Meet Lyra Vale, Bellkeeper of the Eleventh Cycle

The protagonist of The Chronowarden. Twenty-seven in this body and a great deal older than that in the body of her soul.

Lyra Vale is twenty-seven years old when the bell rings backward. She is a Chronowarden of the Eleventh Cycle, initiated five years earlier by Anselm — her old teacher, who looks like a Welsh shepherd who has wandered out of the wrong century. She lives alone in a small cottage inside a circle of tourmaline she drew herself. Her wool robe is the colour of dried lavender. She wakes at the wolf-hour because something in the architecture has begun to fail.

What she carries

Three small things, in the working sense.

The first is the Tablet — a green-stone pendant the colour of old jade, given to her at initiation, worn next to her sternum. It is the carrier of her tradition; it is also the small reliable weight that reminds her body she is a warden, on the days her mind has forgotten.

The second is a piece of black tourmaline she has held since she was nine. It is the older of the two stones. It does not glow in the dramatic sense. It is, quietly, the thing she places at the edge of her circle when she goes down the Ladder. The thing that keeps her able to come back.

The third arrives later, in fragments: the Seven-fragment Bell, which she has to gather across an entire book and a dozen densities before it can ring whole. The book is, in some sense, the story of her gathering it.

What she is afraid of

The honest answer is in the novel. She is afraid of becoming Korvanis — of taking the same path her predecessor took out of grief, refining stolen years into something the Council would have to refuse. She is also, more ordinarily, afraid in the way every working practitioner is afraid: of the descent, of the Council's gaze, of the moment she will be asked to act and will not know whether she is up to it.

What the novel teaches her, slowly, is that fear is allowed. On the Plain of Unspoken Things she finally names it: I am allowed to be afraid. A warden simply has to walk anyway.

She is the figure we wrote for every working practitioner who has ever been asked to walk a discipline they were not sure they were ready to walk, and who walked it anyway.

Her relationships

Three matter most. Anselm, her teacher, is the gentle keeper of the Forge of Souls and the one who shows her the three named Hollow Travelers in a basin of what looks like water and is not. Soren, her barred-owl familiar — a Child of the Broken Law, a being of probability — is the small witness who blinks once for yes and twice for worse. Korvanis is the figure she has been writing toward from the first page, the former Chronowarden whose grief built the order that is now thinning the Web.

What she becomes

By the last chapter she is named Bellkeeper of the Eleventh Cycle by Sephora, chair of the Council. She does not stop being twenty-seven. She does not stop being afraid. She does begin to write the volume the reader is holding — the first volume of The Ethereal Pages of Lyra Vale, Bellkeeper of the Eleventh Cycle. She will train three students. She will live forty-six more years. She will die in her sleep on a Tuesday afternoon in early October, at the age of seventy-three, alone in a small white room, which is what every working warden was always going to do.