Chapter title: The Dream of Gold

Warnings: Please go to my profile for a full list of warnings if you need them.

Wordcount: 840 words for this chapter.

Other notes: This was written for the DeanCas exchange on Tumblr, but it got canceled, and it was just lying around, so I decided to upload it. Also, I decided to take some liberties with the original prompt, so if the person for whom I was supposed to be writing finds this, please don't get mad at me! -cowers-

This is my first Supernatural fanfic, so let me know what you think!

Prologue

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

- Revelation 21:1

On the edge of the world, there exists an infinite shoreline that acts as the matrix between the celestial and the concrete finites of man. In all certainty, there are many places like these in the universe, some only accessible to the truly divine — namely archangels. But this shoreline in particular acts as a return-to state for all beings holy and supernatural — and it's here that Castiel walks, down the untamed path of golden ash, leaving no trail of footsteps behind.

Angels are not solitary creatures. They are beings of one mind, one purpose, and with their every action they act in groups and in sync. When they think, their thoughts are projected in waves to every other of the God-blessed, and when they speak, their choruses are heard from one stretch of the universe to the other and by all. But Castiel has been alone in his thoughts since the dawn of time. He is different. He considers the artistic romance of humankind as he walks, enjoys the small bliss that comes from watching them from this shoreline, and thinks about how he belongs everywhere and nowhere at all.

All at once and coming from all around him he feels a slight tremor in the air and Castiel stops. The chorus of heaven perforates the silence — the chorus that he's shut out from his head for months now — and suddenly angels are crying wonderfully and mightily: Rejoice, for a new angel has been born; blessed is he who enters the realms of angels, he has saved us all. Castiel shuts out the frequencies (Dean calls it the Angel Radio) from his ears almost as soon as the songs begin (they remind him too much of what he's lost and what he's no longer a part of) but he cannot unhear what he's already heard — A new angel has been born.

A new angel hasn't been created in over two thousand years. As a matter of fact, Castiel had been the last.

He wings himself away from the shoreline and makes for Earth, his mortal figure appearing in the middle of an empty tundra immediately afterward. And then he walks, his coat billowing formidably behind him against the harsh weathered plains, and stretches his hand out, catching the way the fog rolls over the ridges of his knuckles. Before him appears another angel and Castiel is tired but his anger spurs him on and he is ready.

"Where is Dean Winchester?" he demands as he slows his pace to a stop.

"Where is Dean Winchester. The question all of us have been asking for forty years and then some," the angel sighs. "I don't know, Brother."

"Please, Leliel. You were there when it happened."

"One of many," Leliel hums. "Yet you chose me to answer your summons —"

"You are one of the few remaining who does not hate me for the choices I have made."

Leliel throws her head back to face the grey sky and openly weeps for a long, long time. There is something beautiful in a weeping angel, but terrifying, and would make any other being succumb to tears as well. But Castiel does not; he waits for her to finish with the patience of a saint, and finally she does. And she looks at him, and she smiles, and her tears dissipate to almost nothing but a trail of ashes on the ground. "Yes, Castiel. One of the very few."

"Then I will ask again. Where is Dean Winchester?"

Leliel responds, "He is gone, Brother; they have taken him. They have made him into one of us and he does not remember."

Castiel had already known, but a cold fear spreads through him anyway. He'd been intrinsically connected to the human for some time now, and had felt their connection snap as soon as the angels' voices had appeared. Of course he'd known.

And for the first time in a long time, he is afraid.

"Gone," Castiel repeats uselessly.

"Gone."

Gone because he hadn't been there; because he'd been on his search for God and they'd taken him away when his attention had been distracted for only a moment. Gone is the man who was the center of Castiel's universe for half a universe and had changed the essence of where he belonged and who he was, and Castiel is at fault, like he always is, because he is the angel that disrupted the perfect path of God, and perhaps this is his true punishment after all.

Leliel affirms it. "He's an angel now, Brother. You cannot save him anymore. Dean Winchester is an angel now."