Lyra Bouchard

Overview

Lyra is the leader of The Dragons, the fourth and final house of Lea Monde. She is popular, friendly, active and intense. She harbors a huge amount of resentment for the EDF and the Andromedan Technocracy.

Lyra is an intergalactically ranked athlete in dance, soccer, wushu, fencing and a variety of other sports. Though she’s the youngest of Crowley’s lieutenants, she’s no less formidable, having earned a variety of nicknames such as the Apex Dragon of Lea Monde, The Valkyrie, and others.

In addition to being a tremendous athlete, she’s also Lea Monde’s premiere pilot, capable of piloting ships at speeds beyond what a normal pilot is capable of, even without the use of navigation AIs.

Origin

Lyra, like Crowley, was a young member of the Andromedan aristocracy before it was deposed by the Technocracy. Unlike Crowley, she was too young to recall any of the politics surrounding those events. She does, however, recall her parents and all of her friends being murdered by insurgents, and she has never let go of her rage.

The Technocracy launched their revolution with a surprise attack that became known in history books as “The Night of the Red Violin” where they locked hundreds of aristocrats inside of an opera hall that they burned to the ground. Lyra’s parents were among the dead, and her friends were slaughtered in the days and weeks that followed. She’s been living inside these events, in one way or another, ever since.

Lyra’s Playlist

  1. Kaycee Rice – None of Yall Don’t Rap – Choreography by Zoi Tatopolous
  2. PEOPLE ARE AWESOME 2017 Insane Compilation
  3. Best Parkour and Freerunning 2017
  4. Wushu World Champion Jade Xu – Gold Performance
  5. Most Inspiring People Ever Compilation | People Are Awesome
  6. Djrum – Tournesol – Choreography by Zoi Tatopolous ft Sean Lew & Kaycee Rice

Role

Lyra is the head of Lea Monde’s fourth house: The Dragons. The Dragons are focused on athletics, sports, meditation, discipline, martial arts and control over the mind and body. The Dragons live for topping themselves and breaking their own records.

In addition to traditional sports, the Dragons like to make up their own games and exercises, such as dunking a basketball from a jet ski launching off of a cliff, free running through an urban jungle, throwing a javelin through a hole the size of a nickel from a football field away, or dead lifting three times their body weight while balancing on a narrow pole three stories up in the air.

While not organized or trained as a formal army the way Aria’s Lightworkers are, the Dragons are no less terrifying due to their physical prowess and their dedication to honor and discipline.

Author’s Note

Actually, the initial inspiration for Lyra was that Kaycee Rice dance video I put in Lyra’s playlist above. Just the idea that there’s this petite girl, who seems really nice, but who can turn on this intimidation factor and this intensity and move in a way that seems deadly, and it sort of evolved from there.

There’s also sort of this idea that if Aria and Lyra are both fighters, what differentiates them is that Aria is inhumanly strong, like Supergirl, and Lyra is inhumanly agile, like Spider Gwen. Alita: Battle Angel is a big influence for Lyra. Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. Princess Mononoke. She has big Princess Mononoke vibes.

As for the Dragons themselves, those People Are Awesome videos were a big influence and just this general idea of: what if they weren’t necessarily an army, but more like a frat/sorority, and the vibe is just a bunch of friendly people who were like free-running Rugby players basically, or like contestants from American Ninja Warriors. And do you really need an army to invade a place if you have a bunch of these people making friends, integrating into a town and they’re capable of jumping from building to building with swords and spears in an urban setting?

Lyra is one of these types of people who will stop at nothing to get her revenge, and revenge vs. forgiveness is pretty central to the themes of Draconis. I don’t know if I have as much to say about her as some other characters, but she’s one of the coolest characters in the book I think, and when she’s ‘on-screen’ so to speak, especially when she’s really in action, she steals the show.