"Bless-ed is the Consort who will lead the Dreamer's army in the next age." said the children. The room bent around Sam as though Dean were looking at him through a fish-eye lens.

"Sam we gotta get you out of here." said Dean, as the chalk word flew from the table into Dean and reshaped to Consort and burned with terrible knowledge. He shook his head. Sam, he had to get Sam to safety, but the room was so distorted he couldn't judge distance anymore.

The children spoke on. "The people are dust on his fingers, he but puts out his hand..."

Angered, Dean reached to grab the nearest child, to see if there were still a face to the voice, but when he touched a little girl's shoulder… she smeared. A chalk drawing. He looked at the wall, the children now two-dimensional, and then at the dust on his hand, trembling. "But the kids were real. They were right here," he said looking first at Sam and then at the woman, "What have you done to Sam?!"

“I have fulfilled the prophecy,” she said, her voice an insectoid buzz.

When Dean looked at Sam again, the words on his skin were bleeding upward, snaking under his eyelids until his skin was eggshell white and his entire eyes were a deep, ocean blue. Sam’s very presence expanded and he seemed to grow, towering above everything.

Sam stood galvanized, his mouth open as unbelievable power flowed into him. His mind was cracked open and attuned to the world. Every living being was a shining pinprick in his mind, spread over countries, over continents. He could feel the residents of Arkham milling by the sea, their presences a sickly green. The sea glowed in his mind, the deeps beckoning him.

All were pinpricks but for Dean and the priestess. The priestess glowed red, brighter than the humans, but Dean was even brighter, a bonfire in his head.

His Consort. The connection was strong, and Dean’s panic was loud in his head, the bonfire flickering as if in a strong wind. The ocean called to him so strongly it was all he could do not to stride out of the church and walk into the water, to Dream the Dreams for thousands of years, but Dean’s distress was the only thing that kept him here. His Consort. Sam, holding the world in his mind, knew that he could spend millennia away from the corporeal world if he had Dean by his side for the entirety of it.

Sam turned his solid blue eyes to his brother and said Dean’s name, not Dean, but his version of it; the spiraling, soft syllables of brother-lover with a deeper resonance of Consort. “We could be together forever,” he said, his voice hollow and deep, echoing within itself.

Sam touched his hand and they shared a vision of eternity, wrapped in each other's arms, impervious to time, lungs full of salt water, and for a moment Dean weakened. But only a moment. "No, not like this, this isn't you Sam. As for you," said Dean, rounding on the woman and grabbing her jaw in his hand, "You got ten seconds to start running or there won't be enough left to draw a chalkline."

He turned back, his voice pitched low so only Sam could hear. "Don't listen to her Sam, the prophecy got it wrong, they all got it wrong. We only have one name," he said, hands gathering Sam's face and bringing him close, "Because of us, people hear 'Winchester' and they don't think of the gun, they know that help is on the way. That they're going to live."

Slow tears streamed down Dean's face. "And if we could turn a word that meant taking lives into something that means saving lives, then you can take whatever damned name that bitch fed you and make it human again."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Dean felt the skin of his entire body tightening, burning. He flinched as something was torn out of him.

“You’ve rejected my offer,” the priestess said, her eyes cold embers, a look of smug satisfaction on her face. “Now he’s mine.”

Dean’s hands on Sam’s face suddenly felt distant and insubstantial. His focus snapped, centered instead on the woman, who suddenly filled his mind with images of deep underwater, blackness upon blackness, her dark hair swirling about him as he Dreamed. Now there was nothing standing between him and the sea.

“Come,” his Consort said, holding out her hand to him. Sam broke effortlessly from Dean’s grasp and took her cool hand, felt the connection with her grow and deepen. He knew now that he was no longer human, but a god, and god-power welled up inside him, filling him almost to the point of bursting. But he was made for power, born and bred to hold infinite amounts of it, and he held it as easily as a balloon holds air, his presence expanding and filling as he let the god-power shape him.

He let her lead him out of the church, the bonfire of Dean’s existence now a single note in the back of his mind.

Dean howled after them, running across the room after the door had shut only to open it and find them gone, a wasteland of monuments and gray sand before him.

"Sam..." Dean whimpered, clutching his sides in paroxysms of grief, "How do I get home?"

The chalk drawings giggled as he began frantically searching the church for another way out, a sigil, a trapdoor, anything, but Sam had walked them both here and Dean could not leave the way he came. Even the UnWords Sam had taught him were useless. Frustrated, he kicked a chair, the woman's chalk rolled toward him...and he got an idea.

"Stop it!" cried the chalk children, as he smeared them into a uniform gray background and began sketching Arkham, the waterfront, the spires, a triangle at his feet to indicate a road narrowing into the horizon. Lastly he drew Sam, taking care to get all the face right, and when he ran out of chalk he bit his hand and painted his brother in his own blood.

He looked down at his filthy hands, his right ring finger humming in sympathy to the ring Sam wore.

"Damn I hope this works."

And with one last look for the nightmare church, Dean took a deep breath and walked into the drawing.

Chapter 17: Sam Walks Into the Atlantic

The priestess led Sam by the hand through a small grove of trees, down a grassy hill that gave way to sandy scrub grass, and finally onto a rocky beach. Sea-spray wet Sam’s face and hair, and the salt-smell in his nose was like coming home.

At least a thousand men and women stood on the long beachfront, staring out into the waves. Mostly nude, their pale skin glowed in the moonlight.

"They will follow us," said the priestess. "Sacrifices to Your Greatness."

Sam nodded and stood, surveying the beach and the cliffs in the distance. The tug of loss he felt at this being the last time he'd see land for millennia was brief, and it drifted away before he barely registered it.

There was another tug. Warmth encircled his finger, and he felt momentary discomfort in the back of his mind, the distant bonfire of his brother’s soul in distress. He looked over the humans waiting patiently to walk to their deaths.

"I need no sacrifices," he said, “I’ve had enough in my lifetime,” and the woman narrowed her eyes at him, then bowed her head in acquiescence. "Free them," he ordered.

With a few harsh words from the priestess, the men and women on the beach began to look around, visibly confused. In ones and twos, and then dozens, they turned away from the water and started climbing the slope to dry land, back to what was left of Arkham where their houses and businesses and cars and children waited, abandoned.

"The Dreaming awaits," said the woman.

Without another word, Sam let his Consort lead him into the sea.

After what seemed years of darkness, the soft flutter of bat wings flying past him, Dean emerged from a natural cave that opened to the harbour. He put up his hand against the blinding moon, having lost his boots and shirt in transit. People lurched past him like shipwreck survivors, but two figures remained in the water...

"Sam!"

Sam's head vanished, though to Dean's magic-addled eye he glittered like a star beneath the waves. Cursing, Dean clamped a knife between his teeth and tore down the long long pier in his bare feet and moonlight glinting off his shoulders and dove into the black water below.

The cold nearly stopped his heart, but he did not die. The riptide pulled him down and forward, but he did not sink. The ocean was a sunless, loveless world save for the songs of whales greeting their new master, but he did not lose hope. He let out the last air in his lungs to plunge deeper, chasing that fading light that was surely the corona of his brother's soul, calling him home…

The Impala zoomed through empty streets, corn fields waving in a gentle wind. "Hey wake up," said Dean, patting the bundle in the passenger seat, "We're nearly there."

The blanketed figure did not reply, and panic gripped Dean's chest as he shook Sam's shoulder. "Can you hear me?"

The old house loomed into view, a pie cooling in the kitchen window and the TV flickering behind the curtains. Mary opened the door in her bathrobe as Dean leapt out and raced around to the passenger side. "Dean honey, you're early."

"He's not waking up!" he shouted, gathering Sam in his arms and carrying him up the steps.

John came out, the younger version from Dean's wallet photo, and Dean sprang upon him, pressing Sam to John's chest. "Please help him!"

John searched his face, looking at one eye and then the other. What was wrong with them? Dean wondered, Why weren't they saying anything? Dean looked down at his arms. Pulled back the top of the blanket, let it unroll onto the carpet.

It was empty.

"Sam..."

The knife fell from his blue lips. If Sam called back, Dean was not there to hear it.

Chapter 18: Dean is Dead

It was lovely and dark under the water, and as soon as his head was submerged, Sam took a deep breath and reveled in the way the sea filled his lungs, saturated his body. He went deeper and deeper, the pressure reshaping him and concentrating his power.

Only one thing kept it from perfection. The bright fire of his brother’s soul was following him down, and it was fading from a bright roar to a dim flicker. This could not be. He could not allow his brother to make yet another sacrifice for him. Sam turned, pausing in his descent to push a momentous force upwards and behind, to push his brother to shore.

Satisfied, he swam deeper, cutting through the water. He shed his unraveling jacket, shed his ripping shirt, kicked his boots off so that his bare skin would be caressed by the sea. The speed of his movement shredded his jeans.

He touched a slumbering mind in Spain, giving them dreams of waves and salt. He caressed a mind in Vermont, letting them sleep easy.

His strong strokes took him deep, deep, and one push of his hands through the current disturbed the ring on his finger. He slowed. His brother’s light was smothered, gone. For the first time since the Priestess had imbued him with his god-power, he felt panic.

She turned toward him, beckoning him deeper with a smile that promised him the world. When he didn’t follow, she frowned and moved toward him, her fingers touching his face.

His brother’s light was gone.

He had a promise to keep.

Thumbing the ring on his finger, frowning thunderously, he opened his mouth in a resounding scream that shoved the Priestess away, spiraling dangerously until she skidded in a tumble against the rocky bottom of the sea. He pushed away toward the surface, moving so fast he was a blur.

When he climbed out of the water, it was to find Dean lying on the beach with his feet in the creamy waves lapping at the shore, his face pale, his chest still. No. No.

Dean sat at the dining table, a birthday cake with twelve candles and his name written across the top in blue frosting. Young Sam sat in the chair across from him. "You gotta make a wish, Dean."

They were alone, Sam's eyes unnaturally bright through the flames. "I don't know what to wish for." said Dean.

"Hurry up and think! The candles are melting!" said Sam, "You could wish for a bike. Then we can chase the ice cream truck in our superhero capes."

Sure enough, they'd been sitting so long that only one flame remained. Dean swallowed back tears. "That sounds really good Sammy. But I'm not a kid anymore," said Dean, "And neither are you."

Young Sam closed his eyes. "Then I'll make one for you."

Sam rushed to Dean’s side, skidding on his knees in the rocky sand. “Dean!” he yelled, voice booming off the cliffs. Then he lay his hand over Dean’s heart, and softer, over and over, he said the gentle, spiraling word that would always bring him home. It pulsed into Dean’s body, warmth that could only be summoned from Sam in the presence of his brother curling around his brain and his lungs and his heart.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Dean opened his eyes. Looked at Sam.

“Did you get your wish?”

Sam breathed out hard and looked down at Dean with his god-blue eyes. “Yes,” he said, and he grabbed Dean by the face, thumbs pressing at the hinges of his jaw, and kissed him hard.

“I could never have been hers,” he whispered, pressing his forehead against Dean’s, wet strands of hair sliding against Dean’s face. “I’m yours.”

Sam was changed, or rather he looked like a dream of Sam, droplets shining in his lashes, skin a pearly luminescence, his hair the iridescent rainbow of an ocean sunset. He looked beautiful. He looked cold.

"Am I dead?" said Dean, half-convinced Sam was some god of death come to reap his soul and wrapping his arms around him anyway, "Tell me it’s really you."

Something broke in Dean as he pulled Sam in, stealing the breath from his lungs as water crashed and dissolved around their bodies, Sam's fierce kisses calling him further from that borderland between life and death, until finally a great tumult echoed from the cave behind Dean as bats burst forth and spiraled upward and the moon disappeared in a cloud of black wings.

And then they heard her singing.

Sam looked round. Farther down the beach, waves pounded the surf, some as much as thirty feet high, but Sam knew it was neither the tide nor a storm nor any natural thing that might force the water to act in such a manner.

The Atlantic was rising.

"My king."

A path had been carved in the ocean. Hair coiling upward, naked save for a scanty loincloth about her hips, the priestess's hands stretched over her head between two walls of water hundreds of feet high, a dry ribbon of land leading from her to Sam.

"Come back," she commanded. Dean clutched Sam's arms, sand shivering around them in the wake of her words.

Sam felt the pull of her words, felt the tug of her command as his Consort, but it was nothing compared to the grasp of Dean’s hands on his arms. He stared down into Dean’s eyes, ignoring the priestess for a moment.

“I won’t,” Sam assured Dean, though the warmth that would usually be in his eyes was absent in the solid cold blue of them.

Sam pressed one more hard, cold kiss to Dean’s lips, then stood, facing the priestess.

“No force can make me,” Sam said, his voice booming over the tumult of the raging waters, standing tall and solid and immovable, his broad shoulders squared. He felt energy rise up in him in preparation for this confrontation. Thin ribbons of it spilled out of him and gave the air around him a curling, hazy glow.

Storm clouds boiled in the sky. She walked toward him, her footsteps filling with blood. "Then I will take my wedding gift."

And with that her body swelled and tentacles burst from her face, whipping round Sam to latch onto Dean.

"Dammit!" Dean shouted, catching sight of his knife mere inches away. He rolled over, black tongues whispering his name and licking his bare skin hungrily, but the knife lay out of reach.

"Sam!" Dean shouted. Slimy tendrils dragged him belly-down across the sand, his fingers scoring deep grooves in the sand, and then lifted him in the air like a trophy as the walls of water closed in fast, ready to swallow him up.

Rage boiling up inside Sam as he watched the tentacles writhe and clutch at Dean, pulling him toward the priestess, into danger, away from him, Sam took a step forward and whipped his hands outward, thrusting the walls of water away from Dean and the priestess.

She was powerful, yes.

But she seemed to have forgotten that she had given him the power of a god.

“You can’t have him!” he bellowed, thunder in his voice, lightning arcing down from the clouds to strike the beach around him, burning the sand into jagged formations of glass where it struck.

Though Dean was lashed to and fro in the air, like the world's last bone being tossed between two dogs, Dean had a moment of clarity. He wasn't going to die, not today at least.

Sam would not permit it.

"Lady," said Dean, his little smartass smile hovering inches from the dripping horror of her face, "You shoulda run when you had the chance."

Sam took another step forward. With a slice of his hand, a razor-thin sheet of water jetted out from the churning walls of the sea, severing the tentacles off a foot from her face. As she shrieked, he jerked his fingers backwards, and Dean was sent flying to the beach, still-flailing tentacles wrapped around him. He skidded across the rocky sand for a dozen feet before he came to a stop.

The priestess advanced on him, her face twisted in rage, black blood streaming from the slashed tentacles dangling from her mouth. Sam held his ground. Dean was a warm, living presence at his back.

The priestess's face squirmed into a smile, triumphant.

But Sam smiled back.

Cthulhu, whose Dreams and godhood Sam had inherited, had been many magnitudes of power stronger than Sam, possessing knowledge and abilities beyond comprehension. However, he lacked one thing: Sam's sharp, well-trained, analytical human brain. For Cthulhu, the language he spoke had been just that: a language.

For Sam, the vocabulary was a machine with many parts, one that could be taken apart and put back together as he saw fit. He could make and remake words, and this he did now, thinking furiously, concentrating his entire being on pulling the correct syllables and accents and subtleties together.

The priestess opened her mouth to sing once more, a garbled, many-voiced horror of a song.

Sam smiled wider as the machine parts fit together in his head. Hair whipping around his face, he raised his hand to her, palm out. He took a deep breath.

He spoke the word of UnMaking.

The world flashed white as her song was abruptly cut off, and then there was a crater miles wide and miles deep beginning where she had stood, digging out the bottom of the sea. Tumultuous waves rushed in to fill the hole.

Sam made it to Dean’s side before he fell to his knees in the sand.

Chapter 19: Fourth-Dimensional Declarations of Love

Dean sat up on his elbows, bruised and ears ringing. A helicopter droned nearby.

"Sam, are you okay..." he said, his fingers glowing pink when he touched Sam's hand, the way some jellyfish do.

Time had solidified around Sam, a hundred semi-transparent Sams trailing from where he had stood before the blast to where he sat now, all his moments trapped in amber. Or maybe Dean was just seeing the world from the Dreamer's perspective.

Dean wrapped his arms around his shoulders, fingers twined in his hair, but multiple Sams continued to blur the air like a camera shutter left open.

"Can you hear me?" asked Dean, as an Army helicopter swung overhead.

“Yeah,” Sam said, reaching up to grab Dean’s shoulders, swaying on his knees.

"Ezeerf!" said a soldier with a white megaphone, "Meht ees nac I erehw sdnah ruoy esiar!"

Dean shut his eyes, trying to blink away Sam's reality. "We gotta move," he said, standing them both up, "The car shouldn't be far---"

Bullets strafed the sand a few feet away. Dean grabbed Sam’s wrist, wondering where they could run and hide with Sam's timeline tailing behind them. The car keys bit into his leg through the pocket.

He drew a line in the sand. "This is a dream," said Dean, told himself, barely sane this close to Sam, "We are sleeping, so we can go anywhere..."

All his training, that little voice that reminded Dean that the human body was allergic to bullets and they should run like frightened piggies, was deep underwater. Another line, another curve, a square for a window, and under that a door handle. He jammed the key in the sand.

"Okay Sam," he said, helicopter fanning his hair as Dean lifted a door to the Impala interior, "Climb on in."

Sam tumbled in. Once Dean climbed in half on top of him and closed the door, the whole world shifted ninety degrees. Sam rocked with it, still disoriented from the last huge expenditure of energy.

It was an intense relief for Sam to be with Dean in the Impala, moving down blacktop shining with the recent rain. What little was left of both of their clothing was in tatters, and Dean was scuffed up and bruised, with raised welts where the tentacles had grabbed him… and Sam had no idea what kind of condition he himself was in; he felt a deep buzzing, churning in his chest and in his groin, skin electrified, power lashing at him from the inside.

But the priestess was gone.

Dean was alive.

Sam had to reach over and touch him, touch the skin of his bare waist, run a finger along a purpling bruise. It was hard to take his eyes off of Dean, but he finally looked out to survey Arkham. It was wrecked, buildings sagging, windows broken everywhere he looked, and Dean had to swerve occasionally to avoid fish-man corpses. A few straggling townsfolk walked the streets, looking around in a daze.

“Are you okay?” he asked, but it came out in that other language, echoing through the car and setting the windows to shaking. The radio crackled then switched itself on, Blue Oyster Cult setting up a monstrous, dizzying feedback in his head before it switched itself off again.

Dean swerved, a truck honking as he swung back into his lane, then watched as he and the truck driver drove in reverse and replayed the same swerve with Dean braking right sooner the second time around.

Dean pulled off into a field facing a concrete wall, nearly falling out the door. He couldn't drive. He could barely move through time in the right direction.

"I had a strawberry lamp," he said, on his knees searching the ground for a rock, "It poured champagne all over the basement."

Finding one, he began a pale line drawing of the Men of Letters garage on the side of the building, columns and cars inside a square big enough for the Impala to fit. Would the Bunker let them through?

Dean leaned into the passenger seat window. "Is the Men of Letters Bunker spell-proofed against Cthonic magic?" he asked, though it came out as, "Can you grow roses by candlelight?"

Sam heard both questions. He opened his mouth to answer, but he tasted the oil slick of the wrong language on the back of his tongue. He climbed out of the car.

Part 10