Chapter 4: The Monk and the Maiden
The circle of spearpoints gleamed in the diffuse light filtering through the gnarled pines. The lead guard, his face a mask of stern authority beneath his kabuto helmet, barked another guttural command. Godfrey wagged his tail harder, a plume of golden fur swishing against Jan’s borrowed kimono.
“Johnny,” Jan hissed, her hands still raised, the fine silk of her sleeves brushing her cheeks.“A little translation? A diplomatic ‘we come in peace’?”
Johnny’s eyes were distant, scanning not the guards, but the air around them.“Their dialect is archaic. He said, ‘Identify yourselves, spirits, or be pierced.’ They think we’re yokai. Our sudden appearance, the wrong clothing… it’s a logical assumption.”
“Great. So we’re demonic intruders.” Stacy’s knuckles were white on the katana’s hilt. Her stance was all wrong—a boxer’s crouch, not a swordsman’s. “Do I try this thing, or is that just going to get us killed faster?”
“Do not draw it,” Johnny said, his voice a flat calm in the center of the tension. “You have no training. It would be a fatal provocation.” He took a small step forward, placing himself slightly in front of the women. He bowed, a precise, deep movement that seemed to momentarily confuse the guards.He spoke then, his voice taking on a rhythmic, formal cadence. The words were foreign, but the tone was unmistakably placating, explanatory.
The lead guard listened, his spear not wavering.He responded with a short, sharp phrase.
“He doesn’t believe me,” Johnny reported blandly. “He says only foxes or tengu would wear such garb and appear from empty air. We are to be taken to the daimyo for judgment.”
“The boss,” Jan translated, a spark of her old mischief flickering in her green eyes.She lowered her hands slowly. “Okay.Judgment. We can work with that.”
“Jan,” Stacy warned, seeing the familiar glint.
“Just follow my lead, Coach.” Jan smiled, a slow, dangerous curve of her lips. She let her Power of Exposure simmer just beneath her skin, not unleashing it yet, but letting a faint, enticing warmth radiate from her. The air around her seemed to thicken, to carry the scent of arousal amidst the pine and damp earth. One of the younger guards, his eyes visible beneath his helmet rim, blinked and shifted his weight.
They were marched along the winding dirt path, through a village of silent, watchful peasants who averted their eyes. The shrine loomed ahead, its curved roofs dark against the grey sky, surrounded by a breathtaking whirl of pink cherry blossoms that fell in a continuous, silent storm.It was beautiful and deeply unnerving.
They were brought into a wide, tatami-matted hall. At the far end, seated on a raised dais, was the daimyo. He was a man in his forties, with a severe, intelligent face and a carefully trimmed beard. His robes were somber, rich indigo embroidered with cranes. His eyes, black and sharp as obsidian chips, assessed them without a trace of fear.More guards lined the walls, still as statues.The lead guard gave a report, kneeling. The daimyo listened, his gaze resting on each of them in turn: the oddly-dressed monk, the fierce woman holding a sword like a club, the red-haired woman whose smile didn’t match their predicament, and the golden dog sitting calmly beside her.
When the guard finished, the daimyo spoke.His voice was quiet, carrying easily in the hushed hall.
“He asks,” Johnny translated, “what realm we hail from, and what business we have in his lands. He is a practical man.He suspects trickery, not divinity.”
Jan took a step forward. A guard moved to intercept, but the daimyo raised a hand, stopping him. He was curious.
“Tell him,” Jan said, her voice dropping into a low, intimate register, though Johnny translated it into formal Japanese, “that we are travelers from a distant land. A land where pleasure is the highest art. Where tension is meant to be unraveled.” She began to slowly, deliberately, untie the obi of her kimono. “And where judgment…” she let the silk belt slither through her fingers and drop to the tatami with a soft whisper, “…is often delivered through ecstasy.”
She opened her kimono.
The Power of Exposure wasn’t a blunt force.It was an insidious, targeted magic. It didn’t command arousal; it unveiled it, amplified it, made the sheer fact of a body—this body, with its flame-colored pubic hair, its pale skin dusted with freckles, the confident curve of her hips—an object of devastating awe.It bypassed propriety and spoke directly to the hindbrain.
A collective, sharp intake of breath hissed through the hall.The stoic guards’ eyes widened. Their grips on their spears loosened. The daimyo’s stern facade cracked, just for an instant, revealing a hunger beneath.He leaned forward, his knuckles white on his knees.
Jan didn’t stop.She let the kimono slide off her shoulders, pooling at her feet. She was utterly naked in the austere hall, the cherry blossoms drifting past the open screens. She ran her hands up her own sides, cupping her breasts, her thumbs brushing her nipples until they hardened into tight peaks. “Your men are so tense, my lord,” she purred, though Johnny’s translation likely sterilized the filth.“All that armor.All that discipline. Doesn’t it ache?”
She turned her gaze on the youngest guard from the path. She beckoned him with a finger.He was rooted to the spot, trembling. The daimyo, his own breath coming faster, gave a slight, dazed nod.
The guard stumbled forward, his spear clattering to the floor.Jan’s magic wrapped around him, a viscous, warm pressure. She dropped to her knees before him, her hands going to the ties of his lamellar armor. She fumbled them open, not with skill, but with a thrilling urgency. She freed his cock, already half-hard, into the cool air.She didn’t hesitate. She leaned forward and took him deep into her mouth.The sound he made was a strangled sob. His hands flew to her red hair, not to push her away, but to fist in it, holding her as she worked him with a ruthless, expert rhythm. Her head bobbed, saliva slicking his length, her throat working to take him deeper.The wet, noisy sounds of her sucking filled the silent hall. Other guards began to shuffle, their own armor creaking with restless movement. The daimyo watched, entranced, one hand moving to adjust the growing tightness in his own robes.Chaos needed only a spark. Jan provided the inferno.
She pulled off the young guard’s cock with a lewd pop.“Stacy,” she gasped, her lips glistening. “A little help?”
Stacy stood frozen, the katana dangling from her hand. This was the chaos Jan wrought, but it had always been in safe, modern spaces.This was different.This was survival. She saw the daimyo’s dark, ravenous eyes on Jan, saw the guards closing in, not as captors now, but as a pack. The magic was affecting her too, a low thrum between her legs, a heat coiling in her gut. Jan’s power didn’t discriminate.With a curse, Stacy dropped the katana.It thudded on the tatami. She tore at the kosode, the fabric ripping in her urgency. She was all taut muscle and sun-kissed skin, a stark contrast to Jan’s softness. Two guards were on her immediately, their hands rough on her arms, her waist. One pushed her down onto the mats, his mouth finding her breast, sucking hard. The other yanked her hakama down her hips.“Yes,” Stacy hissed, the fight turning into something else, something raw and necessary. She spread her legs as the guard with his mouth on her breast positioned himself. He thrust into her without preamble, a grunt escaping him as her tight heat enveloped him. She cried out, a sound of shock and sudden, overwhelming pleasure, her back arching off the floor.
The hall erupted.Discipline shattered under the weight of magic. Guards tore at their own armor, at each other’s clothing. The daimyo descended from his dais, his robes open, pulling Jan to him.He turned her around, bent her over the very platform where he’d sat in judgment. He spat into his hand, slicked himself, and drove into her from behind.
“Fuck!” Jan screamed, the force of it knocking the breath from her lungs. He was thick, and the penetration was brutal, unpracticed. It hurt in the best way, a sharp, claiming pain that melted instantly into a deep, filling pleasure. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging bruises into her pale skin, and set a punishing rhythm. Each thrust slammed her against the wooden dais, the smack of flesh on flesh echoing in the room now filled with grunts, moans, and the slick sounds of sex.Nearby, Stacy was lost in a tangle of limbs. The first guard was still pounding into her, his pace frantic. Another guard had his cock in her mouth, and she was sucking him greedily, her athletic body thrashing between them. He knelt by her head, fucking her face with short, sharp strokes that made her gag and drool. She was being used, completely, and a wild, liberated part of her reveled in it. This was pure physicality.A release of all the tension, the fear, the absurd responsibility of her normal life. She came with a muffled scream around the cock in her mouth, her core clamping violently around the one buried inside her, triggering his own groaning release.
Jan’s world had narrowed to the brutal, piston-like drive of the daimyo inside her. Her magic fed on the frenzy, amplifying it, reflecting it back in a feedback loop of lust. She felt another man kneel before her, his cock nudging her lips. She opened her mouth, taking him in, a slave to sensation on both ends.She was a vessel, a conduit of chaos.It was terrifying. It was exhilarating.Through the sweaty, heaving tangle of bodies, she saw Johnny. He stood perfectly still amidst the orgy, like a rock in a raging river. Guards bumped against him, but their glazed eyes slid off him as if he weren’t there. He was manipulating local time, making himself a blur, a forgettable shadow.His face was a mask of detached concentration. In his hand, he held his Perpetual Sunrise focus—a simple, worn pocket watch. He was counting.Waiting.
Godfrey, bored, padded through the forest of thrusting, moaning men. He found a discarded plate of rice cakes and began to munch on them, tail wagging.Johnny’s eyes met Jan’s. He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.It was time.Jan, stuffed full on both ends, managed a guttural shout. “Now!”
Johnny snapped the pocket watch closed.
A wave of silent, golden energy pulsed out from him.For everyone in the hall except Jan and Stacy, time stuttered. For three full seconds, their minds went blank, their bodies frozen mid-act. The daimyo was locked deep inside Jan, motionless.The guard in Stacy’s mouth was rigid.
The spell broke.
The sudden cessation of movement, the abrupt return to thought, was profoundly disorienting.Men stumbled back, confused, their arousal cooling rapidly into shame and shock.
“Godfrey!” Jan yelled, shoving the limp daimyo off her. “Find the way out!”
The golden retriever, swallowing the last rice cake, perked up. He trotted towards a side screen, sniffed, and pawed at it.A hidden door, meant for servants, slid open.
“Go!” Jan grabbed Stacy, who was pulling her torn clothes back on, her body slick with sweat and other fluids. They stumbled after the dog, Johnny falling in behind them, his calm undisturbed. They burst out of the hall into the cherry-blossom choked twilight, the sounds of rising anger and confusion following them.
They ran, half-dressed, through the mystical grove, the pink snow sticking to their sweaty skin. They didn’t stop until the shrine was far behind and they’d reached a rocky stream in a hollow.
Jan collapsed on the moss, laughing breathlessly, her body throbbing with aftershocks. Stacy plunged her hands into the cold water, scrubbing her face violently.Johnny leaned against a tree, checking his watch. “The temporal deflection was not random,” he stated, as if commenting on a weather shift. “The interference has a signature.It’s the journal.Brigid is not just learning from it. She’s activating it. Her attempts to control it are sending out pulses, disrupting the stream’s local flow.We were caught in one.”
Jan’s laughter died. She looked at her brother, then at her own trembling, used body. “So this… this was Brigid?”
“Indirectly.” Johnny closed the watch.“The path to her is now clear. The pulse passed.But we must reach her before she causes another. Or before one of those pulses does something far worse than redirect a time travel spell.”
Stacy stood up, water dripping from her chin, her eyes hard.“Then let’s not stand here.Where next?”
Johnny looked upstream. “The vortex point is stabilized.Next stop: Ireland.1899. We find Brigid.” He glanced at Jan.“Put your clothes on, Jan Siobhan. We have a sister to retrieve.”
Godfrey barked once, as if in agreement, and trotted ahead into the gathering dark.
Godfrey led them to a narrow deer trail that wound up a fern-choked ridge. Behind them, from the direction of the shrine, angry shouts began to echo through the pines. They weren’t just shouts of confusion. They were barks of command, crisp and furious. The daimyo’s humiliation had curdled into rage.
“The vortex point is just ahead,” Johnny said, his voice low and urgent. He didn’t run, but his long strides ate the ground. “The temporal aperture is still open from our arrival, but it’s decaying. Run.”
Jan and Stacy sprinted after him, their borrowed garments tangling in their legs. They burst into a small clearing where the air shimmered like a heat haze over stone. It wasn’t a door. It was a tear, a vertical wound in reality fringed with cold, golden light. From the path below, the sounds of pursuit grew closer—the heavy thud of feet, the clatter of lacquered armor hastily reassembled.
“Now, Jan!” Johnny shouted, foregoing all calm. He shoved a stumbling Stacy directly into the shimmering rift. She vanished with a swallowed yelp. He grabbed Jan’s arm next. “Go!”
Jan lunged forward, the world dissolving into a nauseating swirl of color and pressure. Godfrey, with a final glance back at the approaching samurai, trotted in after her as if entering a familiar park. Johnny stepped through just as the first guard breached the clearing, his spear aimed at empty air. The vortex snapped shut with a sound like a sucked breath.
The disorientation was profound, a feeling of being spun and stamped flat. They stumbled onto hard-packed, dusty earth. The scent of pine and incense was gone, replaced by dry wood, horse dung, and a strange, metallic tang in the air. They were in another corridor, this one of rough-hewn stone, lit by flickering, mismatched sconces.
“What is this?” Stacy gasped, straightening up and instinctively reaching for a hip where her gun wasn’t. “Another castle?”
“No,” Johnny said, his head cocked, listening. “The temporal signature is… layered.”
From the opposite end of the corridor, footsteps approached—casual, unhurried. Three figures rounded the corner, their forms backlit by a brighter light. A man with streaks of white in his red hair, his posture eerily familiar. A woman, fuller-figured, her medium-length red hair in a loose braid. A fit, dark-haired woman with sharp, watchful eyes. A tiny Maltese dog trotted at their heels.
All movement stopped. The two groups stared.
The younger Jan blinked at the older, wider version of herself. The older Jan—Fat Aunt Jan—let out a gust of laughter that filled the stone passage. “Well,” she said, her voice richer, more weathered, but sparkling with the same mischief. “I’ll be damned. The Brigid Hunt. Phase one.”
“Phase one?” younger Jan echoed, dread pooling in her stomach. “We’re going to be looking for her for decades, aren’t we?”
“Oh, honey,” Fat Aunt Jan said, her smile kind and weary. “You have no idea. But don’t worry. We’re not here for that. We’re on a different errand. A supply run.” She looked at her younger brother, then at the middle-aged Johnny beside her. Both men were studying each other with identical, clinical detachment.
Middle-aged Johnny nodded once at his younger self. “You’re tracking the journal’s pulse spikes. The Ireland landing is imminent. You should go.”
“You can’t tell us anything else?” younger Stacy asked, her eyes glued to her own older face. She looked good, she thought with a detached part of her mind. The silver streaks were kind of badass.
“Temporal etiquette,” both Johnnys said in unison, then glanced at each other.
“This is a weird experience,” the two Stacys said simultaneously, then frowned.
Younger Jan pointed a finger at Godfrey II, who was enthusiastically sniffing the rear end of the unimpressed Maltese. “Godfrey, stop that. That’s… you. It’s unsanitary.”
With a final, knowing chuckle from Fat Aunt Jan and another wordless nod between the Johnnys, the older trio moved past them, continuing down the corridor. The younger trio was left in the dusty silence, the encounter feeling both monumental and disconcertingly routine.
“Okay,” Jan breathed, shaking her head as if to clear it. “So we’re not crazy. We eventually get… thicker. And we’re still doing this. That’s something.”
Johnny was already moving, following a thin, glowing thread only he could see. “The path is re-established. The interference is localized around Brigid. We need to reach her before she causes another cascade.”
In Ballymore, the light was soft and grey. Brigid knelt in the herb garden beside Maeve, her fingers carefully separating the hair-fine roots of a soulsooth plant. The journal was quiet, a learned student. She focused on the texture of the soil, the green smell, the solid hereness of 1899.
The lurch, when it came, was different. Not a violent shove, but a gentle, devastating slide, as if the ground beneath her soul had turned to mist.
One moment, her fingers were dark with peat. The next, they were clean, and she was standing on cracked suburban sidewalk. The air was thick with the humid fragrance of cut grass and grilling burgers. Sprinklers hissed in synchronized arcs across manicured lawns.
She knew this street. She knew the slight uplift in the pavement where the oak root had broken through. She knew the blue-painted shutters on the house two doors down. Her house. The one from before.
In the yard, a sprinkler whirled. Two little girls shrieked with laughter, running through the spray. One, a whirlwind of fiery pigtails and mischief, was chasing a smaller, solemn-eyed girl with a tight red braid already coming undone. Jan. Brigid. Herself.
On the porch steps, a boy of about twelve sat perfectly still. Johnny. His blue eyes were fixed on a point in the middle of the air, watching something infinitely more fascinating than his sisters’ game.
The screen door squeaked open. Shiv stepped out, younger, vibrant, a dish towel in her hands. “Jan Siobhan! Don’t you dunk her! She’s got your father’s good shirt on!”
Brigid’s throat closed. She took one involuntary step forward, the asphalt rough under her 19th-century shoes. A sob welled up, hard and painful.
“They sure are something, aren’t they, Brigid-Bear?”
The voice, warm and tinged with a smile, came from just behind her left shoulder. It was a voice from memory, from old home videos, from the deep, safe place of childhood. It wasn’t an echo. It was real.
She turned, slowly, as if in a dream.
Marty O’Connor stood there, holding a leather leash. At the end of it, tail wagging patiently, was Oscar, the black lab mix who’d died of old grief not long after his master. Her da looked just as she remembered him in his best years: kind eyes crinkled at the corners, a quiet strength in his stance, his shirt neatly tucked in.
Brigid didn’t think. She flung herself at him, burying her face in the familiar cotton of his shirt, breathing in the scent of sawdust and his spicy aftershave. She was crying in great, heaving gulps that shook her whole frame. His arms came around her, solid and real, holding her tight.
“That bad, huh?” he murmured into her hair, his hand rubbing slow circles on her back. After a long minute, he gently pushed her back to arm’s length, his thumbs wiping at her tears. “Let me look at you. All grown up. My Brigid-Bear.”
“How…” she choked out, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “How did you know it was me?”
Marty’s smile was wry. “I’ve known time travel was a thing since your brother Johnny brought home a helmet that smelled of olive oil and blood, straight from some Athenian battlefield. Your mother made him take it back, scolding him something fierce.” He shook his head, his gaze drifting to the playing children, his children. “I don’t have the magic. Never did. But I learned to see the ripples.”
He looked back at her, his expression sobering. “I don’t need to know what my future holds, Brigid. But I need you to know something.” He cupped her face, his palms rough and gentle. “I am so proud of the woman you are. You will always be my little Brigid-Bear. And you will always,” he said, his voice firm with absolute certainty, “do what you know is right.”
The tears came again, silent this time. She fell into him once more, clinging as if he were a rock in a torrential river. He held her, whispering, “It’s okay, bear. It’s okay.”
Then she felt it—the subtle, terrifying tug in her navel. The journal on her hand pulsed, a cool, calculating counter-rhythm to her heartbreak. “No,” she whispered against his chest. “Not yet.”
“It’s time,” he said softly, understanding. He kissed the top of her head. “Go on. They need you.”
She looked up, and the suburban street was melting into a blur of green and grey. She was back on her knees in the damp Irish soil, the soulsooth plant crushed in her fist. A weight settled beside her. Not Marty. Maeve.
The old woman didn’t hug her. She simply placed a dry, steady hand on Brigid’s trembling back. “The past has a gravity,” Maeve said, her voice lacking its usual sharpness. “It pulls. Especially the pieces love has glued to our bones. But you didn’t break. You held your ground, then let go. That is the lesson.”
Brigid nodded, unable to speak, her father’s scent still clinging to her clothes, his words etched into the frantic beat of her heart.
The pulse that wrenched Brigid from her father radiated outwards through the time stream, a fresh surge of chaotic energy. In the stone corridor, Johnny, who had just located the stable thread to 1899, flinched as if struck.
“Incoming!” he barked, but it was too late.
The glowing thread to Ireland snapped like a rotten rope. The corridor walls dissolved into a scream of wind and blinding sunlight. They were falling, then hitting ground, hard.
Jan pushed herself up, spitting out dirt. They were in the middle of a wide, rutted street. Wood-frame buildings with false fronts lined the way. A saloon sign creaked in a hot, dry wind. The smell was dust, whiskey, and animal sweat. Her kimono was gone. She now wore a simple, dusty calico dress. Stacy, beside her, was in a man’s work shirt and trousers, a heavy Colt Peacemaker holstered on her hip. Johnny’s robes had become a worn duster and a broad-brimmed hat.
Godfrey II shook himself, sending a cloud of prairie dust into the air.
Stacy drew the Colt, her hands moving with an instinctual familiarity the katana had lacked. She checked the cylinder, then holstered it, her eyes scanning the rooftops. “Okay. New when.”
Johnny stood, brushing dirt from his duster with brisk, efficient motions. “American frontier. Mid-19th century. The pulse deflected us again, but the linguistic assessment is correct.” He looked at Jan, his blue eyes flat. “We are getting closer to the epicenter. These deflections are shortening. Brigid is trying to control it.”
Jan climbed to her feet, squinting against the sun. A man in a bowler hat was staring at them from the boardwalk, his hand near his own gun. She managed a weak, gritty smile. “Well,” she sighed. “At least this time they speak English.”