Lyra Belacqua

Lyra believes she's an orphan, raised by the scholars of Jordan College in the distant shadow of her uncle, Lord Asriel. The Master secretly hands her the alethiometer, a golden device that answers any question for anyone who can read its symbols. Roger vanishes, taken by a gang that has been stealing children, and Mrs. Coulter turns up offering help.

In London, during a fight, Mrs. Coulter lets slip that Asriel is Lyra's father. Lyra also learns that Coulter runs the kidnappings, escapes with the alethiometer and is taken in by the Gyptians, the boat people. Ma Costa tells her the truth: Mrs. Coulter is her mother.

With the Gyptians, Lyra travels to the Arctic. There she meets aeronaut Lee Scoresby and helps the bear Iorek Byrnison recover his armor. Captured, she ends up at Bolvangar, where children are cut away from their daemons. Lyra finds Roger and destroys the machine.

On Svalbard, she tricks King Iofur Raknison and clears the way for Iorek to take the throne. She brings Roger to Lord Asriel, with no idea what her father has planned. Asriel severs Roger from his daemon to release the energy that opens a bridge to another world. Roger dies. Lyra crosses the bridge after her father.

On the other side, Lyra reaches Cittàgazze, a city with no adults, and meets Will Parry, a boy from our world. The alethiometer says her task now is to help Will find his father. In Will's Oxford, she meets physicist Mary Malone, who studies Dust, and loses the alethiometer to Lord Boreal.

With the subtle knife Will wins, the two get it back. Far away, Lee dies, and Will loses his father. In the end, Mrs. Coulter captures her.

Her mother keeps her drugged and hidden until Will arrives. Lyra dreams of Roger begging for help and decides to go to the Land of the Dead to find him. To get in, she has to leave Pan on the shore, the most painful parting of her life. Down there she finds Roger and Lee again, and Will cuts a window that lets the dead leave and become part of everything again.

In the mulefa's world, Lyra and Will fall in love, and Dust flows again. She is reunited with Pan. But every open window leaks Dust, so each of them has to go home to their own world. Will closes the last window and breaks the knife. First, they make a promise: every Midsummer at noon, each will sit on the same bench in Oxford's Botanic Garden, in their own world.

In Philip Pullman's books, Lyra appears as a baby in La Belle Sauvage and as an adult in The Secret Commonwealth and The Rose Field. Dakota Blue Richards played her in the 2007 film, and Dafne Keen in the series.