Lyra had not always been a guardian of the old ways.
She remembered a time when the silence was a comfort, a space where she could hear her own voice, her own song.
But the great unraveling had taken that from her, had replaced the silence with a void, and the song with a scream.
She had seen what happened when the story was lost, when the world was reduced to a collection of facts without a narrative to bind them.
And she would not let it happen again.