One of the children she’s kidnapped is Lyra’s friend Roger.

Coulter is spearheading chilling experiments on children in her pursuit of “truth.” Specifically, she’s separating children from their dæmons. Lyra soon discovers that the Church is also desperate to learn about Dust - a substance they believe is somehow connected to original sin - and that Mrs. Several events then occur almost simultaneously: Lyra is given a truth-telling device called an alethiometer (the golden compass) and told to keep it secret she begins to hear rumors of children disappearing without a trace and she’s whisked into the care of a glamorous but ruthless agent of the Church named Mrs. Lurking in the wardrobe, she hears her uncle, an iconoclastic explorer named Lord Asriel, documenting the findings about a mysterious substance called Dust to a group of scholars. a choice that unwittingly launches her into a universe-altering adventure. The Golden Compass begins when Lyra clambers into a wardrobe to avoid detection. All humans in Lyra’s world, we learn, have dæmons who eventually take on a single animal form when children reach adolescence. Lyra is headstrong and prone to getting into trouble, and she’s accompanied always by her dæmon (pronounced demon) Pantalaimon, a shape-shifting animal spirit who embodies her soul. This precocious young orphan lives in the care of scholars at Jordan College in Oxford, England - albeit in an alternate universe. The first book in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy introduces us to the series’ heroine, a 12-year-old girl named Lyra.

His dark materials the golden compass