Page 114 of Claimed By the Mothman
Without hesitation, Nell reached for it and stepped through.
Another corridor rose before her. Another door stood.
She opened it again. And another. And another.
She would open every door for eternity until she found him.
A deep whisper flickered within her.You’ve never been enough.
She exhaled, slow and steady. “I’m more than you ever imagined,” she responded.
The bond flared within her, and she felt Sig—on the edge of unraveling completely. But he was holding. He was solidifying as she moved, as she breathed, as she vowed against the space that held them both.
Nell began to run. Down hallway after hallway, through door after door, the walls warping as she passed and the air growing hot and hazy. Doors melted as she passed through them. The not-floor beneath her feet grasped at her ankles.
“I have been claimed,” she growled, throwing herself through yet another door. “I have been claimed by Sig Samora and you—will—not—STOP ME!”
With one final push, with everything she had, she tore open the final door and beheld him.
He was floating, nearly formless. His wings just a breath now, his body a suggestion instead of sustenance. He was there, but barely, an echo of the essence of him.
Above him, around him, loomed the Lustrum.
And it was beautiful. An abstract god with eyes of distant stars. It looked at her, through her, and Nell felt the weight of galaxies cluster onto her skin, into her bones.
Do you not wish to rest?The words floated through her, pressing against her skin and her ribs. The gentleness in the whisper nearly brought her to her knees. It was laced with tenderness, compassion—and an undercurrent of curiosity.
“No,” she said, her voice resonant with the truth of it.
Her eyes drifted to Sig, her lover, her heart, as he balanced between there and not-there. She drew a deep breath and called to him.“Come back to me.”
The Lustrum pulsed in defiance—a thrum of refusal that shook the air. The shape loomed, vast and unfinished, a thing built of hunger and unmaking.
Nell glared at it, her heart pounding like war drums behind her ribs. “No,” she declared.
She reached down,inward, scraping through grief and rupture and all the quiet days when she’d made herself smaller to fit into someone else’s vision. She reached for every version of herself that had been abandoned, erased, discarded. Found them. Gathered them. And claimed them for her own, forging them into a kintsugi of love and self and choice.
The ring blazed on her finger. She lifted her chin, flung out her hand, and screamed—
“He is mine!”
The chamber rippled and reality bent like hot glass, but Nell pressed forward, seeking, searching, until she was next to him. Sig flickered in and out of shape—barely real, barelyhere—and Nell placed her hands on his chest, feeling him try to hold shape beneath her touch.
“I am his, and he is mine,”she cried, voice ringing like a vow.“I claim him. I claim this. I claim us.”
The bond began to weave, stitching itself back together from everything they were and had been and might become: want and wonder, ache and awe.
Nell breathed the truth into the space between their mouths. “I am yours because Ichooseto be.”
She grabbed him, and felt himgrab back.
The air cinched in on itself like a drawn cord. The walls bowed inward. The light bent, slow and deliberate, sliding across their skin in blistering reds and storm-light violet.
Beat by beat, breath by breath, she felt Sig solidify beneath her hands, felt him anchor, felt his thrum stutter, stabilize, and settle, pulsing in time to the echoing hum in her chest.
Around them, the Lustrum coalesced, shimmered in impossible geometries, lines fractaling through the air like a spider web woven of starlight. Eyes bloomed and blinked in spirals, galaxies spun inside pupils too large to belong to anything living. Mouths curled open and closed without sound, tasting the air, the moment, the bond.
A question poured into the space around them.
