Godhood: for Dummies - Chapter 31

OK. Holy shit these past few months have been crazy for me. Between work, multiple weddings, getting sick a couple times, a D&D campaign that I'm DMing, and date that I might be agonizing over a little bit.... Well, I've been a bit preoccupied. Sorry for the massive delay, but this chapter's a bit longer than usual.

Please give me your thoughts for edits. I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the Supernatural fandom/plot points. If something reads wrong on that front, I'll want to fix it.

__________

“That’s supposed to mean something, right?” Dean asked with a note of sarcasm. “Guess it’s got ‘Dark’ in the name, so probably not great.”

Nathan nodded, not finding much humor in the moment. “The most insidious book in existence. All the knowledge you could ever want or need, but wrapped up in so much cartoonishly evil bullshit that will twist anyone who reads it into a pretzel.”

“So…” Dean blinked. “Useful bullshit, or burn it with fire from ten feet away bullshit?” 

“Definitely the latter,” Nathan said, and looked around at the sigils. “You getting anything from this, Alice? I’ve never seen some of these.” 

Her hologram didn’t even bother to appear, but her voice rang out all the same. “Same on my end. Half of this makes sense, but the other half is basically gibberish.”

Nathan felt the beads of his bracelet start to heat up as Alice used more and more of her processing power. So she was either trying to decode it by trial and error, or getting stuck in a loop. It took a lot for vibranium to heat up, but the beads weren’t made of only that. His eyes went back to the Darkhold. 

Sam was right. It wasn’t glowing. Why wasn’t it glowing? Doesn’t this thing normally glow when doing… anything at all?

Dean nudged one of the skulls with his foot, then grimaced when some of the blood rubbed off on his boot. “Gross,” he mumbled, and tried to wipe it off - unsuccessfully - on the floor.

“I also recognize some of these, but… The ritual’s not active,” Sam said while kneeling down to study a section of sigils. “There’s no chanting, no demons. Nothing.”

“So they just cut the main act from the show?” Dean hedged. “I was promised a meeting with the devil. Feeling a bit blue-balled, here.”

“Anyone else getting ‘trap’ vibes?” Nathan wondered aloud.

Sam shrugged, still looking over the various glyphs. “Maybe it’s already complete? There are a lot of demons outside.”

“Then what’s with all of the currently glowing runes all around the city?” 

“Might be a different ritual?” Sam answered his brother. “This one has been here for a while. Whatever it did, it’s over.”

That seemed unlikely, as the active ritual across the city was using this building as the centerpoint. Though even to his senses, the only things that were doing anything were the candles.

Nathan moved a bit closer to one of them and studied it. 

There were thirteen of them arrayed out - seemingly - randomly throughout the room. Some were closer to others. Clustered in a strange, haphazard way, and a few that stood alone. Two were thick and placed directly on the floor. Three were together on a candelabra. Six of them were different flavors of Yankee Candles, and the last was a fucking fake electric candle that was on it’s side without a holder.

There was no pattern that he could see at all - save for the fact that they were all glowing with a sanguine red flame. Though even that was strange. 

The little flickering flames didn’t illuminate anything. The shadows around them weren’t undulating like he would have expected. The room was dark. The lights were off. The only reason they could see was because the windows in the raised, middle section of the ceiling weren’t darkened by whatever magic affected the floor-level windows. 

“How do you figure?” Dean asked his brother, hardly looking up from his bloody boot. His frown grew by the second as he tried to shake off the glob of viscous liquid. 

Sam stood and turned to the Darkhold with a tilted head. “The blood is dry. This was set up a while ago.” 

Dean scoffed. “Tell that to Jimmy, here.” He flicked a thumb at the skull that was still dripping, and shook his boot again with an exaggerated motion.

“So this was set up before the shields broke?” Nathan asked the room, moving his eyes to the dead body against the wall. “But that’s a good point. The skulls are new, at least.

“Shields?” Sam asked blankly.

Nathan nodded. “Planetary magical shields that prevent this sort of crap.”

“You guys have all the fun toys,” the more mouthy brother sighed. “Why doesn’t our earth have shields? I want shields.” 

“You don’t want the things they protect against,” Nathan moved to study one of the skulls. “Alice, you have anything yet?”

“Sam’s right,” his holographic daughter started slowly. “Most of this is old. At least three days. Though there are a few freshly drawn sigils.” Her little arm pointed to a small glob of blood that sat next to the skull he was looking at. 

Nathan leaned closer. He had seen the glob, but he thought it was just a bit of splatter from when everything was placed. On a closer look, though, it was shaped purposefully. Like a small punctuation mark. The area around it was wiped clean.

Everything here was deliberate. Carefully, and precisely placed despite the hodgepodge view of it. 

“My best guess,” she continued, “is that there are two rituals here.”

Sam hummed. “One that was activated days ago, and one that’s been set up, but not triggered.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Dean asked, moving to pick up a candle. “Means we can just bulldoze the whole thing and it won’t go.” 

“Stop!” Nathan and Sam both yelled, freezing Dean just before he grabbed the Ocean Air flavored candle. 

Dean blinked, and looked back at the two, who shared a glance. 

“What?” he asked impatiently.

Sam shrugged. “Don’t touch the only thing that’s being freaky.”

Nathan spat out a laugh, and nodded.

Dean just narrowed his eyes at his brother. “So the blood and guts aren’t freaky? We need to work on your definitions, Sammy.”

The candles around the room flared, forcing Dean to retract his hand. But then they flickered back down to their previous level soon after - if with a slightly darker hue.

“They’re batteries,” Alice spoke up suddenly, coming to a realization, and quickly turned to Nathan. “The candles are the only thing that’s linked to the first ritual. They’re collecting energy for the second!” 

Souls. Nathan realized instantly. Mephistopheles deals primarily in souls. That’s why they found piles of corpses around the city. The demons weren’t just the first wave of the invasion, they were the workforce for setting the stage of the main act. 

They were collecting fuel for the summoning of a Prince of Hell. 

“Very good.”

Power erupted from the space of the room. From every angle, as the voice rang out. It was the suddenness of it that caught Nathan flatfooted. That made him panic slightly. The sheer, primal malevolence jolted him into an action he might have used to dodge just yesterday.

But today, after coming so close to losing Alice just an hour or so before? 

He used the time to drop her bracelet into a small portal, getting her out of there as quickly as possible. 

He suffered for it immediately. Thick chains made of black, infernal metal slinked around his form. They came from the ground, the pillars around the room, and the empty air - all holding taught from some unseen origin. Phasing through rock, concrete, and the void like they meant nothing.

They hung loosely around his form, but Nathan had never felt so restricted. His divine soul, spread thin through the world around him, was compressed back into his form. External energies were suddenly blocked from his sight, and even his nigh-infinite pool of Celestial Chi was being drained at an alarming rate. 

“And you didn’t even try to read the Darkhold,” the voice from earlier said, though this time with direction. “It’s honestly impressive.”

It was coming from behind him. From where the dead body- They didn’t examine the singular dead body in the room. 

Why? Besides the Darkhold and the candles, the body was the most interesting thing in the room. It might have told them the most about what they needed to know without risking the book. Had they assumed it was just another body to fuel the ritual? There was only one, instead of a pile - like the ones they found around the city. This was the center of the ritual, so if that was the case wouldn’t there have been more? 

Was it a legitimate failure on his part? Did he just not notice the strangeness of it? Or did something block him from realizing it? From paying any attention to it at all?

What could do that? What could bypass his various magical and divine senses, while it sat right under his nose? 

“You know, Quill, I really have to thank you,” the voice began, echoed by a quiet rustling of movement. Like leaves in autumn, slowly ruffling the grass as they fell. 

Nathan tried turning his head, but even if the chains were loose, he found himself unable to move. Both Dean and Sam in front of him had drawn their guns, pointing them at something behind him. Aimed up at chest level, so Nathan could only assume the dead body had gotten up.

“You opened the door wide for me,” the voice continued in a drawl. “I’ve been making due with cracks for so long that I forgot how… easy it could be. How many obstacles I’ve had to contend with-”

Dean pulled the trigger on his shotgun, and Nathan heard a thump of something falling behind him. 

Then he pumped it, and fired again. And again. And again. 

“Why do the bad guys always talk so much?” he asked, seemingly to himself.

Nathan wouldn’t lie that he wanted to laugh, but the power in the room wasn’t disrupted. The chains were just as restrictive, the candles were burning brighter and brighter by the moment, and the Darkhold was starting to glow.

“The door’s not open fully yet,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. The brother’s guns wouldn’t do anything to a fully formed Mephisto. And there was no way that could be anyone else. 

He turned his eyes to Sam. “He still needs an avatar. We need to stop the ritual, and I think you’re our best bet.”

“Me?” Sam blinked at him.

Nathan tried to nod, but his neck didn’t obey him. “Yeah. Mephy deals in souls. The book over there corrupts souls. You don’t have one. Can’t twist something that’s not there.”

“So now you want us to read the book?” Dean asked, face twisted in disbelief.

“Not us,” Nathan denied. “Just Sam.” 

“That seems like a really dumb idea.”

“I mean, it sounds reasonable enough,” Sam shrugged and shuffled towards the book, dodging the sigils and bones that littered the floor.

“Don’t just do it, Sammy,” Dean complained. “We gotta think about this kind of thing.”

“You have a better option?” Nathan directed at Dean. “These chains are draining me and fueling the ritual. We have to act quickly.” That was true as far as Nathan could tell. The drain itself wasn’t affecting him all that much - considering just how much Chi he had, but the energy had to be going somewhere, and the candles’ flames were getting brighter. 

Nathan quickly tried pulling at the restraints, but his strength meant nothing to them. His Celestial energy was locked away tightly. His divinity was shackled. The Eldritch energies of the universe bubbled just outside of his reach. But there had to be something, right? Some flaw he could exploit? 

It was clear these chains had been set up beforehand. They didn’t just come out of nowhere, despite what it looked like. They were a trap, and from what Mephisto said through the mouth of that dead body, they were meant for him specifically. 

The fucker knew he was coming.

“What are those, by the way?” Dean asked, gesturing to the chains. “They don’t look that tight, just wiggle out.” 

“Not a clue,” Nathan would have shrugged if he could. “Definitely infernal, and they’re locking me down tight. Not the first set of divine chains that I’ve heard of that can trap a god.” 

“God?” Dean squinted at him. 

“It’s a new thing. I’m figuring it out.” 

“Okay, so it looks like the hologram girl was right,” Sam interjected. “This is a two part ritual.” 

“Sammy, what the fuck?! Don’t read that!” 

The logic was sound, at least in Nathan’s mind. Everything he had ever heard of the Darkhold told him that it drove people to madness. To the greed of endless knowledge, and the disregard of everything around them in that pursuit. 

To a being without a soul. Without that greed, or any particular mortal sin… It should have worked. Sam should have been their ace in the hole for a problem like this. Hell, even Thanos’ snap wouldn’t have affected Sam - at least in theory. The Soul Stone was likely  a major component of the targeting mechanism, so without one he would have been invisible to the act. 

It was the primary reason Nathan didn’t just send the brothers back to their dimension as soon as he met them. 

Alice, if he hadn’t panicked and sent her away, might have stopped him. She was the more well-read of the two of them. 

Nathan had really gotten lazy since she joined him. 

“According to this, everything hinges around the ribcage under the book.” He tilted his head and peered at the bones that held up the Darkhold. “To activate it fully, we just need to smash this skull right here,” he waved at a skull by his feet that still had an eye in the socket. 

“Wait, what?” Dean frowned. “The whole point was to not activate it.”

Sam paused, then turned to his brother, letting them both see the look on his face. “What do you mean? Activating it is the whole point.” 

He was grinning wide. Showing every tooth. His voice was overlaid with another. Deeper, raspier, and carrying a reverberating echo that it shouldn’t have. And then there were his eyes. The whites were now black as the void, they were bleeding, and his irises were tinged with a flickering, mischievous fire.

Nathan might have miscalculated.

__________

It took Alice a moment to realize her setting had changed. She was still running a diagnostic on the sigils, trying to find the cornerstone of the ritual, and was basically going in circles. Demonic magic was, in general, a mess. There was very little rhyme or reason to whatever was involved in it. 

It was like the difference between logic and emotion. Both were fundamental reasons for action. They governed life equally, and between the two, moved everything worth moving in the universe.

The magic she studied with Nathan worked like math. Full of logic and specific steps that led to specific outcomes. On the flip side, demonic magic was like philosophy. Full of complex emotions that all fought for control at any given moment, and muddled through an ever-changing labyrinth of steps for an unsure outcome.

It was variable by nature, and Alice was still relatively new to having emotions. Her understanding of a fundamental aspect of life came slowly as a result. 

Then she tried to run another scan, and instead of a map of sigils, she got the confused face of a billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. 

“Dangit, dad,” she mumbled aloud.

__________

Nathan idly pondered where he went wrong, still wrapped in the infernal chains, and watching as Sam’s fist came down on the skull. Bone fragments skittered across the floor from the force of it, and a moment later, the room lit up.

Every flame in the room shot up, from the steady flicker of the candles, to beams of sanguine fire that bathed the roof of the building in a rolling blaze. 

Obviously - at least in hindsight - Mephisto needed a new avatar at that moment, since the last had been struck by multiple devil-trap, divinely infused slugs, and was down for the count. 

But the point of this whole thing was to let Mephisto through without the need of an Avatar, right? No, no. Even a ritual of this size didn’t offer the power needed for a full summoning. Not with the Sanctum shields still active - sure they had been cracked with recent events, but they were healing over quickly enough.

So this was just the second or third step in a multi-stage plan of consecutive bullshit. 

“Sammy, you still in there?” Dean asked slowly. His instincts were obviously telling him to point his gun at the possessed man in front of him, but his hands were twitching. Like he was actively fighting the urge.

The possessed Sam stood slowly from where he had smashed the skull. Bathed in the light from the pillars of fire. “Poor little Sam Winchester was never even in here, Dean.” 

That made Nathan’s eye twitch.

Mephisto knew who the brothers were. He had planned for this whole thing, and Nathan wasn’t sure how that was possible. Mephisto wasn’t known for having a view of the future, so was this some evil conspiracy, or was the devil pulling from some unknown source? Did he or his cult use something from the Darkhold for it? 

Speaking of… Where were the cult members that set this whole thing up? The only things that were causing problems in the city were the demons, and they couldn’t have put this together by themselves. So did they all ritualistically sacrifice themselves to start the initial shindig, or was something else going on?

“I really must thank you all. It’s so rare that a plan comes together this smoothly.” Sam’s mouth moved, and Mephisto’s words came out. “Your brother really is my perfect host. Such a… treasure.”

Dean tensed. “You better get your slimy ass out of him, if you know what’s good for you.”

Sam’s face twisted in a show of genuine mirth. Something that seemed so foreign on the previously blank-faced man. “Oh I do know what’s good for me, Dean,” he laughed. “And we are just getting started.”

The fire in his eyes escaped his irises, washing over his brow in an undulating wave. Even still, Nathan could tell his eyes were on Dean. Grin just as wide as before.

Everything was slowly coming together in Nathan’s mind. But there were still some glaring holes. 

Mephisto needed an avatar. A catalyst that he could be summoned into. But a dead body, or normal possession wouldn’t work for some reason. Likely that he needed something of a higher quality, and anyone he tried to possess of that quality would have a soul that would fight him on every step. 

Sam neatly sidestepped that problem, having a body, but lacking a soul. And for a mortal, he was undoubtedly of a higher existential quality. So the devil either brought the brothers here, or was taking advantage of something he knew would happen. If it was the former, how in the fuck did he manage to steal Chuck’s favorite toys from that universe? If it was the latter, there was still the question of how he looked into the future, and an open question on how the brothers escaped from Chuck’s playpen.  

But if Mephisto was the one that brought them here, why bring Dean as well? 

Almost in answer - to both the devil’s verbal lob, and Nathan’s internal question - the rumble of an engine reverberated through the room. Even the rush of air, and the sound of the pillars of fire didn’t drown it out as it approached. 

Nathan had to get out of these chains. Slowly but surely, he was starting to really feel the drain. The longer he stayed locked down, the more he was adding fuel to the ritual. 

But what could he do? He couldn’t even feel the Power Stone that hung from his neck. He knew it was still there, but couldn’t access it. His abilities were locked. Nathan strained his muscles, any control over his internal energy reserves, everything he had. But it was like there was a bubble around it all. Blocking his mind from the connection. 

He needed something else, something free from his own form to affect the chains.

The sound of the engine came to a stop outside the building and idled for a moment before cutting off. 

Sam’s mouth grinned wider. “Dean Winchester, and Quill, I would like to introduce you to Johnny Blaze.”

The door was kicked in with a sort of detached violence, as the man walked in. There was a certain swagger in his step and an annoyed tilt in his brow - barely hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses. 

The man paused once he was through the door, removed his shades slowly, and looked around. “Well this is a mess.”