Prologue

The True Nature of Things

Blood. Who would have guessed its importance?

Humans naturally shunned the crimson liquid for the longest time. For them it had meant injury, pain, and impending death. Only in the past century did they really discover it for what it was. Life-giving.

It was the essence of life in the purest physical form. And he wanted it.

The problem was not that Crowley was dead and craved life. It was that after 290 years of being content to live a not-life – to exist in a state of being that revolved around borrowing someone else's physical form – he had suddenly been reintroduced, against his will, to what life was meant to be. Forced to touch it: Emotion. Feeling. The need to be loved.

He had been awake at the time, squirming, snarking, and struggling against the chains that bound him to his fate. He had fought the change every step of the process, every second that ticked by in the relentless and unforgiving march of time. But once the seventh hour struck, the fever and terror granted clarity – and he began to realize that he had not been awake. He hadn't even been asleep.

He had been dead. And the injections of blood had been… were… injections of life.

Very few truly understood the nature of Hell, and why it was made to burn so hot. The truth was as simple and as complex as the idea that one might set themselves on fire to avoid freezing to death. Those who hailed from Hell were not just dead themselves, they were empty. Empty of sensation, forcing them to borrow another's nervous system. Empty of emotion, prompting them to fill the vacancy with the suffering, fear, and devastation of others. Empty of love – and unable to grasp anything about the concept except the darkness of life without it.

Demons did not have souls. They had a void. An emptiness that violently hungered for the something that was meant to be.

And though to elicit such a confession would be an impossibility, the truth was that the void was cold. It was a cold so terrible that those who carried it subconsciously tried everything within their power to warm themselves. Even if it meant setting their plane of existence perpetually on fire.

For 290 years he had been like the rest of them. A great emptiness inside, and a cold so intense that the idea of warmth meant nothing to him.

But in his 291st year, everything changed. The blood was life-giving, and opposed to the frigid abyss of death, life was more than warm. It was as liquid fire that coursed through his borrowed veins. Life was hot – in ways Hell never could be.

For the first time in 291 years, Crowley once again understood the concept of warmth. But more than that, the liquid life that had been forced back into his frozen, lifeless veins did more than burn; it rekindled something in place of the dark void that belonged at a demon's core.

It was nothing but a dull spark, an ember that seemed to threaten every day to go out as the rest of his demonic nature attempted to smother it like the foreign entity it was. But yet, it remained. He could feel it.

And he could feel its hunger.

Kevin Tran, Advanced Placement. Prophet of the Lord. Who would have guessed his importance?

Ever since he had been a little kid, his mother had told him he was special. But neither Linda Tran, nor his many fawning teachers, nor any college counselor that happily recommended him to Ivy League schools had any notion at the time of the impact the he would have on the fate of the world.

It didn't matter what he had believed before, or what he believed now after everything he he'd seen. Nothing changed the fact some higher power had chosen him for some inscrutable purpose. And that purpose was what would shape his life.

It hadn't taken long for him to discover the inglorious existence of a prophet. The first thing he had learned very quickly wasthat his life wasn't about him anymore. It wasn't even really a life at all. Lives had dreams and hopes, and Kevin's life had dried up as soon as his existence as a prophet came to fruition: all dreams of college disappearing forever when the demon Crowley took him prisoner. All hopes for the future vanishing indefinitely when he escaped and learned there was to be nothing more to his life than running for the rest of it.

For one who had been chosen for a higher purpose, thus far it had been rather lonely and purposeless.

So why did prophets exist?

The Winchesters would spin an inspiring tale about how being a prophet meant to be a part of the great sacrifice, a martyr and hero in the fight between good and evil. Castiel might be a bit more blunt and inform him he was placed on the Earth to interpret God's word for the Winchesters, around whom the universe seemed to revolve. To Kevin, all it had ever been was an extra helping of divinely related superpowers that everyone desired access too, and some would go to cruel lengths to acquire.

It had cost him his mother, his future, and quite possibly his sanity. He was starting to suspect it might cost him his life before the end.

But neither the Winchesters, nor the angels, nor even the prophet himself understood the true nature of prophets. After all, there were very few who did. For to understand the reason for prophets was to understand the mind of the one who sent them. A mindset in which the idea of a cost too high did not exist for the return that was to be infinite.

The truth about prophets was that they were sent for one purpose and one purpose alone…

To reach out to those lost in the dark.