Chapter - 32 - The Retrieval Blazing Wukong Friday, October 22, 2027 – 3:11 a.m.**
We meet in the Ohio Club basement.
Every ghost in Hot Springs is here.
Al Capone has the bar lined with every weapon that ever killed a man in the 1920s.
Holly is pacing the stage in her copper dress, voice low and furious, copper flames flickering in her curls.
Remy arrives last.
He looks like he's been dragged through hell and decided to bring it with him.
Eyes glowing solid gold.
Claws fully extended.
A low, constant growl that makes the bottles rattle.
He doesn't stop until he's in front of me.
Then he drops to his knees, presses his forehead to mine, and just breathes.
**Remy (voice shredded):**
"I can't feel you."
**Celeste (just as broken):**
"I know. I'm sorry."
He pulls back, cups my face with shaking hands.
**Remy:**
"We're getting it back. Tonight."
Rowan Vale steps out of a shadow, galaxy eyes blazing.
**Rowan:**
"The Forty-Eighth didn't break the bond. She stole it.
She's keeping it in the space between mirrors.
There's only one way to follow."
He looks at me.
**Rowan:**
"You have to go through a mirror.
Voluntarily.
Alone."
Silence.
Seras's fire flares white-hot.
**Seras:**
"Like hell."
Kayo's tails lash hard enough to crack the air.
**Kayo:**
"She'll be waiting."
Remy stands, steps in front of me like a shield.
**Remy:**
"Then I'm going with her."
Rowan shakes his head.
**Rowan:**
"Only the heir can cross the reflection threshold.
Anyone else gets shredded into their worst memory."
I look at Remy.
At Seras, whose hands are literally suns.
At Holly, who died for us once already.
At the ghosts, the yokai, the pack, the man from Shambhala who's been waiting four centuries.
I close my eyes.
Dacia's voice, calm and ancient:
**Dacia:**
*You are not alone because you walk in with nothing.
You are not alone because you walk in with everything we chose.*
I open my eyes.
**Celeste:**
"I'll go."
Remy starts to argue.
I kiss him—hard, desperate, tasting blood and coyote and forever.
**Celeste (against his mouth):**
"Trust me."
He rests his forehead against mine again.
**Remy (barely a whisper):**
"Always."
Rowan produces a single hand mirror framed in black cedar.
**Rowan:**
"Say the oath you used in the library.
Out loud.
Then step through."
I take the mirror.
Everyone circles tight.
Seras grabs my hand, squeezes once.
Holly gives me a fierce, proud smile.
Al tips his hat.
I look at the mirror.
My reflection is already wearing the full crown.
I speak the oath in perfect Vinča, twenty-five percent of a language older than sin.
Light explodes from the silver scar.
The mirror ripples like water.
I step through.
The world flips.
I'm standing in a place made of every reflection I've ever feared.
And the Forty-Eighth is waiting, holding my stolen heartbeat in her fist like a trophy.
She smiles with my mouth.
**Not-Celeste:**
"Welcome home, little storm."
I smile back with all my teeth.
**Celeste:**
"Give me back my coyote."
The war for the forty-eighth piece begins now.
And this time, I didn't come to refuse her.
I came to take. The Retrieval (continued)** Inside the Mirror-Realm**
The Forty-Eighth tilts her head, amused.
**Not-Celeste:**
"Still clinging to your toys?
You walked in alone.
That was the rule."
I feel the ripple behind me a half-second before the world ignites.
A pillar of white-gold fire punches straight through the mirror like a comet.
It doesn't shatter the surface;
it burns a perfect, blazing circle that stays open behind me.
Seras's voice echoes through the flames, layered with the roar of a star and the laugh of the Monkey King himself.
**Seras (everywhere and nowhere):**
"I might not be able to walk through the mirror after her…
but my Blazing Wukong sure as hell can."
The fire condenses, folds, and steps through.
It's Seras, but not.
Ten feet tall, hair a living solar flare, eyes twin suns, the outline of the Monkey King flickering around her like a second skin made of pure stellar plasma.
In her right hand: the Ruyi Jingu Bang manifested as a staff of compressed star-fire.
She plants it on the glass floor and the entire mirror-realm trembles.
**Blazing Wukong Seras (voice like a supernova):**
"You took something that doesn't belong to you."
The Forty-Eighth actually takes one step back.
**Not-Celeste (hissing):**
"Impossible. Only the heir—"
**Seras (grinning with too many teeth):**
"Guess what, mirror bitch?
My best friend is the heir, and I'm the plus-one she never has to ask for."
She slams the staff down.
The realm fractures into a thousand burning reflections.
**Seras:**
"Give Celeste her coyote back.
Or I start breaking your pretty little kingdom one star at a time."
The Forty-Eighth snarls, crown flaring crimson.
**Not-Celeste:**
"You'll both burn for this."
Seras laughs, and the laugh is the birth of a new sun.
**Seras:**
"Baby, I was born burning."
She looks at me, eyes softening for one heartbeat.
**Seras (quiet, just for me):**
"Go get our boy.
I've got the door."
The Blazing Wukong avatar raises the staff high.
The mirror-realm ignites.
And I run—toward the stolen heartbeat pulsing in the Forty-Eighth's fist—knowing my sister just turned herself into a living sun to hold the gate open.
This is why we win.
Because I never fight alone.
Not ever. Inside the Mirror-Realm**
The Forty-Eighth raises the stolen bloodstone locket like a weapon.
**Not-Celeste (voice cracking with fury):**
"This realm is mine. You are trespassing on ground built from every piece you will ever claim. You have no right—"
Seras's laugh cuts her off like a solar flare.
The Blazing Wukong avatar towers higher, staff spinning lazily.
**Seras (voice of a thousand suns):**
"Wrong again, mirror girl.
You keep forgetting the fine print."
She points the staff straight at the Forty-Eighth's chest.
**Seras:**
"Celeste and I share the throne.
Always have.
She's the storm queen.
I'm the fire that crowned her.
That makes this a two-on-one fight on your own damn turf."
The Forty-Eighth's crown flickers—uncertain for the first time.
I step forward, silver scar blazing white.
**Celeste (quiet, deadly):**
"You stole what was never yours to take."
I speak a single word in the 25% I own—
a word that means **return**.
The stolen locket rips itself out of the Forty-Eighth's hand and rockets toward me.
She lunges to stop it.
Too late.
The ruby bloodstone slams back into my palm, warm, alive, beating in perfect time with Remy's heart.
The severed bond snaps back into place so hard I stagger.
I feel him—across the valley, across the realm—gasp my name like a prayer.
The HUD screams across my vision:
```
HEARTBOUND RESTORED
13 → 14 / 47
Piece reclaimed: LOVE
The Forty-Eighth bleeds again.
```
The Forty-Eighth screams—pure, animal rage.
The mirror-realm fractures into a storm of glass and black water.
**Not-Celeste:**
"THIS IS MY WORLD!"
**Seras (grinning like the end of days):**
"Not anymore."
The Blazing Wukong brings the staff down.
A ring of solar fire explodes outward, carving a perfect circle of real ground into the reflection floor—our ground.
The Forty-Eighth is suddenly alone in the center of it.
Seras and I step onto the circle together.
Two queens.
One storm.
One sun.
**Celeste & Seras (in perfect unison):**
"Get off our throne."
The fight is brutal, beautiful, and short.
Seras is raw stellar force—every swing of the staff a supernova, every laugh a detonation.
I am precision and refusal—Vinča symbols carving themselves into the air, binding, breaking, refusing to yield.
The Forty-Eighth fights like a cornered god.
She still loses.
Because she's fighting for dominion.
We're fighting for the boy whose heartbeat is back in my chest, for the family waiting on the other side of the mirror, for every morning we've ever had and every morning we refuse to lose.
The final blow is ours together:
Seras pins her with the staff across the throat.
I press my bleeding palm to the Forty-Eighth's copy of the bloodstone on her forehead and speak the oldest word I know:
**MINE.**
The crown on her head cracks—forty-seven pieces screaming as one.
She shatters into black water and crimson light.
The mirror-realm collapses.
We fall upward—through fire, through storm—straight back into the Ohio Club basement.
We land hard.
Seras is human-sized again, hair smoking, grinning ear to ear.
I'm clutching the restored locket so tight my hand bleeds.
Remy is already there—waiting, eyes wild.
He doesn't speak.
He just crashes into me, arms crushing, face buried in my neck, breathing me in like oxygen.
The bond sings between us—stronger than before.
**Remy (voice wrecked):**
"Don't you ever do that alone again."
**Celeste (laughing through tears):**
"Never. Promise."
Seras flops onto the stage beside Holly, still glowing faintly.
**Seras (to the ceiling):**
"Two-on-one on her own turf.
We just made a goddess cry."
Holly starts slow-clapping.
Al pours ghost whiskey for everyone.
Rowan Vale watches from the shadows, galaxy eyes unreadable.
The HUD flashes one last time.
```
14 / 47
The Forty-Eighth is no longer unbeaten.
She is afraid of queens who fight together.
```
I look at Seras.
She looks at me.
We grin like the dangerous, unbreakable disasters we are.
The war isn't over.
But tonight?
Tonight, we took back what was ours.
And we did it together.