Lyris is one of the Nine Ladies of the Aurethian faith, the divine Lady of Trickery, Cunning, and Academia. She governs cleverness, scholarship, rhetoric, strategy, deception, thievery, fraud, and the use of intelligence to gain advantage. Scholars, students, lawyers, diplomats, strategists, gamblers, thieves, and confidence artists may all invoke her for very different purposes. Her virtue is Ingenuity, the active and questioning use of the mind. Her sin is Credulity, the willing surrender of one's own judgment.

Lyris is depicted as a slight, wiry woman in her early thirties with a long narrow face, pale brown skin, short tightly curled dark hair, and a crooked half-smile. Her most distinctive feature is heterochromia: her right eye is grey and her left dark brown. In monochrome sculpture, where eye color cannot be shown, artists conventionally tuck one side of her hair behind the ear while allowing the other to fall across her cheek. She usually wears a scholar's long coat and carries a book, folded writing tablet, coins, cards, keys, or other small objects associated with knowledge and cunning.