She Was My Darkness

You think you know me.

Big, bad Lord Byron: the limp, the scandals, the poetry so drenched in sin it should come with a warning label. The man who turned seduction into performance and heartbreak into art. Too many lovers, too many debts, too many headlines screaming “tragic genius” like it was praise. Died young in Greece, left a beautiful mess behind. The End.

A charming tale, is it not?

Yet you know nothing.

People adore a cautionary tale — write too much, burn too brightly, die young. If anyone had ever bothered to ask me (which they never did, because gossip is far more entertaining), I would have told them the real reason I never quite fit, never quite aged, and never actually died.

On Halloween night, 1815, at No. 13 Piccadilly Terrace, while London drank itself blind, I did something spectacularly stupid.

I made a deal with the dark.

Six months to find real love — the kind that ruins you properly — or my soul, my body, and every broken verse I would ever write would belong to her. Forever.

Guess who lost?

This is my story.

— G. G. Byron