They pulled up to the empty field on Main Street, unchanged though perhaps the moonlight looked a little more angular to Dean. To Sam however...
Dean's eyes slid over to him. "What? There's nothing there."
In the previously vacant lot stood a church, the stone columns and carvings familiar. It seemed to vibrate like a tuning fork, setting up an answering hum in Sam's bones.
"Dean, that's the church!" Sam said, turning his face to his brother, looking more normal now that he had another piece of the puzzle. "The one from the Lovecraft drawing!"
Dean looked again, but was prodded out of the car by one of the girls. "I don't see any church."
"You cannot thee becauth you don't know the wordth!" she lisped, with a pronounced Cthuvian accent, "Our wordth are your thingth, your buildingth, your world!"
Dean turned to Sam. "So how come you can see it?"
Sam stared at him for a few seconds. "Because I know the words, Dean," he said simply, the deep tug still in his voice. But then he circled the station wagon, shooting a brief, hungry look at the panting fish-men from the sides of his eyes, and stood next to Dean.
When Sam looked at Dean, the tiny pinpricks of his pupils seemed to vibrate. "Do you remember in the desert, when we said the words? Do you remember any of them?"
"No, no I don't, and I don't get any of this...thingness of words business," said Dean, imagining the word 'church' falling out of his mouth in steel ten-inch letters and landing heavily in the grass. He took Sam's hand, cold power humming through him. "Hey man, you don't look good, are you still with me?"
Sam's shoulders fell an inch as he breathed out, relieved by Dean's touch though he hadn't known he'd needed it. "Yeah, I'm still with you,' he said, the words truer as he said them. The power of words was still in him, whether they were the arcane ones he spoke to destroy, or the plain English he used to talk to his brother.
He squeezed down on Dean's warm hand. Feeling a muted arc of electricity pass between Dean's palm and his own, he had an intuition. He pointed. "Look now. See anything?"
Dean's eyes flared. "How...?"
He put his hand on the translucent fence, a lumbering house of seven gables overgrown with ivy now superimposed against the empty field.
"I don't like this," said Dean, mouth right against Sam's ear while the children drew starfish people on the sidewalk with chalk, "Why toss fifty-foot soldiers at us and then roll out the welcoming committee to bring us here alive?"
In the adrenaline rush of the fight, Sam hadn't yet fully considered this. He stared up at the church, aware of the ichor and blood on his clothing, thinking of all the bodies strung out in their dust.
The first thought that came to him was a dark one, and he shook it off. You were supposed to die in those attacks. She only wanted me.
But then he guessed, "It was a test. She wants me, she wants us, for something, but not if we can't handle ourselves." There was more to it, as well; Sam had a feeling she wanted Sam primed for something, all juiced-up and ready to go. Which he was. But he refrained from saying this to Dean, wanting to protect Dean from that thought. Wanting to protect Dean from the knowledge that if Sam wanted to right now, be could wipe the whole city off the map with a single word. "We handled ourselves. Let's go find out what she wants."
The door opened on a sparsely furnished hall with heavy beams and candles burning in the high ceiling, long wooden table flanked by two rows of straight-back chairs. Children in oversized suits and dresses sat at attention, the bottom halves of their bodies masked in shadow. No stained glass, no altar, no iconography of any kind signifying its purpose, except for the woman standing at the far end of the table with an open book in her hand. Dean shivered in a cold sweat.
"Who are you?" he asked, struck by her alien beauty, her porcelain skin and hair spilling over her shoulders like black foam. It would have been easier if she'd been ugly.
She said nothing. Her mouth hung open, frozen as a mannequin, the only sound she made like a circling wasp far back in her throat. Dean snapped his fingers in front of the children's faces, nothing.
Swallowing his fear, Dean walked up to her, the buzzing growing louder.
"Lady?"
Something crawled out of her mouth, a black-winged fly as big as his thumb with long feelers and a pink pinched face at the end. Lovecraft's face.
It leapt onto Dean's cheek. "Behold, the prophecy is made flesh!" it buzzed, "One soul with two names shall lay the salt-bourne low with word and fire, and the Dreamer shall claim his crown!"
Dean slapped it away, staring at Sam. "What the hell...what is he talking about?"
The tidal pull was strong here, dark magic ebbing and flowing in Sam's veins, and it made it hard to concentrate but for Dean's warm hand gripping his. "One soul," he said meaningfully, squeezing Dean's fingers gently and trying to keep his gaze away from the priestess's face. "But who's the Dreamer supposed to be?"
He looked around, studied the weather-worn interior of the church, the open, glass-less windows. Outside the landscape was all gray sand and sky, as far removed from wet New England as you could imagine.
"Take a look at the walls," he said, and he dragged Dean along with him to study foot-tall words etched on the flat surfaces. The Lovecraft bug followed, perching on Sam's shoulder. Familiar words and phrases leapt out at him, things he'd read in crumbling journals in the Bunker and in motel rooms on the way here. "Look familiar? It's HPL."
It might have been the flickering candles, the way the walls bulged like baby octopuses dragging themselves under the wallpaper. "I can't read it," said Dean, positively clinging to Sam's arm now, "What's it say?"
Sam unshouldered his duffel bag and pointed to a passage above eye-level. "There. One soul with two names; that's what the bug said."
He scanned the walls, looking for something more concrete. The letters seemed to tremble as he read them, slipping back and forth from English to angular Cthonic script. "In the destruction of the Dreamer will be borne the Dreamer again." Sam's body trembled at this, the dual words for Dreamer setting up a buzzing feedback in his head.
It was coming together all too clearly, and yet Sam struggled to fight it. He twined his fingers around Dean's, feeling the metal bite of the ring. He touched the wall, tracing letters, and a jolt sizzled through him, power pulsing thick and slimy enough to make him nauseous and effervescent with it at the same time. "The Dreamer and His Consort are destined by the stars of many universes to sleep beneath the seas, shaping the world with their minds until the time comes to rise again and reign."
The buzzing in the room grew louder, more organized, as the children joined in tritone harmony until a much higher fourth tone met in the center on the dog-whistle edge of perception. The woman had not budged yet long umbilical shadows stretched from her to the children, their faces losing definition until one girl collapsed, the front of her head as featureless as bread dough. Whereas Sam...
Dean looked down. The front of the church had been muddy, yet he saw only one set of tracks. Sam stared mesmerized at the walls, his feet hovering an inch above the floor, the dead girl's face pressing from under the skin on the back of his neck in a silent scream.
"Oh you bitch..." Dean hissed, releasing Sam to cross the room and land a punch in the priestess's face that should have loosened her back teeth. If the children hadn't stopped him first.
Their little fingers scrabbled at his clothes, thin and short but far too strong. He felt himself being pulled back, his recently-healed shoulder twisting painfully in its socket and his boot being wrenched from his foot.
"NO," Sam said, voice booming in the church, dust shaking down from the rafters. Struggling, Dean turned his head to see Sam's eyes blazing cold, power visibly sizzling off him like heat off a July sidewalk.
"Stay still, Dean," Sam said, voice echoing off the walls. "I don't want to hurt them."
Sam swiped a hand down the back of his neck and then made delicate gestures with his fingers, neat little puppeteer flicks that plucked the children that Dean couldn't even see any more off of him, one by one. Sam's intense gaze was leveled at the priestess, whose small, sharp teeth were bared in a grin right back at Sam.
At this, the children all lined against the wall with their backs facing out. The woman's book fell with a bang, as loudly as a door being shut. "Bless-ed, bless-ed, bless-ed art thou. Behold I have a gift," said the children in unison, a piece of chalk in the woman's outstretched hand, "I have your true names."
She drew a word on the table. Her eyes glowed and the prophecy melted from the walls and streamed toward Sam, crowding his skin until he became a living book, but only the woman's chalk word hung in the air before Dean, and he couldn't even read it.
"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.