you ask why? You—the ones who imprisoned and created shadows—tell me to explain why I destroy something that should never have existed? Do you not understand that your 'protection' was the tombstone over my world?"
Silence descended.
Causality, who had spoken, inclined its figure slightly, as if the universe itself reconsidered the voices of condemnation.
"We were not the ones who decided the end," said Balance more gently. "The actions of the past were extreme, but this Second Existence is a new opportunity—for life, for learning. Astrid, not everything is lost. You can still choose."
"Choose?" Astrid said, and the word exploded. "Choose to wear a mask of peace while I stand beneath the graves of my universes?! No. If what you call an 'opportunity' was built with bones, then I prefer eternal silence over this ordered lie."
The guardians exchanged among themselves a resonance that was more than discussion—it was the council of ages. They carried the authority of those who had created and sealed the First Existence, and now they faced the daughter of one of its ghosts.
"We know the pain you feel," said Entropy. "We know the memory of what was lost. But indiscriminate destruction will bring irreversible harm not only to the lives that now exist, but to the very fabric that prevents a greater collapse. It is not the path."
Astrid laughed—a broken laugh without joy. Her eyes shone with terrible determination.
"Irreversible?" she repeated. "Is it irreversible to refuse to let what once existed rise again? Is it irreversible to imprison my world and feed upon its remains? You decided to be judges when we were not guilty. You are the ones who cast a destiny upon millions and called it 'stability.'"
Her voice became a roar that made the rubble tremble even more. The guardians stepped back. The entire universe quaked, yet no one came to stop her: what was breaking in that place was the cornerstone of her own life.
"Astrid," said Silence, with a calm that seemed capable of crushing mountains. "We are not your executioners. We are custodians. The goddess of inexistence, Elisa, left us instructions we have always followed: preserve balance. If you destroy indiscriminately, you will cause fractures that even you do not desire."
She stared at him. For an instant, her resolve seemed to falter. The warning held truth: blindly tearing open rifts could bring back forces that not even the modern gods could contain. But the idea of a possibility halted by fear was unbearable.
"Then stop me," she said calmly. "Try to stop what I will do. If you want this plane to remain a lie, then fight for it. I will not stop. In fact, you've just given me a good idea—the fastest and easiest way to destroy this would be the same way the previous existence once threatened to be destroyed… with the rifts. I'll open a direct rift to the First Existence and let all of this be destroyed once and for all, as it should be."
The guardians aligned themselves like ancient jurors. They were not cruel by nature, only resolute. They knew this young woman was no longer the confused astral being nor the benevolent traveler they had once known; they saw her now as a flame that could burn the balance itself.
Their decisions were measured.
"We do not wish to fight," said Causality with sorrow. "We wish to reason. But if your path is one of resentment, then we will fulfill our function. Not out of desire, but out of duty."
Astrid plunged her hand into the ground and felt the planet's materiality vibrate beneath her fingers. She focused her power toward a tiny crack, barely a thread of darkness beneath the plaza. She wanted to test something: an opening, a wound that would connect the Second Existence with fragments of the First. She did not intend to release everything at once; she wanted to plant the possibility—a fracture that would grow, and with it the chance that what was lost might meet ruin again.
The guardians watched in synchronized motion, ready to act. Tension gathered in the air like a storm that refused to break.
"Then so be it," said Silence. "If you force us, we will remember our task. To protect creation."
With that quiet warning, the entire plaza seemed to hold its breath.
Astrid, her face pale with a determination she barely recognized, began to trace the runes of rupture. Her words—ancient and harsh—shattered the calm.
The first ray of shadow appeared, a fissure like a scar in the fabric of the world.
The guardians raised their hands.
The battle both sides knew was coming was no longer merely a possibility.
It was a fact.
And in that instant, the plaza, the ruins, and the bodies of an entire civilization all became spectators to a decision that would change the course of existence.