after time adrift, among open stars

I haven’t read anything from the His Dark Materials universe in quite a while, but yesterday something clicked and it was all I wanted to read about. I don’t have my copies of the trilogy with me, so I checked out what the library had, and they had the short books Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North. I’d heard about Lyra’s Oxford in the past, which contains things like maps and flyers from Lyra’s world, as well as a short story. I hadn’t heard of Once Upon a Time in the North before, which is a short story about Lee Scoresby, the aeronaut, and how he first met Iorek Byrnison.

I picked up Lyra’s Oxford first, which contains the short story “Lyra and the Birds.” This is set two years after The Amber Spyglass, so Lyra is fifteen and back in her own world. She’s a student at one of the Oxford colleges (not Jordan, a college called St. Sophia’s), but still spends time at Jordan and keeps up her relationships and some responsibilities there.

One day, while she and Pantalaimon are hanging around Jordan, a flock of birds appears in their midst - all attacking another bird, which is actually a witch’s dæmon. They save the dæmon from the birds, and end up on a bit of an adventure to fulfill what the dæmon’s witch has told him to do.

There are a surprising number of turns for such a short story! Some of it is a fun little jaunt back into Lyra’s world that answers questions like “can you tell a dæmon without their person apart from an animal” (yes, apparently, very easily), and some of it is much darker and reminds you of just how awful some of the things Lyra’s gone through are. But she’s still Lyra, clever and sneaky, and Pantalaimon is still the familiar voice of reason (or, at least, he’s still attempting to be!). Other characters aren’t extremely well fleshed out, but that doesn’t feel like very much of a problem, because this is very much meant to be about Lyra and her place in her world.

Lyra is, of course, very much a Chosen One kind of character, and this is firmly within that scope. That’s no longer the kind of story I generally seek out for new books or stories, but for an addition to an old favorite that’s never made any attempts to appear as anything but, I’m not bothered.

I always loved the idea of the witches in this universe, and of course everyone loves the dæmons. Overall, I’m really glad I picked up this little book! It was a very quick read - less than an hour all told for me, split up a bit because I read it before bed and then on a subway. It was great to be back in such a fun world for a bit. The postcards and flyers interspersed with the story made me smile, and the story itself was a reminder of how much I love this universe.