The Illusionist

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Disclaimer: I do not own any of Philip Pullman's complex, counseling-deprived characters.

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A/N: I'm doing what no writer (I have filtered for it!) has done: Lyra and Iroek. Yes, fear me (not romance you weirdos). And then because I couldn't abuse myself enough, I did Asriel's POV, needed a dictionary, Aristotle (becuase Asriel speaks so...stfu I thought of Aristotle), Susan Kay, and decided by the time I was done I would rather take two sharp pencils and stab them through my eyes than get inside -his- head again. And I wanted to post it (mostly since I can't look at it without wanting to claw my brain out). You know this guy is the hardest to write about—EVER? I've done all sorts of experiments with other stories, even inserts for Poe (very trying), but this is by far the most multifaceted individual I've read about yet. Maybe it's because of his charisma, how all the characters that interact with the Lord are all quite in awe of him…even Lyra. Underneath the hate…I almost smile at the bittersweet relationship, the hidden pride and respect for the other. If he hadn't died, I wonder what would have happened…?

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SUMMARY: After all, every world is created upon the final conclusion of chance, odds: probability. There are millions upon millions of worlds, all so close those living in them could share the same breathe, brush against another—yet they would never know it; but all are broken off of possibility. And, in this particular possibility, on an overlooked, hidden side of the dice, Lord Asriel loved his daughter. AKA: Lord Asriel acknowledges:

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And I don't know what my intentions are

They're speaking in a different tongue

But I won't let you know

Until it's right, I'm going to stay my distance

And you should go

I think I'm lonelier than I have ever been before

'Cause I was so close

To going through that door

(I hesitate to say that you were bait for me to further my plan.)

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It is safe for me to declare my mind has touched the farthest horizons of mental imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand…

And…as long as I live, I will never look upon another in love.

And yet, I'm falling now.

I think...

I could have taken her then when she was small and vulnerable and easily manipulated, but I didn't.

She needed an enemy, I was frightening, she wanted to hate me, I sent an army after her. I could have done so many things differently against her.

But I didn't.

I tried very carefully not to love her, and I believe at one point I almost succeeded.

I quitted to London on the 27th of March and remained a few days at Windsor, allowing my child to crawl and ramble in its surreal forest under a hired maid's eyes and her squirrel daemon, my own taking meticulous, looming watch of the maid from a distance. The scene was enjoyed by the tiny thing; the majestic oaks, the wild small game, and the herds of stately deer novelties to her newborn eyes. She watched them with an avid, unchildlike awareness that did not escape me while I contemplated with detached amusement the few blood droplets that managed to spray on my arm from the gunshot of that fool earlier.

From there I continued to Oxford. As I entered this city with her seated beside me in the carriage, my mind was filled with the remembrance of events transacted more than a century before. It was here that Charles I had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join in the name of Parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king released a spirit of elder days tracing its footsteps around every part of the city, and subsequently my heart, for very soon I would embark on a quest of popularity similar to Charles.

Once I looked at her when she cried and for an instant I dared shake off my chains and meet her with a human spirit, but the iron had eaten my flesh years ago, and I turned again, pitiless and indifferent from her miserable self. Ayeesha lowered herself to push the sniveling daemon to console its antsy counterpart. She didn't whimper again.

The colleges are ancient and the lovely garden, which flows beside it through meadows of exquisite architecture, is spread forth in to a placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees. Jordan College.

It was here that I would leave her.

I disassociated myself from her as soon as possible, as good as dumping the child into the Master's lap with a large bribery before the sun even came to the clock tower's steeple. Whenever I did find it to my advantage to return, the 'we' was somewhat of a reprieve, a pardon: some sort of temporary, irritating bind that shattered, much like the relation photographers have with their landscapes when there's an intruding cough behind them, the second I stepped off Jordan's grounds to the freedom of my own life.

She was an undomesticated, disgusting child, her daemon no better. They ran down the halls laughing wildly with a pack of servants, unfortunate to have a girl that was as uncontrollable as she was cunning, stumbling after her like idiots; they quickly learned that no punishment was able to pin her down for long. The clothes provided for her were ripped or dirtied mere minutes after dressing her, and also no matter how many baths there was dirt under her fingernails. Wild, unbearable, and beneath my attention.

…For while anyway; you see, something went wrong.

I discovered that she still amused me.

Pathetic pride, perhaps. My offspring, as disconnected as I was with it, still harboring the traits most feared in myself and using them to her advantage as a juvenile delinquent. It was left unspoken with my own daemon that it was regrettable Lyra hadn't been raised in a more sophisticated environment, but only in passing.

Damnable girl.

One night in the drawing room a mirror was full of us. She never noticed; Lyra is predictable in never surveying her surroundings. An old glass, one that could have had her caught had any of the chairmen casually looked over and saw the darkness of a body reflected from the cabinet, had managed to capture us like a photograph never had. But it was elegant in its decay, and I found it to have that unique, unprecedented display of taste found in faulty crafts. Coldly, in that reflection I too reflected that her proximity to me did not matter. She could be one foot away or ten; I was quite independent of any pathetic paternal cries now if she should unconsciously or purposely attempt to stir one—which was perfect.

I saw she should have bound her hair, it was natty like the rest of her, and while she spoke all I could see was how much it symbolized the rest of her. I didn't care for the words she spat out of her uneducated mouth, because for all the world it was utter ignorant nonsense.

Until she said…that.

The words cut sharply, unexpectedly. She walked around me. She took her steps silently and made a circle to assure herself as if this could close me in some way. Absently, I only thought how she knew nothing of magic, circles, pentagrams…

I cursed her infernal innocence. The crossroads were high and my irritation was mounting, Ayeesha sensed it and growled low and made a move as if to strike down the infernal brat once and for all...

But the answer was this: I couldn't kill her, not yet. I couldn't for simple logic's sake, and Ayeesha bade my order to restrain herself from going for her jugular. I have to admit a part of me was curious what Lyra could be taught—what if she could be tamed down enough to receive what I have learned?

I moved away from her. I sent her away and packed my things; it did not matter. Demands had kept me from grooming her the way a member of my blood should have been, and now it was too late. A mind such as mine has no time for "could have beens."

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My voyages of discovery were often prolonged by the successive objects that presented themselves. Soon unearthed in that frozen tundra were tombs of illustrious sights, and through desecrated tombs of those ridiculous old men in Rome I threaded the secrets together thread by thread.

Ideas of unorthodox nature pursued me and tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose and peace. I waited for my answers with concentrated patience, though inside I was completely possessed with the idea that I could be right.

I sat one evening in the glass laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labor for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. I took satisfaction in knowing that my decision mattered not, the result would be the same.

What do I need?

What mountain does this pathetically fallible fate dare me to still mount? Perhaps I taunted the dice too close to a crack on the table, for later that evening it came so simply I should have seen the accordion sound preparing to blast.

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The servant reported his ear being suddenly arrested by the pounding of a beast near the shore, and a small person—"a child, my Lord!"--atop landing close the fortress.

A child.

The dream of gods and their gifts still played behind my waiting eyes when, on looking past the servant out in the frozen terrain, I saw by the light of the moon... my Lyra at the doorway.

Imagine this picture: a man travels to the ends of the earth, breaks world barriers, gives his service to a royal fool of a bear, plays the church, travels far and wide to the ice-capped tundra in a house of glass…and still a scrawny, wild, uneducated little girl manages to walk up and knock on his doorstep.

For God's sake, Jordan College was over three countries away! Hundreds of thousands of miles. If this had happened to someone else, the contemptuous words would have shot out of my mouth in disgust already for their obvious idiotic fallacies.

And the servant's earlier cry hit me: A child.

I stared at her. A child. Lyra...was...

The feeling I experienced could be akin to being shot. In an alternate world I promptly left the room and locked the door, myself from her, and downed several bottles of Merlot. Or walked around her and asked quite sanely to the servant, "Well where is it?"

And I don't know why.

In this world my mind was blank, perversely and primitively overcome with the most unpleasant sensation of helplessness against my welded dice for fate and calculations that demanded my own daughter. While I in vain endeavored to fly from the impending nightmare, instead found myself rooted to the spot. Inside, I can not fully describe how one's heart fails. I cannot describe how it feels to have the God you're trying to kill laughing at you.

I thought with a sudden sensation of madness towards my ambitions, to open another world right then and there, in that instant cursed the pieces of the subject of which I had engaged. The girl looked at me—

She was mine.

Those large eyes, and defiant chin, mine!—exhausted and her existence depended on my next decisions (she was bleeding, who touched her?), ignorant of my derailed mind she stepped forward. Between the seconds I vowed to never resume my labors, immediately after she became a daughter--mine--peering at a locked cage but before I became aware of the personal significance..with those steps I saw the boy.

Structure resumed, time sped up. My vision between reality and the fabrication restored to clarity. Distantly I could hear fragments of her words: "This is…friend…tired…Roger…"

This is...Roger.

This is...

A child.

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I allowed several hours to pass for Lyra and the child's recovery, and I remained at a window in the library gazing at the icy sea my glass house rested on. It was almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon.

Reflected in the silent pools gleamed the aurora; silently as I watched it silently called.

I had split in two: one part of me summoned her. That part was aware when in a few minutes after, there came the creaking of the door, as if someone endeavored to open it softly. I could be indifferent once again because I, Lord Asriel, maintained control: Lyra was once again just an irritating chil—a thing that I could also direct at my leisure. The other part was away checking calculations in a far off soul wing, that the kinetic energy I would need when the child was electrified and the potential energy the bond with its creature would release.

I will not admit that side was hiding, that it did not want to see her for reasons unknown to my summoning half.

She came to me but I did not hear. Indifferent to her statements, at some point I did look over at her…and found myself performing an unexpected intake of breath as two worlds damnably merged once more.

Had I ever seen a sight more excited than she was, more proud, and more hot for glory? I sped through the palace of my mind: I saw crowds of faces, faces that smeared together in their sudden unimportance. I heard songs. I saw ecstasy; but those had been masses and masses, and it had been a lie. And my god had been weeping before I swore to kill the true Him forever. That was no answer.

She stepped away from me. Oh good, she's done.

"You fear me suddenly?" I asked her, amused. "Why?"

"I don't fear you," she spat back, "I've been before a bear King and refused to serve him, not as a human and not as a daemon. I've seen them; I've seen the daemons when they were dying…"

Curiosity provoked me to pry further. "Have you?"

Her chin was defiant, strong; good girl—I can only imagine what you could have truly been like. "I was there in Bolvanger and I freed them from their cages, I was in the cage before the axe fell. The doctor lifted his hand; his eyes were completely ready for the half-death that—that w-would..." Her voice wavered, her eyes faded, and she spoke softly; more to her daemon than to me. "I, I don't think I have any more great dreams in my head. Maybe that's why the others died." She looked at me directly. "But you are full of dreams, aren't you? That's why the Church is so afraid of you. And you do burn bright, and I fight you, I hate you…but…" She drifted off, troubled.

Now this was interesting. She spoke and I'd be lying if I did now say that I wasn't intrigued by her uncultured intelligence (as a stifled flame still glows, so she did glow quite beautifully)…timing is everything here. And in that one moment when the 'we' had been reprieved, while I watched the girl unfold before my eyes—

It happened again.

I was running out of excuses.

It happened again and the abstract tore to a simple fact.

I liked her.

The thought cut sharply, unexpectedly.

/Beat./

I liked her.

I had not changed my mind, I had been preparing for this for years. I would not be stopped by mere complications of a belated, irritating attachment. I dismissed her in more ways than one, and at the duration of those hours I surmised that the state of the present world would end; I would alter all dimensions.

The answer presented itself before me gift wrapped: the boy, the child.

I do not reflect that I had committed great crime, and the conscience of which did not haunt me. I was neither guilty or innocent, because there was nothing for my state to be guilty or innocent of. There was no curse upon my head, magical or otherwise: the universe had broken wide, and I was the first to cross my bridge.

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(After Lyra and Will are attacked between the worlds for the Subtle Knife)

That night I was prone to quick splashes of physical and verbal anger, until none dared come near my desk.

For the first time I was unsure of my motives. In the process of transfer from mind to mouth, my intentions were worded as if through a different tongue, even a small pawn like Byron deduced what I so sorely wanted to obliterate.

I could have unleashed another wave of attack; I should have unleashed another wave of attack.

But she was sleeping peacefully in a world of lush green and sweet almonds.

I longed with a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either for hunger or cold, warmth or food, to know the texture of her hair, the exact curvature in the edges of her mouth when she gave a certain frown in her sleep. When she was young it looked like mine.

Deep within, a daughter-mine and her fingertips grazed through a wired, locked cage, her stubborn eyes set and her mouth twisted in concentration to slip past to the bars to my growling, warning heart.

I deduced after a particularly hazardous recovery from physical anger towards a mocking hour glass that it was better, needless to say, that the distance was best maintained until the balance was restored.

Besides, to tell her everything…?

Hate…but she already expressed this quite clearly; it wasn't as if she could cry out how I'd tricked her in her assumptions of me.

Love…I had not expressed this ever; and my assumptions of her were miscalculations of her uselessness fit for Galileo's frustrations against the Church that the earth was not the center.

And I tried to revisit her every smile, the shape of her dirty fingernails as she spun a lie about her "fascinating day of private study in the library", and I tried to think of all the things that I could have done to just…

I lay awake that night…and did not pray (like is different from caring)…but I wondered what would happen…should she still be alive tomorrow.

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Ironic, that only as I fall forever I can admit to myself that none of us can choose who or where we will love. That as I wrestled with what could well be my inner demon personified I can admit to myself that I love my daughter.

Intensely.

And I try to revisit her every smile, the shape of her dirty fingernails as she spun a lie about her playful day, and as she finally and completely made contact with the beating damnable thing in the locked cage; I tried to think of all the things that I could have done, "could-have-been," to just…

(I wish…to

let you know that I love you)

But it was too late; I had forgotten the photographs and the palace was crumbling. And the final blow: there never was a photograph to begin with.

My daughter, the new Eve. The Eve to be hanged in the name of God.

Mine.

Hold on, Lyra. Hold on to something tight.

Like the vine of how I will be forever to this demon for you.

Because this is all---

(these fears

my lies

everything)

--going to hurt like hell.

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You're gonna hate me when I tell you everything

You're gonna question whether you really know me at all

You will revisit every smile and where it fit into the day

I know this is how it will play

But I'll always think of all the things you did

That made me fall in love with you.

And I'm leaving

But

[Even so…

-- Even So, by Rachel Yamagata

(earlier song quotes from 'Under My Skin' by Rachel Yamagata)