Chapter One: The Screaming Queen

Oct 10, 2026 · @Janet Kira Lessin
By Janet Kira Lessin | Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | © 2026 Aquarian Media
Research: Claudia Lenore

I. The Scream

Hampton Court Palace, November 1541

A scream splits the dark.

She tears around the corner of the long gallery, skirts bunched in both fists, hood gone, auburn hair whipping loose behind her. Torches gutter as she flies past. Boots pound the boards somewhere behind her.

“Stop her!”

She doesn’t stop. She runs like a hunted thing, all elbows and breath, past painted kings who stare down from their frames. Her slipper skids. She slams a hand against the window ledge, catches herself, throws one look back. Two guards in red livery round the corner, halberds clattering against the paneling.

She’s young. Too young for the pearls bouncing at her throat. Too young for the crimson velvet ripped at the shoulder. Too young for whatever she has done.

Ahead, a door stands ajar. Gold light spills through the gap. Behind it, voices chant in Latin.

She hits that door with her shoulder and bursts through.

Candles. Incense. A wall of velvet backs turning toward her. And at the center of it all, in a carved chair, sits a mountain of a man in a jeweled doublet, one bandaged leg propped on a cushion.

The chanting dies mid-note.

She throws herself down. Not to her knees. Lower. Flat on her face. She can go no further down. Her cheek smacks the cold, hard stone. Her arms fling out toward his feet.

The string at her throat snaps.

Pearls burst across the floor. They bounce, roll, and scatter under the benches and into the chapel’s far corners. A queen’s fortune skitters away into the dark, and tomorrow a maid will sweep it up with the candle stubs and never look twice.

“Henry. My lord. My husband. Hear me. For the love of God, hear me.”

Nobody moves. A candle hisses.

He doesn’t look at her. He looks at the altar. His jaw works. Then he lifts two fingers, like a man flicking away a fly.

“Take her away.”

Three words. That’s all he gives her.

The guards haul her up off the stone. Each one clamps an arm. Her feet leave the floor. She hangs between them like a rag doll, and the fight drains out of her. It’s over.

In the corner, where the candlelight never reaches, someone watches. A woman. Small. Five foot two, no taller than the girl. Pale as smoke. No one in the chapel turns their head toward her.

She can’t bear it. The girl’s despair floods her own chest. The girl’s breath shreds her own throat. She knows, with a sick, sure dread, what waits for this girl at the end of a winter that hasn’t come yet.

She knows the girl’s name. Catherine. No. Not like this. The watcher steps out of the shadow and into her.

She explodes.

She’s small, a girl, barely up to their chests, and she fights like a wildcat in a sack. She twists, kicks, claws. Her elbow cracks one guard’s nose. Her heel rakes the other’s shin. Two of the king’s own yeomen, giants picked for their size and drilled for years, and they can’t hold her.

The bigger one grabs for her waist and misses. Sweat stings his eyes. Where does a slip like this find such strength? Nothing in his world has a name for it. Fear and rage tear through her like lightning through a tree, and something more, something that came out of the corner.

And the king is watching.

Sweet Jesus, the king is watching. The guard feels every eye in the chapel burning into his back. Two grown men wrestling one girl across the floor in front of the king. If she slips them now, hers won’t be the only head on the block.

He locks an arm around her ribs. She sinks her teeth into his wrist. He howls and lets go, and she bolts back out the door and down the gallery, and the sound that rips out of her now has no words in it at all.

II. Inside

Now I’m running.

Her legs. My fury.

What did I just do? I stepped into her. I stepped into another woman’s body and threw two giants off her like wet coats. I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know anyone could.

No time. Run.

The floor slams up through the soles of my feet. My lungs burn. Fingers claw at my sleeves, and I wrench free and keep going, because if I stop I die, and I am nineteen and I don’t want to die.

The gallery blurs. The torches flicker and burn white.

Hampton Court Palace, present day

Daylight. Velvet ropes. A crowd in raincoats, phones raised.

“…and this is where she ran,” a guide announces. “November 1541. Henry’s guards caught her right here and dragged her away screaming. Three months later she lost her head at the Tower of London.”

I skid to a stop among them.

Most of them stare straight through me at the portraits. But a teenage girl in a yellow raincoat lowers her phone, and her mouth falls open. Auburn hair. Catherine’s wide eyes. Beside her, an old man grips the rope with both hands. A woman at the back crosses herself.

They see me. They see her. They see us.

I stare back.

Then the floor drops out from under me.

In the gallery, the girl in the yellow raincoat jabs at her phone with shaking thumbs. The tour shuffles on without her.

She scrolls back. Portraits. Ropes. The back of the guide’s head. Then a crimson blur tears down the hall.

She freezes the frame.

Inside the blur, behind the young queen’s face, a second face appears. Older. Calm. Staring straight into the lens.

III. Maui

Maui, present day

My eyes open. Rain on the roof. I lie on my right side in the dark, and everything is quiet.

And oh, God, I have to pee. The rain drums and drums on the roof, and every drop works on me like a running faucet.

No stone. A mattress. No torches. The green eye of a phone charger, the phone beside it dark. I switched it off hours ago. No more East Coast calls in the middle of the night. No palace. My living room in the Maui jungle, half of it given over to my bed since the bedroom roof gave out years ago.

Seventy-two years old. Alive.

Again. I was fifty-two the first time I dreamed my way into that corridor. Almost twenty years now, over and over. Same corridor. Same door. Same three words.

Will I ever figure this out?

Behind me, in her spot between Sasha and me, Mocha chirps in her sleep. Tiny, bright little sounds, like a very small puppy barking at something only she can see. Mocha is far too sophisticated to thrash.

The rain keeps drumming. And I still have to pee.

IV. Morning

Maui, the next morning

Early sun rays break through the veil of clouds that embrace Haleakala and creep gently into my bedroom. I lie deathly still, and the stillness holds me like a hand. No pounding heart. No gasping. After all that running, all that terror, my body rests as though nothing touched it.

The air runs cool, the season when all three cats crowd my bed, and I travel deepest. Furball purrs at my feet, a low, steady motor. Athena lies along my right side, twenty years old and queen of this bed, her flank rising and falling against my arm. Somewhere in the night the guard changed, and I went too deep to notice.

Athena senses my eyes open. She nuzzles my hand. “Good morning, Mommy,” she purrs, the ritual dance we’ve shared for more than twenty years.

Sometime before dawn, I turned to face Sasha’s side, the way I always do, and the pillow went between my knees. Mocha rides that pillow like a throne. She could chirp on that pillow half the night, and I’d never hear a thing.

Sasha’s side of the bed lies empty. He’s back in his office, already starting his day, and Mocha, who loves him more than any other human on Earth, has followed him there.

The peace feels wrong. I just fought for my life. But it was my other life, not this one, and this house knows nothing about it.

My throat aches. I press my fingers to the back of my neck and find nothing there but skin.

I lie still, listen to the rain, and wonder whether that corridor will call me back tonight.

The Screaming Queen opens TIME LORD OF NIBIRU, a series to come. Next: Chapter Two.

Janet Kira Lessin, Sasha Alex Lessin, Aquarian Media, Time Lord of Nibiru, The Screaming Queen, Catherine Howard, Henry VIII, Hampton Court Palace, Tudor England, Tudor court, Anne Boleyn, historical mystery, past lives, past life memory, reincarnation, astral travel, astral projection, remote viewing, time travel, timeline healing, fixing the timeline, spiritual awakening, psychic experiences, mystical experiences, supernatural history, haunted history, royal intrigue, palace drama, queen’s arrest, Tudor queen, historical fantasy, metaphysical journey, visionary experience, Maui Hawaii, red-haired heroine, Catherine Howard story, Henry VIII wives, paranormal storytelling, consciousness exploration, esoteric history