All respect to the author of this series and the creators behind the film. This is a tribute, nothing else, as a second film was never released. No copyright infringement intended.
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Lord Asriel needed a child to test his theories. He did not doubt that the child in question wouldn't make it through his experiment, but a part of him didn't care. It was too dangerous to do it any other way, and still relatively untouched by Dust, a child was his only chance for the first effort. If he was to ever cross through the boundary to another world, he needed to start with this.
Another part of him felt deep revulsion for the task, but he flew, as he always had in the face of danger and darkness, into his work. Busied by experiments and trials, he could not feel doubt, he had learnt that so long ago. He thought Stelmaria was glaring at him about the fact, but she had since long ceased her efforts to argue with him and curled up before the fire in his study, as the giant cat she was. He half-wished he could just join her.
He had only the one manservant up here, but he heard the man move around, and thus he also heard him opening the front doors, a somewhat troublesome action up here, where the snow was deeper than the length of a full-grown man. They were lucky the laboratory they built was set up in a building erected by clever people, and all windows and doors faced the leeward side of the mountainous formation which offered ir shelter. It ended up cavelike because of it, but Lord Asriel considered it a small price to pay. In truth, he had always liked mountains and caves, ever since he was a little boy and got in trouble for diving in the cave near their country home, so maybe it was merely another advantage and not a price at all.
He expected some news - he always got what he asked for, after all, and he had asked for a child to come here - after hearing someone arriving, and the lack of noise told him it was no enemy, but what he did not expect was a witch. Not to mention not a witch so beautiful, who looked right through him as if not one of his considerable mental walls were there.
"You mean to cross over to another world," she asked without preamble, "how do you mean to do so? You're a man of action, Lord Asriel," her pronunciation of his name was sharp and implied rather deeply that she did not trust him.
"I mean to cross through the Dust," he replied, guarded. He had no idea who she was, after all, and she was disarming, making him want to arm himself all the more. The large goose which had followed her into the room was looking at the enchanted Stelmaria with as much fascination returned.
"It clings to you, ever since your daemon fixed her shape. How can you..." the still unintroduced witch's eyes narrowed into impossible slits of confirmed suspicion. "You aim to use a child. They will never survive that." His eyes told she all that she needed to know, he knew that much. She threw back the only weapon she had against this idea. "Your daughter will be here soon. She comes to bring you the golden compass. She can read it, and she trusts you to guide her. Maybe she just trusts you, without any reservations." She bore her eyes into his startled ones, while Kaysa hissed at the shamed snow leopard.