TIME LORD OF NIBIRU: Miriam ~ Chapter Two: He’s Here
Janet Kira Lessin | Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. | © 2026 Aquarian Media
Jerusalem, around A.D. 30
“He’s here, Miriam.”
Miriam stops mid-step, her hand an inch from her front door latch. She backs up a step and turns to face Jacob, her best friend, breathless at the gate. Then she springs into action. She grabs his hand and pulls him down the street, past the neighbor’s house and around the corner, where she presses a finger to her lips. “Sshhh. My parents will hear you.”
“He’s here,” Jacob whispers. “He’s speaking on the Mount of Olives.”
Miriam peers around the corner, up the street and down again. The way stands clear. She takes Jacob’s hand once more. “Hurry.”
They run through the lanes and out past the city wall, across the valley and up the slope, where the olive trees give way to people. Hundreds of people, thousands perhaps, more than Miriam knows how to count. She has seen nothing like it in her life: bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder across the hillside, and more still climbing behind them. Then his voice reaches her. It carries over every head, clear as a friend speaking at her ear, though he stands far across the slope. How can she hear him from here?
Time slips away from her. When she looks up, the olive trees’ shadows stretch long across the grass. “I have to go,” she tells Jacob.
“Go, then. I’ll stay. You’ll be fine.”
Anger flares in her, then jealousy, hot and sudden, and she fights to rein both in. Tears gather behind her eyes. Her throat tightens around a cry she swallows whole. He’s right, she thinks. How can I begrudge him the chance to watch this incredible man? She turns toward the slope one last time. Man? He must be a god. He is divine. You must be blind if you cannot see it.
She runs home as the sun slides toward the western hills, her heart racing faster than her feet. At her door, she lifts the latch with a thief’s care. The door swings wide before she can push it, and her father fills the frame.
“Where were you?”
“With Jacob. Just talking.”
Miriam has always carried an old soul, wise beyond her years, and her family can’t explain it. It happens now and then, the elders say, though rarely. Jacob, almost two years older, remains a boy at heart, so Miriam feels no spark for him. She loves him all the same. He is her best friend, and that friendship is exactly why her father, Eleazar, trusts him.
Eleazar sees what Miriam sees: two friends, with nothing between them to worry a father. The street offers her little other company. Boys fill the neighborhood as far as the eye can travel, and not one girl her age lives among them. Jacob serves as her shield against the hungry eyes of every young man who hopes to marry her. Eleazar wants her to wait many years, though most fathers in Jerusalem marry their daughters off young.
Miriam is their only child, born to them late in life. Eleazar and her mother prayed for a child through many barren years, until God came to them in a vision, and Miriam arrived as the answer. She moves through the world like a young doe. Her long dark hair carries streaks of red that her mother traces back to some great-grandmother, and her eyes turn golden in certain light. Everyone sees how special she is. Miriam alone seems unaware, laughing and playing like any girl in the lanes.
Eleazar is a gentleman, and fear for her drives his hand tonight, for he has heard what the priests and the soldiers say about this teacher from Galilee. He takes Miriam’s arm and hurries her up the stairs. “You went to hear HIM, didn’t you?”
Miriam wants to cry out, but she holds her tongue out of respect for her father. In his haste, his hand catches a lock of her hair, and a small “ouch” escapes her despite her restraint. He stops at once and carefully frees her hair. “Forgive me.” Then the worry takes hold of him again. In her loft he drives a nail through the window frame and sets her on the bed. “Sleep now. You stay inside until your mother, and I say otherwise, and that will be after HE is long gone.”
By then Miriam is crying. When he leaves, she lets herself sob once and buries the sound in her pillow. She cries until exhaustion carries her into sleep.
Something wakes her. The house lies quiet. From downstairs near the kitchen comes the soft snore of her parents, a sweet, low sound that has comforted her all her life, because it tells her they live and breathe beside her in the dark. Tonight she hears it for the last time.
She works the nail loose. Eleazar drove it in at a slant in his distress, and besides, he trusts his daughter’s obedience more than any nail. She eases the shutters open, climbs out onto the roof, and lowers herself down the trellis to the ground. Years of moonlit night walks taught her every handhold. Tonight she walks with a purpose: to find HIM, and the camp his followers have made.
She finds them across the mount at Bethany, gathered around their fires, and they welcome her like a long-lost friend. Jesus keeps his distance, wanting her to wait before she sees him up close. He sends a woman to sit with her instead, Mary of Magdala, who draws the whole story out of Miriam with patient questions: the crowd, the voice, the nail in the window, the father she loves. Miriam speaks of Eleazar and her mother with tenderness, because both have always been kind to her. Mary listens and studies the girl’s golden eyes as if greeting someone she has known a long time.
Before the fires burn down, word passes from one follower to the next. “We leave before dawn. Gather your things. We go… NOW.”
Jesus knows Eleazar will come for his daughter at first light, so the camp must vanish before he arrives. Despite their efforts at silence, such a large company makes a ruckus: donkeys bray, cart wheels grind over stone, and children whimper at being roused in the dark. The city keeps its own eyes at that hour. The men who sweep the streets bend to their work, the poor huddle in doorways, and the women of the night walk home from their trade. Yet the followers pass among them unseen and unheard, and even the smell of their animals goes unnoticed. Jesus wraps them in a magic of his own, so subtle that even his followers walk on, unaware. By sunrise, the hillside holds just cold ashes and trampled grass, and every witness to their leaving travels with them.
