~~Run, little angel. Run.~~
Cas wasn't sure if he had actually heard it. He looked around the flat meadow surrounding the lake, the mountains, the woods behind him. No-one there. Just an enormous gaping, smoking hole where the amassed might of the Holy Host had joined together to smite Amara.
And no body.
Dean had told him to see what had happened to her. Now he was here, and the question was: Had she been totally vaporized? Or had she somehow escaped?
~~Run.~~
There it was again. He twitched a small frown, scanned the landscape. Nothing. But he felt a crawling itch twisting up his spine, the kind that made him want to flare his wings, find the enemy, go into battle. But there was nothing here to battle. He turned in a slow circle, squinting, searching not just with his eyes.
The entire place felt...tainted. Hollow. Black. Wrong. To his eyes, everything was normal. Using other senses...all he could feel was the taint, and the sense that something was watching him. He shivered, flicked the pinions on his wings. A sudden vague feeling of imminent danger made him instinctively translocate a few feet.
A lightning bolt hit the spot where he had just been standing, leaving the ground charred and smoking.
~~Hee. Let's try that again, shall we? RUN, angel!~~
The - not a voice, no, an instantaneous knowledge thrust into his brain - whatever it was - emanated vicious glee.
He took an uncertain step backward, then another. A second lightning bolt slammed into the ground, directly in front of him. The remnant electricity in the air made his dark hair stand on end, rippled through his feathers, made his trenchcoat bell out slightly from his vessel's body. Suddenly, the wrongness overwhelmed him, raising a deeply-buried, primal fear that he had never felt before. It was the first time he had really encountered The Darkness, felt what it was. He turned and bolted, toward the forest.
~~Yes. Run.~~
He had never felt like this before, in his aeon-long existence. Sheer panic. No matter where he turned, where his feet took him, the wrongness surrounded him. It wasn't animal panic, rising from his vessel, though that was there, too. It was a gut-level knowledge that the taunting voice came from something that negated his very existence, the existence of his Father, the existence of his Father's Creation. The fear vibrated through every atom of him, both the small portion manifested here on Earth and the remainder of his multi-dimensional being.
He ran.
He crashed into trees, stumbled over roots and fallen branches.
He stumbled through galaxies and whirlpools of stellar gas, stirring up sparkling trails of atoms that burned in his wake.
He shuddered, eyes blank, running blindly, mindlessly.
He smashed into aeons-old crystalline structures in one dimension, shattering them. He bounced from one indescribable ball to the next in yet another dimension, causing them to ripple and deform and vanish into the electric purple they bathed in.
He ran. On Earth, and in a million dimensions, he ran.
Laughter followed him.
It was dark. He blinked, vaguely wondering when that had happened. Why had he stopped? He darted fearful looks around him, then drew in a deep breath of relief that the wrongness no longer surrounded him. He took stock. His vessel's legs trembled from the running, its lungs heaved gasping breaths to pull oxygen in. And his vessel's chest flinched, quivered with every breath he took. Something was wrong. He looked down, and saw blood seeping through his shirt. Fear rippled through him again. He gasped, then ripped the shirt open, looked down again.
Writing. On his chest. He frowned, trying to decipher it, then shook his head in exasperation at himself and extended his consciousness to a point directly opposite, so he was "looking" at himself.
"I am coming."
There was a distant peal of laughter, felt, not heard.
He shuddered.
Then he pulled his shirt closed, resettled his coat, and translocated to the bunker, and Dean.