To the library, where Lyra resides.

The castle grounds are abuzz with activity in preparation for the fete tonight. Banners in yours and your guests’ colors are draped from the ramparts; servants race to and fro with papers or boxes or trays or clothes; an attendant lectures a scullery maid badly regarding a misplaced set of candlesticks. You weave through it all, the way cleared for you as you move hastily through the stone and wood halls.

At the end of a relatively quiet corridor, two women dressed in green and stag-embroidered clothes guard a set of ancient double doors. One woman bows at your approach. The other nods subserviently and opens the doors for you, letting out a cool draft and the smell of old parchment and books. Inside, the light is dreary, provided by feebly flickering blue-fire torches leading down a stone, spiral staircase to your castle’s library. You nod at the guards, and descend.

Your footsteps echo lightly in the quiet, all the fervor of the level above cut off completely as the doors close behind you. The stairs twist and turn and then level out into a low-ceilinged chamber. Bookcases line the walls and dot the open floor evenly, casting long, black shadows in the cool blue light of the torches. It is a humble space, but a dear one, and one you’ve frequented many times.

Sitting in the center of the room on one of two grey, overstuffed armchairs is a small, rail-thin woman in a dress as blue as the fire. Her hair--dark as the shadows--runs so long and so voluminous down to her hips, that at first you think it’s a cape, or a cover. But with one elegant, practiced, lightly-tanned finger, she clears a stray slice of black hair from her dark eyes, and tucks it behind her ear. She holds an impressively-sized tome with her other hand, and is so engrossed in it that she seems not to have noticed that you’ve stopped before her.

You clear your throat politely. She does not stop reading. In fact, she turns a page.

You grimace a little, clear your throat again, and before you can say “Lyra?” in full, she interrupts you, her voice nasally and sophisticated, with an air of knowing everything and being terribly bored because of it. “I’m sad to say I expected a little more from such a renowned castle. Hubert’s Encyclopedia on the Four Corners; The Prince’s Bride; The Mystanomicron. A mundane collection, really.”

She closes her tome (An Exploratory on the Dragon Treatise of 1211 D.E.). “You should see the library where I’m from. Yours is an impressive place, surely, but the material,” she whines. “Not even the touch of the magical, is there?”

She looks up at you expectantly.