There was a beauty, a pleasant sense of freedom, to The Academy that Lyra could not remember from the city where she came from. She spent the classes thinking about it. Was it the air, the trees, the leaves? It was cleaner here, for sure. Not a trace of pollution in the air, and there was always a gentle breeze flowing. But that wasn't all There was a hum in the earth, a kind of natural rhythm that in other inhabited places, Lyra thought, would be obscured by the sounds of civilization. But there were people here too and there were plenty of technology. Hmm, so what was it?

Either way, she loved it. She loved, especially, how pleasantly sound carried through the clear air of the school grounds. Her father had told her playing the violin requires a room with good acoustic, but here she was, right outside the central building on the grounds where they had assembled in the morning, and the music was flowing out of her. She was absent-mindedly playing some tunes, improvising here and there, while gazing at the outside walls of the building. A mosaic of wood and stone, it was beautiful and strange and oddly transfixing. The materials that made it out interlocked with each other with precision that Lyra found pleasant to guess at.