The Deepest Night

Prologue

I’m not a ghost. I am dead, though.

My body lies in its casket underneath the pale sandy sod and wind-scrubbed grass of southern England, not far from where I was born. The marker for my grave looks much like all the others in the cemetery, plain gray stone, chiseled edges. Chiseled letters spelling out my name and significant dates, and a single phrase beneath all that about the salvation of hope.

Most visitors to the cemetery walk by it without a second glance; they have memories of their own dead clouding their minds. If anything, they might make note of my age when I perished—seventeen—and feel a hint of fresh sadness whisper by, thinking something like Poor lad, or Tsk! His poor mum.

Seventeen is young to most of them. Seventeen is a short sigh of years, barely time enough to taste the bitter joy of life, the ashen loss of death. Seventeen reminds them uncomfortably well of how their own years are ticking down to a final, finite number.

But again, most people don’t bother to look or figure the math. And with the Great War still raging on, the death of a young man isn’t nearly as notable as it used to be, even in the countryside. It’s an old cemetery laid out along a hill above an even older fishing village, and mine is just one more grave amid all the generations of others.

On the surface, that is.

Three feet straight out from the front of my marker and seven inches more straight down into the dirt—curiously enough, directly above my face, although I’m fairly certain that was coincidence—is buried a flower.

It’s a buttercup, and it’s made of solid gold.

I should know. I’m the one who made it, back in my mortal life. I used my earthly magic to transform it from a living thing into a golden dead one, and I gave it to the girl I loved, who has now given it back to me. In her own way.

I’m not a ghost. I am a star. I spin a celestial magic now high, high above her, waiting for her to take notice and hear me.

Because she’s not a girl, really.

Actually, not at all.

She’s a dragon.

Poor lass. She only just found that out.