Brother Thomas had been copying manuscripts in the scriptorium of Glastonbury Abbey for seventeen years, and in all that time, he had never once questioned the steady rhythm of his days. Dawn prayers, breakfast of bread and ale, then hours bent over vellum with his quill, carefully reproducing the words of Saint Augustine or chronicling the deeds of kings long dead. It was a life of devotion, ink, and silence.

Until the morning he found the peculiar stylus.

It was the feast of Saint Michael, September 29th in the year of our Lord 1347, and Thomas had arrived early to prepare a new manuscript—a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae commissioned by a wealthy merchant. But there, resting atop his usual workspace as if it had always belonged there, was the strangest writing implement he had ever seen.

The object was perhaps the length of his hand, perfectly cylindrical, and made of some unknown material—not wood, not metal, but something smooth and light. One end tapered to a point finer than any quill he could cut. Most bewildering of all, when he touched the pointed end to parchment, it left a line of brilliant blue without any need for ink.

“Brother Francis,” Thomas whispered to the monk at the neighboring desk, “look at this.”

Francis glanced over, squinted, then crossed himself. “Sorcery?”

“I think not,” Thomas said, though his voice wavered. “There’s no smell of sulfur, no heat. It feels… ordinary. Yet extraordinary.”

He experimented throughout the morning, marveling at how the stylus never needed sharpening, never needed dipping. The blue liquid—or whatever it was—flowed endlessly. His writing had never been so swift, so clean. When Prior Edmund made his rounds, Thomas quickly hid the object in his sleeve, using his regular quill whenever the older man drew near.

That evening, in the privacy of his cell, Thomas examined his treasure by candlelight. There were markings along its side—letters, but in no script he recognized. “BIC Cristal,” it seemed to read, though what manner of Latin that might be, he couldn’t say.

The next morning brought a new mystery.

Brother Francis arrived at the scriptorium in a state of barely contained panic, clutching something wrapped in his rough woolen habit.

“Thomas,” he hissed, “I found this in the garden. Tell me I’m not going mad.”

He unwrapped a rectangular object, flat and black, with one surface that reflected light like still water. Thomas touched it tentatively, and the surface erupted in light and color. Both monks leaped back, Francis muttering prayers while Thomas stared in fascination.

Images moved across the surface—people dressed in impossible clothing, buildings taller than cathedrals made entirely of glass, mechanical birds that carried humans through the sky. Then the light died, returning to black.

“We should tell the Prior,” Francis whispered.

“No,” Thomas said quickly. “They’ll think it’s witchcraft. We’ll be burned.”

“But what if it is witchcraft?”

Thomas thought of the blue stylus hidden in his cell, of how much faster he could work, how many more books he could copy. “Then we should understand it first, before we condemn it.”

Over the following weeks, more objects appeared throughout the abbey and the surrounding village of Glastonbury. A wheeled boot with tiny wheels appeared in the stables (Thomas would never know it was a rollerblade). A shiny pouch that made a crinkling sound and contained thirty-two identical sweetmeats of impossible flavor materialized in the kitchens (Skittles, “Taste the Rainbow” proclaimed the incomprehensible script). A bound codex fell from thin air into the abbey’s library, its pages impossibly thin and covered with dense text about something called “quantum mechanics.”

Thomas became the unofficial keeper of these mysteries. The other monks, torn between fear and fascination, brought him whatever they found. He hid them all in a forgotten cellar beneath the scriptorium, visiting nightly to study them by candlelight.

The black mirror—which he learned would light up when pressed in the right spot—became his obsession. Through trial and error, he discovered he could make the images change by touching the surface. He saw maps of the world that showed lands beyond the edges of Christendom, watched people of every color and dress speaking into similar black mirrors, witnessed wars fought with weapons that breathed fire and machines that moved without horses.

It was the Samsung Galaxy S21, though Thomas would never know its name, and its battery lasted exactly forty-three days before dying forever.

But in those forty-three days, Brother Thomas of Glastonbury became perhaps the most knowledgeable man in medieval Europe.

He saw, though he didn’t fully understand, that the Earth was round and circled the sun. He observed that disease was caused by creatures too small to see, not by bad humors or divine punishment. He watched physicians cut open human bodies and repair them from the inside, saw farmers harvest fields of grain taller than a man, witnessed libraries containing more books than existed in all of England.

The knowledge tormented him. How many could be saved if he could convince others that illness spread through tiny creatures on unwashed hands? How many fewer would starve if he could explain the farming methods he’d glimpsed? But who would believe a simple monk claiming visions from a magic mirror?

On the forty-second day, as the device’s light grew dimmer with each use, Thomas made a decision. He began to write.

Not in the careful Latin of his usual manuscripts, but in the common English of the people, using his miraculous blue stylus that never ran dry. He wrote down everything he had seen, everything he had learned, creating illuminated manuscripts unlike any that had existed before. He drew diagrams of the human body with organs labeled, sketched the true shape of the solar system, attempted to reproduce the mathematical formulae he’d seen even though he didn’t understand them.

When the Prior discovered what Thomas was doing, the monk was prepared for accusations of heresy. Instead, Prior Edmund studied the pages with growing wonder.

“Where does this knowledge come from, Brother Thomas?”

Thomas chose his words carefully. “From divine revelation, Prior. Visions granted through prayer and meditation.”

It wasn’t entirely a lie. The objects did seem to appear from nowhere, as if placed by an unseen hand.

Prior Edmund was silent for a long moment. “The Bishop must not see this. Nor Rome. They would not understand.”

“Then we should burn it all?”

“No.” The Prior’s eyes gleamed with an intelligence Thomas had never noticed before. “We should learn from it. Quietly. Carefully. The Abbey has always been a center of learning. Why should we not learn from… whatever source God chooses to provide?”

And so began the secret work. Thomas trained a select group of younger monks in his new knowledge. Brother Francis, overcoming his initial fear, proved particularly adept at mathematics. Brother Hugh, the infirmarian, eagerly absorbed the medical knowledge, beginning experiments with boiling instruments and washing hands between patients. The death rate in the abbey’s infirmary dropped by half within six months.

They transcribed Thomas’s revelations into multiple copies, hiding them throughout the abbey. When the Black Death arrived in England the following year, Glastonbury Abbey mysteriously suffered far fewer deaths than anywhere else in Somerset. The monks’ insistence on quarantine, hand-washing, and burning the belongings of the infected was seen as holy wisdom.

But Thomas knew the truth was more complex. Late at night, he would hold the dead black mirror and wonder: Why had these objects appeared? Where did they come from? Were they gifts from God, tests from the Devil, or something else entirely?

The blue stylus finally ran dry on a cold December morning in 1348. Thomas had been using it to copy a treatise on astronomy when the flowing blue line stuttered, thinned, and stopped. He pressed harder, shook the implement, even whispered a prayer, but nothing more came.

He was still staring at the useless stylus when Brother Francis burst in.

“Thomas! Come quickly!”

In the courtyard stood a man Thomas had never seen before, dressed in the most peculiar garments—blue leggings of some tough fabric, a tunic with words printed across the chest (“I Survived 2020 And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt”), and shoes that seemed to be made of canvas and rubber. The man was looking around in complete bewilderment, speaking in accented but recognizable English.

“This isn’t… where am I? This isn’t the Renaissance faire. Where’s my car? Where’s the parking lot?”

Thomas approached cautiously. The other monks hung back, hands on their crucifixes.

“You are at Glastonbury Abbey, friend,” Thomas said. “The year of our Lord 1348.”

The man’s face went pale. “That’s… that’s impossible. I was just… there was this bright light when I touched that weird metal sphere at the antique shop, and then…”

“Metal sphere?” Thomas’s pulse quickened. “What color?”

“Silver, about the size of a baseball—I mean, the size of an apple.”

Thomas grabbed the man’s arm. “You must tell me everything. But first, come with me. Quickly, before the Prior returns.”

He led the bewildered time traveler to his secret cellar, where the collected objects lay arranged on rough wooden shelves. The man’s eyes widened.

“My God. These are all… these are from my time. That’s a Samsung phone! Those are Skittles! Is that a Bic pen?”

“You know these things?” Thomas could barely contain his excitement. “Then you can teach us! You can explain the visions I saw in the black mirror!”

But the man—who said his name was Michael Loeb, a history professor from something called UCLA—was shaking his head.

“You don’t understand. If these things are here, if you’ve been learning from them… you’re changing history. The Black Death is supposed to kill a third of Europe. The Renaissance isn’t supposed to start for another century. The scientific revolution… everything will be different.”

Thomas felt a cold dread creeping over him. “But surely saving lives is God’s will?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not even supposed to be here.” Michael pulled something from his pocket—a small metal sphere, silver and innocuous. “This thing brought me here. The antique dealer said it was found in an old monastery, dated to the 14th century, but that’s impossible because…”

He trailed off, staring at the sphere, then at Thomas.

“Because it shouldn’t exist yet,” Thomas finished. “Like all these objects.”

They stood in silence, surrounded by anachronisms, both beginning to understand the shape of something larger than either of them could fully grasp.

“What do we do?” Michael asked.

Thomas thought of all the knowledge he’d transcribed, the lives already saved, the manuscripts hidden throughout the abbey that would survive even if everything else burned. He thought of the future he’d glimpsed in the black mirror—beautiful and terrible in equal measure.

“We do what scholars have always done,” he said finally. “We preserve knowledge. We teach. We try to use what we’ve learned wisely.” He paused. “And we pray that somewhere, somewhen, someone understands why this is happening.”

Michael nodded slowly. “The sphere is dead. No power, no response. I can’t get home.”

“Then you’ll stay here. Brother Francis will find you a habit. You’ll be Brother Michael, a traveling scholar from… where did you say?”

“Los Angeles. But let’s say London.”

Thomas almost smiled. “Yes. London. And together, we’ll try to minimize the damage. Or maximize the good. I’m no longer certain which is which.”

As they climbed the stairs from the cellar, Thomas asked, “In your time, is Glastonbury Abbey remembered?”

Michael’s expression was unreadable. “It’s ruins. Henry VIII dissolves the monasteries in 1539.”

Thomas stopped. “Then all of this… the knowledge we’re preserving…”

“I don’t know. History is already changing. Maybe the abbey won’t be dissolved. Maybe it will become a center of learning that rivals Oxford. Maybe…” He shrugged. “I was supposed to be an observer of history, not a participant.”

“None of us choose our time,” Thomas said. “We can only choose what we do with the time we’re given.”

Michael laughed, “Didn’t Gandalf say that?”

“Who?” Thomas gave the time traveler a confused look.

“Gandalf,” Michael shared, “He’s a character from The Lord of the–“

He was interrupted by Brother Francis, running toward them again, breathing hard.

“Thomas! The Prior wants you. King Edward’s men are here. They’ve heard rumors of miraculous healing, of secret knowledge. They want to know what we’re hiding.”

Thomas and Michael exchanged glances. The future, it seemed, was arriving whether they were ready or not.

As they walked toward the Prior’s chamber, Thomas thought he heard something—a sound like thunder, but rhythmic, mechanical. He looked up to see a silver bird crossing the sky, leaving a white trail behind it. None of the other monks seemed to notice.

The temporal anomalies were increasing.

History was unraveling.

And Brother Thomas of Glastonbury, armed with a dead plastic pen and forbidden knowledge, walked forward to meet it.