Matthew Robinson had eaten lunch on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial every Thursday for the past two years. It was a ritual born of necessity—his cramped studio apartment on Dupont Circle had no outdoor space, and his graphic design firm’s break room felt like a fluorescent-lit prison. Here, surrounded by tourists and joggers and the occasional wedding photo shoot, he could disappear into the crowd while sketching in his Moleskine or simply watching the world turn.

Today was unseasonably warm for late October. Matthew sat halfway up the marble steps, a half-eaten falafel wrap beside him, his attention split between his phone and the tapestry of humanity flowing around him. A group of German tourists debated the memorial’s architecture. A father hoisted his daughter onto his shoulders for a better view. A homeless man played harmonica near the Reflecting Pool, the notes drifting up like smoke.

Matthew pulled out his sketchbook. He’d been working on a logo redesign for a non-profit—something clean and modern that still felt authentic—but his pencil had other ideas. Without conscious thought, his hand began tracing geometric patterns: interlocking circles that spiraled inward, strange angular symbols that felt both alien and somehow familiar. He frowned. This wasn’t like him. Matthew was precise, deliberate. These marks looked almost… runic.

The air pressure changed.

It was subtle at first, like descending too quickly in an elevator. Matthew’s ears popped. The sounds around him—the tourists, the traffic on Constitution Avenue, even the harmonica—seemed to recede, as if someone had wrapped the world in cotton. He looked up from his sketchbook.

The symbols he’d drawn were glowing.

Not metaphorically. Not the way good design “glows” with energy. Actually, literally glowing—a soft blue luminescence that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. Matthew’s hand jerked away from the page, but the light didn’t fade. If anything, it brightened, spreading from the paper to his fingertips, crawling up his forearm like living electricity.

“What the hell—”

The world tilted.

For a fraction of a second, Matthew saw through things. The marble steps became translucent, revealing the earth and stone and ancient foundations beneath. The tourists flickered like old film, and beneath their modern clothes he glimpsed other eras layered like palimpsest—Civil War uniforms, colonial dress, even older things he couldn’t name. And Lincoln himself—the massive seated figure behind him—seemed to turn his head, those carved eyes focusing with impossible awareness.

Then reality snapped back with almost physical force.

Matthew gasped, stumbling to his feet. His sketchbook tumbled down the steps, pages fluttering. The glow had vanished from his hands, but his skin tingled with residual energy, like he’d grabbed a live wire. Around him, people continued their conversations, oblivious. No one had seen. How was that possible?

He retrieved his sketchbook with shaking hands. The symbols were still there, ordinary pencil marks now, but looking at them made something deep in his chest resonate—a tuning fork struck by invisible hands.

Matthew shoved the book into his messenger bag and headed for the metro, his falafel abandoned.

---

That night, Matthew’s apartment felt smaller than usual. He sat at his drafting table, the sketchbook open before him, trying to recreate what had happened. But his hand wouldn’t cooperate. Every attempt to draw those symbols again produced only clumsy approximations, dead marks on dead paper.

He’d always been rational. His portfolio was built on clean lines and negative space, on logos that communicated complex ideas through elegant simplicity. There was no room in his worldview for glowing symbols or visions of layered time. And yet.

Matthew opened his laptop and began searching. Geometric symbols magic. Historical occult signs. Spontaneous hallucinations. The results were a chaos of New Age nonsense, historical footnotes, and Reddit conspiracy theories. He was about to close the browser when a phrase caught his eye in an academic paper about Colonial American folk practices:

“The Robinson family of Virginia, while publicly respectable merchants, were rumored by contemporary sources to practice certain ‘philosophical arts’ inherited from English occultist traditions.”

Robinson. His last name.

His heart rate quickened. He clicked through to the full paper—a master’s thesis from Georgetown University about magical practices in pre-Revolutionary America. The Robinson family appeared in a footnote: wealthy traders who’d settled in Virginia in the 1650s, but who’d been the subject of whispered accusations. One passage, from a 1704 letter, described the family patriarch as a man who “could read the very bones of the earth and speak words that made the air itself obey.”

Matthew leaned back in his chair. This was insane. His family was from suburban Ohio. His dad sold insurance. His mom taught middle school English. They were aggressively normal, right down to their annual Christmas letter and matching Thanksgiving sweaters.

But as he stared at the screen, another memory surfaced: his grandmother, in the nursing home two years before she died, gripping his hand with surprising strength. “You have his eyes,” she’d whispered. “Your great-great-however-many grandfather. The one who could see.” Matthew had assumed she was confused, dementia fragmenting her thoughts. Now he wasn’t sure.

A sound jolted him from his thoughts—a scraping, like fingernails on glass, coming from his window.

He turned. His fourth-floor apartment faced a brick wall. There was nothing that could be scratching at the glass.

The scraping came again, more insistent.

Matthew approached the window slowly. The street below was empty, the neighboring building dark. But in the reflection of his own window, he saw something that made his blood ice over.

A woman’s face, pale and beautiful and utterly wrong, staring back at him from inside the glass. Her eyes were black from lid to lid, and when her lips moved, frost spread across the pane.

“Found you,” she mouthed, and smiled.

Matthew stumbled backward. When he looked again, the face was gone, but the window was covered in a thin sheet of ice, impossible in the seventy-degree October night. And scratched into the frost, in letters that dripped condensation like blood:

ROBINSON

---

He didn’t sleep that night. Instead, he sat with his back against the wall, lights on, researching until his eyes burned. The academic papers led to genealogy sites, which led to historical archives, which led to stranger places—forums where people claimed to be practitioners of “the old ways,” blogs about magical bloodlines, even a few grainy photos of symbols similar to the ones he’d drawn.

One site, maintained by an amateur historian, had a section on “Suppressed Colonial Figures.” And there, buried in a list of accused witches and folk healers, was a name that made his breath catch:

Nathaniel Robinson (1620-1697), known as “The Reader.” Puritan records suggest Robinson possessed abilities to perceive “hidden truths” and manipulate natural forces. Fled England after accusations of sorcery, settled in Virginia. Family line continued until approximately 1780, when records cease.

There was a portrait—poorly preserved, almost certainly not historically accurate, but the eyes were unmistakable. Matthew had seen those eyes every morning in the mirror.

The Reader. His ancestor had been called The Reader.

And he’d just learned to read something.

A crash from the kitchen made him jump. Matthew grabbed a knife from the block—a ridiculous gesture, but it made him feel less helpless—and crept toward the sound.

His refrigerator had been torn open, its contents scattered across the floor. But that wasn’t what made him freeze. The linoleum was covered in frost, spreading from a central point near the sink, and standing in that frozen circle was the woman from the window.

She looked no older than twenty-five, dressed in clothes that might have been fashionable in any era or none—a long dark coat over what seemed to be layers of fabric from different centuries, a patchwork of time. Her black eyes reflected no light, and when she breathed, the air around her crystallized into snowflakes that fell upward.

“You woke me,” she said, her voice carrying accents Matthew couldn’t place—British, but older, twisted by centuries. “After so long in the dark, your little spark of power pulled me from my sleep like a bell in the night.”

“Who are you?” Matthew’s voice came out steadier than he felt.

“I am Morrigan. I was old when Nathaniel Robinson was young. I watched his kind try to tame the wild places, to impose their order on chaos.” She tilted her head, studying him with those void eyes. “He was powerful, your ancestor. It took three of us to bind him, and even then he managed to hide something away. A seed. A possibility.” She smiled, and her teeth were too white, too sharp. “You.”

“I don’t understand—”

“You don’t need to.” She stepped forward, and the frost spread with her, climbing the walls, turning his breath to visible clouds. “You’re a Robinson. That’s enough. Your bloodline ended my sisters, trapped me in the space between waking and sleeping for three centuries. But you’ve brought me back, little spark. And now I’ll finish what I started in 1697: I’ll erase every trace of Nathaniel’s legacy from this earth.”

The temperature plummeted. Ice formed on Matthew’s eyelashes. He backed away, but there was nowhere to go, his apartment suddenly feeling like a trap rather than a sanctuary.

Morrigan raised her hand, and the air began to crystallize, forming jagged spears of ice that hung suspended, pointed at his heart.

Matthew’s mind raced. The symbols. The glow. Whatever he’d accessed on those steps, he’d done it without thinking, without trying. Could he—

The ice spears launched.

“No!“

The word came out wrong—layered, resonant, like multiple voices speaking in harmony. Matthew’s hands moved on instinct, tracing patterns in the air, and suddenly the world bent. The ice shattered mid-flight, dissipating into harmless steam. And for just a moment, Matthew saw the architecture beneath reality—lines of force that connected everything, a vast geometric pattern that his ancestor had learned to read and manipulate.

He was reading it now.

Morrigan’s expression shifted from predatory confidence to genuine surprise. “Impossible. You’ve had your power for less than a day—”

Matthew didn’t let her finish. He pushed, not physically but with something deeper, and reality pushed with him. Morrigan flew backward, crashing through his window in an explosion of glass and frozen air. She vanished into the October night, and for several heartbeats, there was only silence.

Then Matthew’s legs gave out. He collapsed onto the frost-covered floor, shaking, his apartment open to the night through the shattered window.

He’d just thrown a centuries-old sorceress through a wall using geometry and willpower.

He’d just discovered he was heir to something he didn’t understand.

And she would be back.

---

Matthew sat in a 24-hour diner in Georgetown, nursing burnt coffee and trying to process the impossible. Dawn was still hours away. His apartment was a crime scene he couldn’t explain. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The genealogy sites were still open on his phone. He scrolled through records, looking for answers, for some clue about what Nathaniel Robinson had actually been, what he’d done, why it mattered. The paper trail was frustratingly thin—births, deaths, property transfers—until one document made him pause.

A will, dated 1695, two years before Nathaniel’s death. Most of it was standard colonial legal language, but one provision stood out:

“To those of my blood who inherit the Reader’s gift: Know that power without wisdom is merely destruction. Seek the signs I have left. The truth is written in the oldest places, for those with eyes to see.”

Signs. Oldest places.

Matthew thought of the vision on the Lincoln Memorial steps, the way he’d seen through the layers of time. Washington D.C. was built on something older—indigenous sites, colonial settlements, foundations that predated the marble monuments. And if Nathaniel had left signs, clues for descendants who might inherit his gift…

He needed to learn to read them.

His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: Your window needs fixing. Also, she’ll recover faster than you think. We should talk. – F

Matthew stared at the message. We should talk. Someone else knew. Someone else was watching.

He typed back: Who is this?

Three dots appeared, then: Someone whose family also remembers the old wars. The Reader had allies. His descendants aren’t as alone as you think.

Matthew’s coffee sat forgotten, growing cold. In less than twenty-four hours, his entire reality had restructured itself. He was descended from a sorcerer. An ancient enemy wanted him dead. And apparently, there were others—people who knew about this hidden world, who might have answers.

He looked at the symbols still faintly visible on his forearm, the residual glow of power he was only beginning to understand.

Outside, the first light of dawn touched the Georgetown skyline. The city looked the same as it always had, but Matthew knew better now. There were layers beneath the surface, patterns written into the bones of the world. And for the first time in his carefully ordered, rational life, Matthew Robinson understood that he’d been seeing only the thinnest slice of reality.

Now he was learning to read the rest.

He finished his coffee, typed a response—When and where?—and waited for the reply that would begin his real education.

Whatever came next, Matthew knew one thing with certainty: his Thursday lunches at the Lincoln Memorial were going to be a lot more interesting from now on.