Of Constellations → 𝘥. 𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘧𝘰𝘺

i. beware the dragon

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chapter one

beware the dragon

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First Year

The dragons wouldn't stop laughing at me. I was trying to get some rest, and their mockery was making it exceptionally difficult.

Each time my eyelids grew heavy, they would come to life in the space between awake and asleep and snicker with bursts of fire crackling from their snouts or a taunting wiggle of their forked tongues. And then, my eyes would snap fully open. I'd give them hard stares while they were only static figures of ink on their posters, daring that they do it to my face while I was fully conscious.

It was exasperating. I was exhausted. And it was all Draco Malfoy's fault.

A half-hour before, I had returned home from shopping for school supplies in Diagon Alley. Upset and tired, I decided I needed a nap. However, evidently, there were explosives still embedded in my skin, waiting anxiously to be set off in a burst of fury. It turned out being surrounded by posters all over my bedroom proudly displaying Draco Malfoy's first name was just the spark to light the fuse.

Here's the thing: Draco became my favorite constellation many, many years before I knew it was the namesake of the youngest Malfoy. I designated it so when I was six and thought dragons were the pinnacle of cool (not to say I ever stopped thinking that).

So, a constellation that symbolized a dragon drifting through the night sky? Especially one perennially visible from the Northern hemisphere? It was an evident choice.

My room was adorned with posters of stars and planets and colorful nebulae, and there was a substantial number depicting Draco. Some were simple dots and lines, and others more elaborate paintings of serpentine dragons coiled around their neighboring constellations—I even had one that glowed a whitish-blue in the dark. They used to be my favorite posters out of my collection, so realizing I would now associate them with the self-important, spoiled git I'd met in Diagon Alley infuriated me.

Eventually, sufficiently tired and fed up, I jumped up from my bed and tore them all down. I was too emotionally attached to destroy them or anything, so, instead, I stored them in a desk drawer for safekeeping.

Perhaps I would put them back up after someone convinced Draco to change his name because, obviously, such an unsavory person didn't deserve to share a name with such a marvelous array of stars. 

Draco the constellation possessed one of the observable universe's most massive galaxy superclusters; in October, a meteor shower issued from the dragon's head as though it was breathing fire; and, best of all, it contained the Cat's Eye Nebula—a beautiful and complex dying star surrounded by a halo of colorful glowing gas, three-thousand light years away. 

Draco the Malfoy, on the other hand, possessed one of the observable universe's most punchable faces.

It wasn't like I was surprised by how awful he was. Growing up, I'd heard the Malfoy name paired with the term vile often enough that they were as good as synonyms in my mind.

Of course, it wasn't just Draco's family that my father despised. He didn't speak warmly of any Death Eater, You-Know-Who sympathizer, or blood elitist, but a distinct brand of venom laced his words when it concerned the Malfoys.

Part of it had to do with the history between my father and Draco's—a history that Dad refused to talk about until I was ten. My dad, Magnus Fossen, had been a soft-spoken, delicate boy with a predilection for the Muggle sciences and a measure of intelligence perhaps too great for his own good. Draco's father, Lucius, was a few years older, also clever (though less so), and derived great joy through torturing younger, weaker boys exactly like my dad.