Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Castiel worked the tips of his fingers into the tiny crevice in the sheer rock face.  He felt he had a secure hold, so he pulled himself up with the slim steel cord of his biceps.  The grip on his shoes caught the orangey-rock and gave him some reprieve as he rested his left arm.  He reached up to the small sliver of rock that would just accommodate his fingertips and pulled himself closer to the summit.

Without warning the rock crumbled under his left fingers.  His feet slid against the wall like it was made of ice rather than rock.  He dangled from the precarious hold of his right hand.  Then that just disappeared.  His heart lurched as he fell.  His body snapped violently when he reached the end of the rope tied to the harness around his waist and pelvis.  It was very odd for two reasons.  One, it didn’t hurt and it should have hurt a lot.  Two, he had been free climbing and not wearing a harness at all.

Metal scraped on rock.  He looked up and saw the nut holding the rope to the rock wall slipping loose.  He looked down.  The rock face seemed to go on forever and disappeared into a thick fog.  The nut slipped again and his body dropped another few inches.  He turned and desperately sought out anything that he could use as a hold.  Any crack, any bump, but the rock was unnaturally solid and smooth.  It was grey now rather than orange.  The nut slipped out of the wall and Castiel felt weightless as he began to plummet down.

He couldn’t see the ground, but he knew it was approaching.  Fast.  He knew he only had a few seconds.  He couldn’t scream; he was in sheer disbelief that this was happening.  The unseen ground rushed toward him in his mind’s eye.  Three, two, one…

Castiel jerked awake and put a hand to his chest, trying to hold his heart down so it wouldn’t pound out of his ribcage.  He breathed hard and felt disoriented as he looked around the room.  There was his closet with clothes hanging on the door and laid across what clothes did manage to get on a hanger.  There were the pictures of his trips to various mountains and rock formations around the world with friends and fellow survivalists.  There was the stray cat that occasionally took advantage of the open window in warm weather and slept on his bed.  It had one eye open and was watching him carefully.  It looked like it wanted to go back to sleep, but that it had to make sure the weird human wasn’t going to keep freaking out.

Seeing the familiar parts of his room helped him shake off the dream—and recognize that it had been a dream.  He flopped back onto his pillows and moved the hand on his chest to cover his eyes.  He swallowed thickly as the fear he’d felt in the dream faded to a lingering echo.  It was a very bizarre dream.  He’d been rock climbing since he was old enough to try out the kiddie wall at the L.L. Bean store in the mall and he’d never had that kind of dream before.  He’d climbed rock faces in every state in America.  He’d scaled mountains on six continents.  He’d used harnesses and done a lot of free climbing and he’d even had a couple of scary moments involving failing equipment and unstable surfaces.  However, he’d never had a dream like that before.  He’d never dreamed that he’d fallen.  Not even after Balthazar’s death.

Maybe it was because he’d just turned thirty and was feeling his own mortality now.  He chuckled to himself.  Thirty years old and life was all joint replacements and retirement homes from here on out.  He turned his head enough to look at the cat.  He was still curled up comfortably on the duvet that had gotten wadded up at the end of the bed during the night, but both eyes were open and watching him calmly.

“You want some tuna?”

His ear flicked in Castiel’s direction.

“Tuna?”

The cat got up quickly, but then immediately went into a stretch and licked his paw to show that he wasn’t actually excited about anything.  Castiel smiled affectionately at him, but didn’t attempt to pet him.  That would probably send him straight out the window and make him disappear for a few weeks.  He didn’t seem to mind being petted every now and then, but it had to be his idea.

Castiel swung his legs out of bed and stood up with a jaw cracking yawn and full body stretch.  He scratched his butt as he made his way toward the bathroom.  The feeling of his blunt nails on his skin made him realize he was naked.  He looked down.  Yup.  Definitely naked, which was weird because he only slept naked after he’d…

The toilet flushed in the bathroom.  Castiel froze, caught like a deer in headlights in between his closet and bed.  He didn’t know which to go to for cover, so he stood there like a moron as a young man exited his bathroom—a naked young man—and began sorting through articles of clothing on the floor.

Castiel was appalled.  Not by the presence of someone he couldn’t remember going home with or the fact that he was naked, but the fact that he was so young .  Castiel didn’t go for twinks.  He liked his men to be men .  This was all Gabriel’s fault.  He’d made him feel insecure about turning thirty and then gotten him drunk on Baileys and Kahlúa.  He didn’t even care about turning thirty.  Professional rock climbers and survivalists continued their activities well into their fifties with relatively minor adjustments made to training regimens and activities.  So why on earth had he gotten drunk on dessert liquor and banged a kid barely out of high school?

“Oh, hey,” the kid said after poking his head through the top of his formfitting retro video game T-shirt (that he probably bought at Hot Topic).  His head was shaved so that the barest hint of dark hair demarked the line with his scalp.  His eyes were incredibly dark even though his mocha skin tone suggested a mixed-race heritage.  He smiled and his teeth were perfectly white and straight.

“Hey,” Cas replied, still feeling awkward for standing in the middle of the room with the stark contrast of his farmer’s tan prominently visible in the sun from the eastern facing window.

“So…” the kid dragged out as he checked his pants pockets for his wallet and keys.  “I have a test on Friday and a paper due on Tuesday, so I need to get back to my dorm if that’s okay with you.”

“Oh.  Um.  Yeah, yeah…go ahead.”

Castiel thanked the Universe that the kid didn’t want breakfast or a post-coitus conversation.  Or worse, an exchange of contact info.

“Cool,” the kid said, stuffing his feet into bizarrely shiny patent leather combat boots.  “Last night was fun.  We should do it again some time.”

Castiel wasn’t entirely convinced the kid meant either statement seeing as he didn’t offer nor ask for a phone number or email address.

“Uh…yeah…” Castiel replied vaguely.

Fully dressed, the kid moved to leave the bedroom, but then he paused by Cas’ side.  He grinned and wrapped his hand around Castiel’s upper arm.

“Do it again.”

Castiel was confused for a moment, and then he remembered the one “move” he possessed.  He tightened and flexed the muscles in his arm without actually bending it.  The kid let out a funny, squealing giggle.

“That is so cool.  It’s like…a human arm, and then it’s like…a steel cable Terminator arm or some shit.  That’s crazy.  You just look like a normal dude but I feel like you’re stronger than any of those juiceheads that try to get little gay boys up on their shriveled dicks.”

Castiel smiled wistfully.  He remembered the days when the juiceheads at Alejandro’s tried to get him up on their shriveled dicks.  Now they ignored him in favor of kids like the one standing in his bedroom.

“Yeah…well, good luck with your paper,” Castiel said.

“Thanks.”

The kid walked out of the bedroom and then the front door opened and closed.  Castiel was alone and there were zero expectations from his hookup.  Maybe college kids were the way to go after all.  Although, the encounter must not have been that exciting if he couldn’t even remember it.  He continued on his trek to the bathroom and tried to remember last night as most of it exited his body in a very long stream.  He remembered the Baileys.  He remembered Gabriel and Raph and Anna and Charlie.  He remembered they’d managed to drag Gadreel along—and that he’d done highly inappropriate things with his fourth cousin thrice removed or whatever the hell they were.  Why had he gone home with the twink and not Gadreel?  It wouldn’t have been the first time they hooked up.  Not even the first time since they’d discovered that their “weird family names” weren’t a coincidental shared annoyance but passed down from a common ancestor seven generations back.  What happened after the Baileys?

Castiel washed his hands and shuffled back into the bedroom.  The cat was gone.  He walked into the kitchen, but he wasn’t waiting on the counter by the cabinet that housed the tuna.  He’d probably left when the kid had come out, which meant he’d probably be gone for a while.  He didn’t like strangers.  Castiel set a cup of coffee to brew in the single serve machine and walked back into his bedroom to put on a pair of clean underwear.  Then he took his steaming coffee to his desk and turned on his laptop.

The coffee helped to wake him up, but he still didn’t remember what had happened after the cement mixer shots.  He navigated to his email account and found five new messages.  The first was from Gabriel time stamped only a couple of hours ago.  He opened it and found pictures of himself doing shots of tequila with Gadreel and the kid who had just left his apartment.  That explained it.  Tequila was not his friend.  Gabriel’s message was short and obnoxious, much like the man himself.

“Twinks and Kissing Cousins!  Must have been a good night.  ;)”

Castiel made a face.  He never should have told Gabriel about “the interesting thing he’d found on ancestry.com.”  He and Gadreel weren’t really cousins.  No more so than anyone was cousins with any number of dozens of strangers they were technically related to in some way through long dead generations.  Guy didn’t know when to let go of a bad joke.

The next email was a reply to Anna’s email asking where the bar was and what time everyone was meeting.  Unsurprisingly the email after that was the one from Anna asking for the information.  Around seven o’clock his agent had sent him an email asking if he’d be interested in doing a piece for National Geographic for the centennial of the National Parks Service.  Castiel made a face.  He wasn’t really sure that was in his wheelhouse.  He wasn’t much of a writer—he just went to extreme locations, wrote down his experiences, and then someone else turned it into pretty prose.  The National Parks weren’t exactly chock full of extreme locations.  He flagged it to remember to come back to it later.  If he needed the extra income it wouldn’t be a terrible assignment.  It wasn’t exactly like professional survivalist was a highly in demand service.

The last email (or technically the first he supposed) had come in late yesterday afternoon.  He’d probably already left the Climb Zone where he moonlighted as a rock climbing instructor by then.  He still didn’t have a new cell phone after losing his last one on a climb in Arizona.  He didn’t really miss it.

Castiel didn’t recognize the name—Sam Winchester—but the subject line didn’t say anything about penis enlargement so he clicked on it.  He leaned his elbow on the desk and his face on his hand.  His eyebrow continued to rise in interest as he read the message.

Mr. Castiel Novak,

My name is Sam Winchester.  You may have heard of my brother, Dean Winchester.  He’s an archaeologist and was in the news a few months ago for making waves in Turkey surrounding his theories on the ruins of Ephesus.  For the most part Dean researches the legends behind the history, trying to find the truth in the fantastic.  He’s spent most of his life trying to determine whether or not there is any legitimacy to the stories of the Godland.  For the past several years, he’s convinced himself there is.  He tried to mount an expedition to follow the clues he thinks he’s uncovered, but was unable to convince anyone to accompany him.  He took on the task himself and I lost contact with him shortly after he arrived in the South American Amazon.  I know that area is still some of the most untamed country in the world, and I wanted to solicit your expertise as a survivalist to go looking for him.

There are a lot of details I won’t bog you down with in an email, but I’d appreciate it if you would be willing to meet with me in person.  I believe I read your home base is Austin when you’re not traveling.  I live a few hours’ drive from there, so I can meet you when it’s convenient for you.

Thank you for your time,

Sam Winchester

Castiel reread the email.  He was not familiar with Dean Winchester, Rogue Archaeologist.  He did a Google search on the man and found mostly articles criticizing him for following wild leads, believing in children’s stories, and wasting grant money.  The small blurb in the right corner of the Google search results page said he was born in Lawrence, Kansas, was 34 years old, and had graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and had a PhD in archaeology from UC Berkeley.  Pretty fucking impressive.  There was no picture and it said nothing about current employment or residence.

Castiel clicked back over to the email.  So, apparently this Dean fellow went looking for the Godland in the Amazon and got his ass lost or eaten by the cannibalistic pygmies and now his brother wanted Castiel to go and find him.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been sent on a rescue mission.  Usually he was hired by families after state Search and Rescue declared the missing lost and ended their search.  Sometimes he was hired to go while Search and Rescue was still looking—just in the wrong place.  Those were the only times he ever found anyone alive.  If he didn’t get started until after a month since they had gone missing, he could only bring back information and tell Search and Rescue where to find the body.  The families usually had mixed reactions to the confirmation of the deaths of lost love ones; some were grateful for the closure and some resented him for taking away their hope.  Either way, Castiel still got paid.

There was a part of him that felt a little guilty for taking people’s money so that he could traipse through the wilderness risking life and limb—and enjoying the hell out of it—while looking for a missing person.  But, someone had to do it and if someone had to do it, why couldn’t they enjoy it?  At least when he did that he felt like he was accomplishing something whereas the “Wilderness Adventures” he took tourists on bored the crap out of him.  All because Bear Grylls had started taking celebrities on two day excursions on TV, a new trend in tourism had sprung up.  Castiel appreciated that he could actually make a living now doing the thing he loved, but people didn’t realize how much of those two days got edited out for the forty-two minute show.

Most people were ready to give up after four or five hours and bitched and whined about sleeping on the ground with no equipment.  They also didn’t realize that the scenes of the celebrities finding a place to sleep and settling down for the night and getting up for the morning were mostly staged.  The celebrities slept on a cot in a tent more often than not and had gourmet meals provided after pretending to try whatever gross thing Bear had found earlier in the day.  There were no tents or cots or prepared meals on Castiel’s outings.  He had very, very few repeat customers.

Castiel tapped his fingers on his desk for a few moments, debating what to reply to Sam Winchester.  In the end he shrugged and agreed to meet the man.  Even if the brother was a quack of some kind, it didn’t mean he deserved to die in a jungle.  Plus, it wasn’t like he had to go out of his way since Sam had agreed to drive to Austin to meet him.  He gave Sam a list of days and times and told him to pick any of them and meet him at the Copper Star Café on Nueces Street.  The term café was definitely used loosely as the place was a total dive.  It didn’t even have particularly good food, but it was cheap and never crowded

Castiel stretched his arms above his head and contemplated a shower.  It was probably the prudent thing to do after blackout sex with a stranger.  He’d also better carefully check the sheets and floor for used condoms.  He wasn’t sure what would be worse, finding one or not finding one.  He left his computer on and glanced back at the screen as he started to stand up.  What he saw made him plop back down into his seat.  Sam Winchester had already replied.  The man must be squatting on his phone or computer.  Unsurprisingly with his quick response, he had elected for the soonest date and time, which would be tomorrow at ten in the morning.  Cas shot a quick message back verifying his receipt of the meeting time and then headed for the shower.  He’d go used condom hunting later.

He pushed open the partially closed bathroom door and stepped onto the hideous powder blue tile floor.  His foot slipped on something and he went down with a comical yelp and flailing limbs.  It ceased to be funny when his elbow and hip connected with the hard floor.  He groaned miserably and struggled to roll over to see what he had slipped on.  Of course.  He frowned at the used condom.  So much for safety first.

~~~

Castiel slumped in the corner of the diner booth, the broken springs poking him awkwardly in the ass.  He held his laminated menu up beside his head to block the weak sun filtering in through the filthy windows because his Ray-Bans weren’t doing their job.  His head pounded and his sinuses felt stuffed with cotton.  He’d dry swallowed a couple of ibuprofen about five minutes ago.  He just hoped they would kick in before Sam Winchester arrived.

Why had he gone out again last night?  Was he really that insecure about turning thirty?  Was the fact that he was thirty why two nights out in a row had left him nearly incapacitated?  He’d been so drunk— Gabriel had gotten him so drunk—that he’d had the worst case of whisky dick he’d ever had in his life.  He hadn’t woken up alone, but both he and Gadreel had been fully clothed.  And because he had to meet Sam Winchester at the ungodly hour of 10:00am, he’d been too hungover—possibly still too inebriated—to fool around with him before he’d had to get ready to leave.  It was probably just as well.  If he was about to mount a days or even weeks long rescue mission, they didn’t need to be any more involved than they already were—which was to say, friends with benefits.

“Mr. Novak?”

Castiel turned his head and saw hips and a torso.  He tilted his head back and let it thump against the wall for support.  He now saw a man about his age looking at him with a furrowed brow.  Disappointment.  Castiel knew the look.  He was quite familiar with it.

Castiel forced himself to sit up straight and winced when he dropped the menu and was hit with sunlight.  Then he flinched when he pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head.  He pulled for modern medicine to start working its miracles.  He focused on Sam Winchester again.

The man was tall with sleek brown hair that fell to just below his ears.  He wore jeans and a blue plaid shirt.  He wasn’t wearing the outfit in quite an ironic enough way to blend in with the Austin hipsters.  He must be a guy who usually wore jeans and plaid, even in late spring.  That did not bode well for the possibility that his brother was sane.

Castiel started to slide out of the booth, but Sam put up a hand and sat down on the opposite side of the table, placing a thin manila folder on the chipped Formica top.  Castiel wasn’t quite functioning well enough to be insulted by the move, so he just stuck his hand out across the table.

“I’m Castiel Novak.  Nice to meet you.”

“Sam Winchester.  Thank you for meeting with me.”

“Thank you for being willing to come out here.”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry.  Dean’s been missing for three weeks now.  The longer we wait…the more likely it is…”

Sam cut off and pressed his lips together into a thin white line.  Castiel decided to skip the gentle reminder that being missing for more than forty-eight hours greatly decreased a person’s chance of being found.  Especially alive.

“Mr. Winchester—”

“Sam.”

Castiel cleared his throat.  “Sam.  I was under the impression you needed someone who could go into the Amazonian rainforest and retrieve your brother.  If he’s really missing, why haven’t you contacted the authorities?”

“I have.  The police won’t do anything because he’s not missing in the United States.  The FBI won’t do anything because he wasn’t taken forcibly from the country.  The State Department won’t do anything because I…because I can’t tell them what country he’s actually in.”

Castiel quirked an eyebrow.  “Why not?”

“Because I don’t know,” Sam shrugged, his shoulders then slumping lower.  “He just said ‘Amazon.’  I assume that covers more than one country in South America.”

“Yeah…around nine or ten.  And you have no idea what country he was traveling to?”

Sam sighed heavily and placed his hands on the table, fingers laced tight enough to turn his knuckles white.

“He deliberately kept his travel plans a secret.  He didn’t want anyone to follow him and then scoop him on an archaeological find at the last moment.”

“Archaeological find,” Castiel said dryly.  “The Godland.”

Sam shrugged again.  “Yeah.  He was looking for the Godland.  He said he had proof it existed.  A list of directions or something that was on a scroll or something found in some private collector’s possessions after his death.  Dean said that the guy was a known Enochian enthusiast and that the script was from the ruins of Enoch—stolen, he said—and that it was a secret coded message on how to find the Godland.”

Castiel tilted his head.  “Are you talking about the Barringer Poem?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.  Everyone said he was crazy because it wasn’t in Enochian, but he pointed out that it was someone trying to sneak the information out of Enoch.  Most people thought it was a nonsense theory, and Barringer’s family threatened to sue him for accusing their great grandfather of theft and fraud.  He’s lost the respect of everyone in his field over the last few years, and then his claim that he’d found a treasure map to the greatest fairy tale of all time was more than they could tolerate.  Berkeley fired him and all of his research—not related to fairy tales and urban legends—was confiscated.  He doesn’t even own his own publications anymore.”

“Is that legal?”

“Unfortunately, yes.  The school published his papers and books, and they were copyrighted not in his name, but the school’s.”

“That seems like a dumb thing to allow.”

Sam glared at him.  “My brother is brilliant.  Just not about nit-picky legal stuff.  He should have let me look over his contracts—but that’s beside the point now.  He had no money, no standing, no support.  But he had those damn directions and he was convinced that he knew it would take him to the Godland and vindicate him.”

“Okay, so where do I come in in all this?  I can’t go scour the two point five million square miles of Amazonian rainforest for one person.”

“I know.  I think there’s a way to figure out specifically where he went.  He kept a—a journal I guess.  It’s on a tablet and contains all of his notes, all of the evidence he had gathered, and he kept an oral record of the clues he’d deciphered as it related to different parts of the directions.  I can’t make heads or tails of them and I’ve been studying his research day and night.  I think he’s making references to certain geographic features, which you might be more familiar with or can at least recognize what he might be talking about.  I also need you because the authorities won’t go after him.  Isn’t that what you do?  When official channels give up, you step in and go looking for missing persons?”

“Well…”  Castiel spun the laminated menu on the table top.  It made him realize that no one had come over to take their order yet.  This place really was a shithole.  “What I do is go to a place where people last know the missing person was seen—and then I look in places other people won’t or can’t.  Climbing down an ice cave is a bit different from deciphering clues and using geographic information to figure where to even start looking.”

“But you have a degree in anthropology.  You’ve studied cultures and geography before.”

“How do you know that?”

“I told you,” Sam said, smiling humorlessly.  “I’ve been doing research day and night.  When official channels were closed to me, I started looking at unofficial means.  There are a lot of survivalists like you out there, but very few who have the background, education, and skills to actually follow my brother.”

“Well, I guess I’m flattered to be compared to a crackpot—”  Sam opened his mouth to protest, but Castiel cut him off.  “But I think you’re grossly overestimating my skills.  If I were you I would start calling the authorities in those nine or ten countries he could be in and ask if he’s been arrested or if a body matching his description has been found.”

“I’ve started that process,” Sam said, his jaw clenched.  “It’s not easy communicating with them and most are uninterested and/or uncooperative.  Dean isn’t some pasty nerd who got lost.  He’s strong and very capable with excellent survivalist skills of his own.  If he is in trouble, it’s not because he got arrested or got bit by something poisonous and just died.  He’s still alive—he has the skills to stay alive—he just needs help.  He just…”  Sam trailed off and looked down at his still tightly clasped hands.  “Please, Mr. Novak.  All I’m asking is for you to look over his notes and see if you can figure out specifically where he might have gone.  And if you think it’s feasible, go and find him and bring him home.”

Castiel felt a pang of empathy for the young man.  When his older brother had gone missing when he’d been four, he remembered the turmoil and chaos his parents and older siblings had gone through.  He remembered the crying and screaming, and he remembered the angry silence that infused his home for years.  They’d never found Inias.  Castiel had been young enough that the loss of a brother didn’t have a huge impact on him psychologically—but it had broken his family apart which in turn had irrevocably altered his life.  He couldn’t really imagine what losing a brother he’d grown up with would be like.  If Michael were to suddenly disappear—Castiel hoped it would affect him.  He only saw him every other year at Thanksgiving as it was, but surely he would notice if he never saw him again, right?  Sam seemed much closer to his brother than that.

“Okay,” Castiel said.  “I can look over his notes.  If nothing else I can help narrow your search, which may be enough to get the State Department involved.”

Some of the tension bled out of Sam’s body and he looked at Castiel with relieved eyes.  “Thank you.  All I ask is someone just look at the situation.”

“I can do that.  I usually charge two fifty a day, plus supplies, but since looking over some notes won’t—”

“Wait, charge ?” Sam asked, looking a little incredulous.

Castiel gave him an “I’m not buying your surprised expression” look.  “Sam, come on.  You had to have found me somewhere that talked about the services I offer—which would have my fee associated with it.  This is a job for me.  I have to get paid to do it.  I don’t work for a government agency or a company that gives me a salary.  When I go on rescue missions, I have to earn something for my expertise otherwise I can’t afford, you know, food and shelter.”

“N-no, I mean, yes.  I understand.  But you’re not even taking the job yet.”

“Well, I kind of am.  If I’m going to take a day or two—or several—to research your brother’s information, then that’s time I can’t do other work.  What I was going to suggest is that I would take a flat fee of two hundred and fifty dollars to review the notes and deliver my conclusions to you.  No matter how many days it takes.”

“I see.”  Sam sat back against the stained cushion of the booth.  “And what if you’re able to pinpoint where you think he might be?  What if you think you could go and rescue him?  How much would that cost?”

“Well, assuming I knew with precision where he could be located—I would allocate at least two weeks to do it, plus supplies for the trek into the jungle, plus airfare to South America and all costs associated with international travel.  My guess is that it would be around six thousand dollars.  Probably a little more.  Could go as high as ten depending on the country.”

“Ten—”  Sam’s eyes were wide.  “Ten thousand dollars?  I—I can’t afford that.”

Castiel chewed on the inside of his lip as he looked at Sam Winchester.  He’d been in this position before.  A grieving family desperate to find their lost son or sister or aunt or father—and unable to pay.  It became an ethical dilemma.  Could he really put a price on a human life?  No, of course not.  But he could value his own life above another’s, especially a stranger’s, and not feel guilty about it.  There was no way he could perform search and rescues without money; there was no way he could pay his rent or feed himself without money.  To say he lived frugally was a bit of an understatement.  Even though he partied a bit, he almost always did so at gay bars and clubs so that he never had to pay for his own alcohol.  His pretty face had to be good for something.

Sam was looking down at the table, his eyes glistening with forming tears and his jaw ticking with repressed anger as he gnashed his teeth together.  Castiel resisted the urge to feel sorry for him.  He couldn’t get emotionally invested in the people he was sent to rescue or their families.  That was a recipe for disaster.  However, he wasn’t completely heartless, and Sam must have woken up very early to drive all the way to Austin by ten in the morning.

“Let me look at that,” Cas said, indicating the folder Sam had set on the table.

Sam’s eyes flashed up angrily, but that made the tears spill over.  Rather than glare at him or make a snide comment, he slid the folder closer to Castiel to distract him while he wiped his eyes.  Cas took the folder and politely pretended like he didn’t notice Sam’s anguish.  He raised it to wave at the front of the restaurant to get someone’s attention.  A young, pregnant woman finally acknowledged them and walked slowly to their table.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

“Coffee,” Castiel replied.  “And the Morning Explosion.”

“How would you like your eggs?”

“Scrambled.  And uh…I’ll take the apple sauce and the bacon for the sides.”

“Okay.  And for you?” she addressed Sam.

He cleared his throat.  “Nothing for me.”

“At least have some coffee,” Castiel said.

“I’m fine.  Water.  I’ll have some water.”

The waitress glanced back at Castiel, and then at Sam who was looking away and still fighting his flood of disappointing emotions.

“You know, sweetie, when my boyfriend dumped me at a restaurant, I ordered everything on the menu so that the cheap coward would have to pay for it.”

“I’m not,” Sam started, but Castiel interrupted him.

“Hey, how do you know I’m not the victim here?  He could be an abusive asshole for all you know.”

“No, I can tell by his eyes.  He’s a puppy dog.”

Castiel frowned at her back as she waddled slowly toward the kitchen.  He faced Sam again.

“I would never dump someone at the Copper Star.  This place is a dump.”

“You just conduct business here.”

Cas shrugged.  “It’s a safe place to meet strangers.  Half the clientele are usually armed.”

Sam glanced around.  They were literally the only two people in the café other than the staff.

“Well…if half the clientele are armed, I guess that means me.”

Castiel started to smile, but stopped halfway there.  Sam didn’t look like he was joking.  Cas cleared his throat and opened the folder.  There were only a few sheets of paper with a picture clipped to the top.  Cas pulled the picture loose and held it up to examine Dr. Dean Winchester.

If he was in his mid-thirties as his Google search had indicated, he was either a very youthful looking man or the photo was old.  Dean Winchester looked young and eager as he sat on a large beige rock with a desert stretching behind him in sandy ripples.  He wore a white tank top with a faded Metallica logo.  Dark Ray-Bans were pushed on top of his head and his eyes gleamed a unique shade of pale green in the sunlight.  His smile was friendly and inviting.  Hopeful.  He was adorable.  Too adorable considering how insanely hot he was.

“Is this an old picture?” Castiel asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you have a more recent one?”

Sam pulled out his phone and began to scroll through his pictures.  “How did you know it was old?”

“He doesn’t…look like he’s been beaten yet.”

Sam snorted.  “I understand what you mean, but despite the shit he’s been through with the university and the archeological community, he’s still not beaten.”

Sam handed Castiel his phone.  On the screen was a picture of the same man, but he looked a little older and a little wiser.  The older part only made him look more virile and attractive.  The wiser part—Sam was right.  Dean hadn’t been beaten down by his mistreatment or ridicule, but he didn’t look naïve any more.

“He’s hot,” Castiel heard himself say.  He blushed and handed the phone back to Sam.  He really needed to stop drinking.

“Does his attractiveness sway your decision to look for him?” Sam asked sounding a touch bitter.

“Well, it might entice me to give you a discount.”

Sam snorted.  The waitress arrived with water for Sam and coffee for Cas.  She gave him the stink eye as she left.

“Please don’t spit in my food,” he called after her.  “I’m not breaking up with him; I’m helping him find his brother.  That’s why he’s sad.”

“Is that true?” she asked, looking back at Sam.

Castiel looked at Sam, and then gave him a pleading look when he remained silent.

“He hasn’t actually agreed to look for him yet.”

The woman tsked and waddled on.  Castiel narrowed his eyes at Sam.  He set the picture of Dean aside and looked through the other pages as he took a sip of his coffee.  It was both burnt and watery.  Perfect.

The top page was an excerpt from Zachariah Adler’s famous eighteenth century book connecting supposedly fictional stories and poems of a city called Enoch to actual historical events in the Fertile Crescent in what was now Lebanon.  There were handwritten notes in the margins and markings all over the text making it nearly impossible to read, but Castiel had read the book enough times to recognize it from the glimpses he could see through the different colored inks.

The next page contained four handwritten paragraphs.  Two were versions of well-known fairy tales from Western and Eastern Europe.  One was vaguely familiar and came out of the Middle East.  The fourth Castiel had never seen before, but appeared to be of Indian origin.  A few words were underlined in different colored inks in each paragraph.  The next couple of pages were printouts of black and white maps with handwritten markings, but it was the last page that really caught Castiel’s attention.

Enochian was the language of the people of Enoch, a city mentioned in the Godland fable that turned out to be an actual historical civilization.  While digging for fossils just outside Beirut, Lebanon in the 1910’s, an archeological team came across a pillar.  The pillar eventually led to the ruins of the lost city of Enoch thought for centuries to be mythical, much like Troy.  It wasn’t a large city, but it was apparent that the people kept themselves quite isolated from the rest of the world and were vastly more technologically advanced for their age.  No evidence was ever found that indicated the Enochians had ever heard of the Godland or worshiped its deity.  Modern scholars assumed that the city of Enoch was chosen at random to be a part of the Godland fable since it was a mysteriously lost city.  They postulated that it could have just as easily been Atlantis mentioned in the tale.

Of course the fact that the Enochians had never heard of the Godland was primarily conjecture based on the artwork found in the ruins because no one had ever really figured out how to read Enochian.  This fact was the reason why Castiel found the last page of Dean Winchester’s notes so interesting.  He had figured it out.

Castiel stared at the page with the Enochian alphabet written out in neat handwriting.  There was nothing unusual there aside from a few letters being placed in non-traditional order.  However, beneath the line of letters was a little doodad that to most linguists appeared to be placed randomly on the Enochian writing samples that were in existence.  Castiel had spent two years getting his Masters hypothesizing the reason for the symbol and whether or not it had any significance.  He’d come up with jack, but Dean had written beside it: connects concepts.  Below that were two of the best known writing samples—printed in mirror reverse.  Dean had then connected the doodads by drawing a curved line through the words and sentences, following the natural arc of their shapes.  Below that the paragraphs had been reversed again, the line now looking random and out of place.  Beneath the paragraphs, the letters above and below the line had been pulled out and structured into one sentence.  “Greco-Starr method” had been written beside it.

Greco-Starr, a translation key named after the two researchers who had developed it, had been thought to be a major breakthrough in translating the language.  They had made the assumption that a fourth language had meant to be included with the Rosetta Stone, but had been broken off.  They claimed that divots on the bottom of the rock weren’t chips in the stone, but the tops of Enochian letters.  They had carefully matched the divots with the letters they thought matched best, and then used the Rosetta Stone key to extrapolate the rest of the alphabet.  At first, everyone thought they had cracked the code; the reconstructed Enochian version of the passage on the stone not only made perfect sense, but could be recognized as words in existing writing samples.  Unfortunately, the translations of those samples came out as gibberish.  Everyone assumed Greco and Starr had simply forced the facts to fit their theory and abandoned their key.

However, when that key was applied to the select few words Dean had pulled out of the paragraphs, Castiel could read three-fifths of the sentence.  Dean had filled in the rest from some other research he must have done.  Two paragraphs that had been studied for decades by thousands of scholars and never even come close to being translated, now simply read: Zode Loc, goat herder, three bushels of grain.  Castiel almost burst out laughing.  These two paragraphs had been postulated to be pieces of important doctrines or poetry.  As it turned out, it might very well just be a bill of sales.

Finally, underneath his genius discovery, Dean had written, “All extant writing samples of Enochian appear to be in code.  After reversing the letters, finding the pattern that indicates which letters are important, and then reversing the letters again, clear thoughts and sentences emerge.  There are no surviving scrolls or tablets from the Enochians.  Only writing found in religious temples and marketplaces exists, which makes it odd that it would be in code.  But the code wasn’t just to keep outsiders from learning their language, it was to make it difficult if not impossible for Enochians themselves to learn to read or write their own language.  Everyone praises the Enochians for being one of the very few ancient cultures not to have employed slavery, but these fucks imposed a tyrannical rule over their own people—preventing them from learning and gaining the power to rebel by keeping them ignorant.  Maybe that’s why the Godland was moved and their city fell to ruin.”

Castiel strummed his fingers over the translated sentence.  There was a possibility this was bullshit, but the more he looked at it, the more he realized Dean had absolutely deciphered the language correctly.  Any linguist or Enochian scholar worth their salt could figure that out within a few minutes.  Which meant that Dean had never released his findings or shared it with anyone.  It would have definitely made the news, and not just nerd news.  CNN and MSNBC would have surely covered a revelation like this as well.  Unless someone was holding onto it until publication…maybe someone had found Dean’s notes.  Maybe Dean had been murdered.

Castiel shook his head.  That was ridiculous.  The academic world could be cutthroat, but he’d never known anyone to be killed over a find.  Even with as major a discovery as this was, it wouldn’t be particularly lucrative to whomever received credit for it.  The meager money and minor fame just wouldn’t be worth the risk of jail time.  Also, the page in his hands wasn’t a copy or a fax; it was the original.  If someone had planned Dean’s disappearance so that they could take credit for the discovery, they certainly wouldn’t leave proof that he had cracked the code.

“Mr. Novak?”

Castiel lifted his head.  Sam was staring at him expectantly.  Three plates loaded with scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, applesauce, pancakes, buttermilk biscuits with gravy, and a large piece of ham were cooling on the table.  He hadn’t even noticed the waitress delivering his breakfast.  He tucked the notes and Dean’s picture back into the folder.

“Yes?”

“Did you find anything interesting?”

Castiel studied Sam’ face to see if he was asking the question as a test.  If Sam knew how critical that last page was, he might be trying to see if Castiel recognized it but then wouldn’t admit to it so that he could steal it for his own.  Ashamedly, he had to admit that the thought had crossed his mind.  If Dean Winchester was lost forever, someone had to share his find with the world…even if his name was left off the credits.  However, Cas didn’t see any deception in Sam’s face.

Cas tapped on the file.  “Do you know what your brother found?”

Sam shrugged, making a confused face.  “Nothing.  That’s the problem.  That’s why everyone says he’s a crackpot.  Why?  Do you think he found something?”

“I think he found something that…would justify to him attempting a wild goose chase.  Did he give you these specific papers for a reason?”

“I just pulled those at random from his notes.  It’s just a sample for you to see what he was working on.”

“There’s more?”

“There’s a lot more.”

“Do you have it with you?”

“Yes, it’s in—my car.”

Castiel scratched his chin.  “I’ll tell you what, Sam.  I like you.  I think your brother was onto something interesting, and I’ll probably enjoy looking through his notes.  So, I’ll comb through his research and see if I can piece together what he was thinking or decipher where he might have thought to go looking for…was he really looking for the Godland itself?  Like it was a physical location he could find?”

Sam shrugged…and then nodded reluctantly.

“Interesting.  So, I’ll look over his notes for free.  Like I said, it’ll probably be fascinating.  Then if I can figure something out, we can go from there.  If I can give you a specific country, then you can go to the authorities.  Or maybe we can negotiate an arrangement that works for both of us.”

Sam sat back against the booth cushion.  He eyed Castiel suspiciously as he cut off a hunk of ham and then paired with some scrambled eggs before shoving it all into his mouth.

“Why the sudden change of heart?”

“It’s not,” Castiel said, talking around his mouthful.  “I didn’t say I’d go looking for him for free.”  He swallowed.  “However, I thought his notes were going to be a bunch of scribbled nonsense about fox spirits, the northern lights, and children’s rhymes.  He did research on the Enochian language.  I wrote my Masters thesis on Enochian.  And I’m a little sad to say that I’ve learned more from these five pages of notes than I did in two years of studying for my degree.  Needless to say, I expect to find the rest of his notes very enlightening.”

Sam’s brows scrunched together.  “You won’t…try to steal his ideas, will you?”

“Nah.  It’s interesting, but there’s no money in it.  Besides, if I find your brother and bring him home and his research is published in my name that would be awfully awkward.  Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know if I find your bluntness reassuring or not.”

Castiel nodded and cut off a piece of biscuit and gravy.  “I get that a lot.  Are you sure you won’t eat?”

Sam shook his head.  Castiel shrugged at his loss, and tucked into the rest of his meal.  Sam patiently sat with him for over twenty minutes while he ate, occasionally sipping his water.  He even covered the bill and Castiel thought maybe he was trying to get him to like him enough to give him the friends and family discount.

“I’ve never seen anyone who can eat as much as my brother and I,” Sam commented on Castiel’s completely clean plates.

Cas shrugged.  “I burn a lot of calories.  Let’s go.”

In the parking lot, Sam walked over to an ugly black car with a trunk large enough to fit a body.  He popped the lid and the entire space was filled with nothing more than a small plastic crate with a few paper filled folders and a Nanosoft tablet.

“Is that it?” Castiel asked, excitement sinking at the thought that there wasn’t much more to learn from Dean.

“Yes.  Oh, his notes are mostly all on the tablet.  He scanned most of his written notes and made all kinds of spreadsheets and charts.  He also used the tablet to record his thoughts.  Maybe his rambling words will help make sense of his rambling writing.”

“He didn’t take any of this with him when he went on his trip?”

Sam shook his head.  “He said it was all in his head.  Plus, he didn’t want it to be lost if…if he didn’t come back.”

“Did he tell you he expected the journey to be dangerous?”

“No.  He just thought that finding the Godland might be a little like staying at the Hotel California.”

Castiel looked to the left, thinking.  Then he looked back at Sam, shaking his head and showing his lack of comprehension of the reference.

“You know, ‘you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave?’”

“Well, what if that’s what happened?  You’re sending me off to disappear.”

“I thought you didn’t think the Godland was anything more than myth.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, neither do I, so clearly I’m not sending you to oblivion.  I just need you to find my brother and bring him home.  He needs…help.”

Castiel raised an eyebrow.  “Like, psychological help?”

“No.  He’s not crazy.  But, well, a little therapy will probably help.  I think he’s just sad.”

Cas nodded his head.  “You know, sometimes when people feel like that, they do just need some time to clear their heads and get away from everything for a while.  Maybe he’s not contacting you on purpose.”

Sam shook his head.  “No.  My brother and I…we had a…rough…childhood.  He would never not check in.”

“Okay.  You know him better than I do.  Let me look through his research for a couple of days, and I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Okay.  How—”

“I’ll email you.”

“I can give you my cell phone number.  And I think I’ll stay in town at a motel.  I’ll let you know where I’ll be staying.  And we can meet in person too, if you want.”

Castiel nodded his head vaguely, feeling sorry for Sam Winchester.  Despite the fact that he was holding it together on the outside, the man was a wreck.  He could see the cracks in his armor.  He wondered if his brother was the only family Sam had.

“Sure.  I would head north out of downtown before finding a place.  The rates will be a little cheaper.”

“Thanks.”

Castiel nodded.  They stared awkwardly.  Then Castiel reached into the trunk of the car and pulled out the small crate.  He carried it over to his fifteen year old Honda and deposited it on the passenger side seat.  He gave Sam a little wave where the man still stood next to his car, and then drove out of the Copper Star’s parking lot.  He made a quick stop by the grocery store to pick up enough supplies to keep him fed and toilet papered for at least four or five days, and then returned home, anxious to unpack Dean Winchester’s mind.

~~~

Castiel ignored his landline phone again even though it was ringing for the fifth time in as many minutes.  He was so close to figuring out the coded way Dean Winchester wrote his electronic notes he could taste it.  He didn’t want any distractions to derail his train of thought.  It had been three days since he had met Sam Winchester and Castiel had poured through everything at least nine or ten times.  The man was a genius, but also one paranoid fuck.

Most of his research and hypotheses were plainly written, and despite some of it being off the wall lunacy, it was meticulously sourced and fact-checked and demonstrated a line of legitimate reasoning.  After the first read through, Cas ignored the small sub-section of notes that talked about vampires and werewolves and goblins and demons; it was interesting, but wholly unrelated to the problem at hand.  It also made Castiel understand why he had been discredited by the academic world.  He didn’t really blame them.  It was reasonably written, but still madness to believe.  It made it more difficult to concentrate on the Godland research with any sort of sincerity.

The Godland research itself was plainly written too.  Using the translation method he’d uncovered, Dean had translated every extant sample of Enochian.  Despite modern scholars being unable to read Enochian, they’d been correct that there were no mentions of the Godland at all.  Dean believed that three poems he’d found were actually of Enochian origin, or at least written by people who had visited Enoch.  He thought that the poems had been written as a way to smuggle the knowledge out of Enoch and into the world.

The problem was that all the notes Dean had made regarding the translation of the “directions” he claimed to have found in the Barringer Poem were in code.  Cas had seen the small roll of vellum in a museum before.  He’d studied it in text books.  No one really thought it meant anything as the translation from the Ancient Greek made it seem like it was a scrap of poetry about deserts and oceans and caves to the Underworld, home of Hades.

Dean had an entire spreadsheet called “Directions” and the page labeled “Start” contained the translated script broken down line by line.

Back to the desert, a jewel shining on gentle waves,

The setting sun falls askance on my right eye.

From the corner, of my homeward bound mind,

Flash and fall and straight down.

Deepness and darkness and breathless,

There lies the entrance to the Underworld.

Breathe easy though, seeker, for there inside,

Is the making of a new way to be.

The notes in the columns next to each line were nonsensical.  As far as Castiel could tell, however, out of all his notes and research, “Directions” was where he stored his theories about physically tracking down the Godland.  Cas knew that if he could figure out what Dean was saying, then he would know exactly where the man had gone.

His landline rang again and Castiel screamed at it, “Clearly I’m ignoring you, you fucker!”  Then he picked it up and answered with a calm, “Hello?”

“Hello,” a warm, female voice with a Southern accent said.  “I’m trying to reach Mr. Castiel Novak.”

“Speaking,” Castiel grunted, already knowing who the call was from.

“I have Mr. Michael Novak on the phone for you.  May I patch you through?”

“Sure.”

“Please hold.”

Castiel put the phone on speaker and set it down.  He knew that it would probably take Michael at least ten minutes to extract himself from whatever he was doing to take the call that technically he had initiated.  Cas moved his mouse over the text of the Barringer Poem, and then over the numbers in the columns next to it.  He’d run it thought decryptors on the Internet and looked up every known key and codex he could.  Nothing.  He had nothing.

Cas glanced at Dean’s tablet where it sat next to his laptop.  He had transferred all of Dean’s files to his laptop in order to peruse it more easily, but he hadn’t transferred the journal records.  He hadn’t listened to any of them yet either.  He glanced at his phone, the duration of the call was steadily ticking away on the dimmed surface of the screen, and then it went black.  He fired up the tablet and then selected the “Journal” folder.  There were about eighty files, all of them labeled with a date only.  There was no telling what the topic of each might be.  Castiel almost clicked randomly on one, just to see if he could ascertain a timeline based on the topic discussed, but then he decided to go ahead and start with the first one.

“Captain’s log.  Star date 41761.5.”  The man chuckled.  “Or May 2, 2014.  Oh.  Note to self, call Sam to wish him a happy birthday.”

Cas put his elbow on the desk and rested his chin in his hand.  He watched the media player with interest.  Dean had a deep, gruff voice.  The kind of voice that would sound awesome being whispered into his ear from behind.  That inherent sexiness was somewhat offset by the nerd reference to Star Trek though.

“So.  I cracked it.  I can read Enochian.  I’m the only one on the planet who can.  It’s kind of cool, but not.  Because I know no one would believe me because my method is ridiculous.  Even I think it’s ridiculous.  I reversed the words just on the off chance the Enochians thought like da Vinci, but they didn’t.  The script is written forwards, but the concept marks make a more obvious pattern when reversed.  I don’t think they knew that.  I think they made the patterns in the regular script.  When I tried to draw the patterns from the forward text, only one time did I match a pattern from the reverse script patterns.  Only the reverse script patterns made sensible sentences.  There must be some method to seeing or finding the patterns in the forward script, but without someone who actually knows the language available to tell me, I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out.  Maybe someone else will someday, but for now I’m cool with sticking with my method.

“I’ve translated every extant sample of Enochian.  I was right.  The Godland is real, and the Enochians know where it is.  Well, knew.  And they definitely didn’t share that information anywhere.  If they ever wrote it down, it was purposefully destroyed.  The only thing I can do now is try to find another source that has that information.  The Enochians were a sneaky bunch, but all secrets get out.  They were isolationists, but they did take in envoys from time to time.  Someone must have found out something.  Someone always does.  And it’s got to be out there in the world.  I just need to figure out where.

“It’s like that time Benny and I put food coloring in the sprinkler lines at the country club.  I don’t know what everyone was so pissy about.  The greens were a beautiful shade of cotton candy pink.”

Castiel grinned.  He could perfectly imagine the looks of horror on the snooty faces of the club members.

“No matter how careful we had been, we still got ratted out by Kubrick.  Talk about a guy who takes religion in the wrongest way possible.  I may believe that a fairy tale is real, but at least I know that I’m responsible for my own actions.  And I don’t mean in a free will kind of way.  Free will…isn’t real.  Because there’s nothing to fight against.  No set future, no fateful outcomes.  Nothing to be free from.  It’s just us.  All of us.”

Castiel’s brow creased.  “But if you believe in the Godland, surely you believe in the deity that created it.”

“I know something made the Godland, and it’s very powerful.  But it didn’t make us .”

Castiel watched the seconds tick away on the media player; it was still recording but Dean remained silent.  Just when he started to talk again, Michael picked up on the phone.  Castiel fumbled quickly with the tablet to silence it.

“Hello?  Castiel?”

“Yes, Michael, I’m here.”

“Who else is there?”

“No one.  Uh, it was the TV.”

“Oh.  How are you?”

“I’m well.  How are you?”

“Very well.”

Silence.  Castiel refrained from sighing loudly enough to be heard over the phone.

“Castiel, I’d like to get together to discuss the estate.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I know, but, there are some things I can’t do without your consent.”

“You have it.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that.”

“What do you want, Michael?”

“I want to meet in person.”

“I can’t leave Austin right now.”

“That’s fine.  I’m in town.”

Castiel sat up straight.  “You are?”

“Yes.  I had business in Dallas, and I decided to stop by Austin to see you.”

“To see me,” Castiel repeatedly skeptically.

“Yes, I do have business to discuss with you, but I do want to see you too.  Can you meet me for dinner?”

“Where?”

“Wherever you like.  Austin is known for its excellent food, right?”

“Yeah, but…”  Not the kind Michael liked.  “Where are you staying?”

“The Four Seasons.”

Castiel rolled his eyes.  Of course.  “Well, they have an excellent restaurant.  How about I meet you there at six or seven?”

“I’ll make a reservation for 6:00.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Yep.”  Castiel hung up.  He narrowed his eyes at the phone.  What did Michael have up his sleeve?  He didn’t suspect that his brother had ill intentions for him, but he often tried to “shield” Castiel like he was a child who just didn’t understand the “real” world.

Castiel turned back to the tablet to resume listening where he’d left off, but his eyes fell on the open spreadsheet on his laptop.  Every line had a large number with a single decimal point, but the numbers weren’t sequential or related to specific letters of the alphabet.  At least not using any known cypher.  But…

Castiel pushed play on the first journal entry again.  “Captain’s log.  Star date 41761.5.  Or May 2, 2014.  Note to—”  Castiel stopped it and clicked it again.  “Captain’s log.  Star date 41761.5.  Or May 2, 2014.”

Castiel stopped playing the audio and looked back at the spreadsheet.  He clicked on the cell that contained the number in the top row.  He right clicked on it to open the menu options and then formatted the cell as a date.  The number changed to February 9, 2015.

“Oh, Dean.  You colossal nerd.”

He searched through the journal entries for February 9th, 2015.  He double clicked on it and Dean’s voice said, “Face away from the land.  A city on a shoreline.”

The track ended.  Confused, Castiel pressed play again.

“Face away from the land.  A city on a shoreline.”

Castiel looked back at the first line: Back to the desert, a jewel shining on gentle waves.

According to the translation from the ancient Greek, the word that became the English word “back” was intended to mean return.  The back, as a part of human anatomy, was not at all similar to the Greek word for return.  Perhaps Dean hadn’t studied the ancient Greek and was ineptly using only the English translation to find meaning in it.  It would be a break from Dean’s careful and methodical accuracy in everything else he did.  Maybe he had some other reason for interpreting it differently.

With a mental shrug, he converted all of the “star dates” to the Gregorian calendar and then typed in the message Dean recorded for each date next to the corresponding line of the poem.  The small fragments of dialogue were randomly placed, out of order, and with zero context, meaningless.  Anyone listening to his notes in order, or even out of order, would never have been able to guess they were meant to correlate to the Barringer Poem.  When Cas was finished transcribing, he had the following:

Back to the desert, a jewel shining on gentle waves.   Face away from the land.  A city on a shoreline.

The setting sun falls askance on my right eye.   Face southwest.

From the corner of my homeward bound mind,   Stand at the northwest corner.

Flash and fall and straight down.   Jump.

Deepness and darkness and breathless,   Swim.

There lies the entrance to the Underworld.   Cave.  Underwater?

Breathe easy though, seeker, for there inside,   Air pocket.

Is the making of a new way to be.   Point A.

Castiel glared at his newly revealed information.  It was still just as unhelpful.  Except, Point A, Point A…He clicked on the tab labeled Markers.  There were only four lines with words in them.

Point A – Find the Map

Point B – Find the Key

Point C – Find the Door

Endpoint – The Godland

He clicked back over to the Barringer Poem.  Did Dean think that the poem gave directions to finding a map to the Godland?  And there was something familiar about those words…Map, Key, Door…Cas let out a huff of laughter.  He had it memorized, most people did from early childhood, but he searched through Dean’s handwritten notes until he found a copy of it.

A blue, blue river

A pink, pink flower

A dull red liver

A spate of power

The home of these stars is not in the night sky

The home of these stars is not for you and I

A longing for you

A longing for me

A longing for the Godland

A green, green field

A brown, brown stone

A bright gold shield

An empty throne

The gifts of these stars can rain from the day sky

The gifts of these stars can be for you and I

A finding of the map

A finding of the key

A finding of the door

A black, black hole

A white, white light

A matte grey knoll

A joyous rite

The choice of these stars drifts in the twilit sky

The choice of these stars is the glad you and I

A melding of the body

A meeting of the mind

A mating of the soul

Next to the lines about the map and the key and the door, Dean had written “Tomb of Enoch,” “Temple of the Disciple,” “Edge of the World.”  Next to Godland he had written “Endgame.”

Castiel picked up a pencil and flicked it around in his fingers.  He gnawed on his lower lip and let his eyes roam over the notes, the spreadsheets.  Castiel concluded: Dean thought the Godland fable was true; he thought the children’s rhyme indicated that there was a way to find the Godland by locating a map, a key, and a door; he thought that the Barringer poem gave directions on how to find the location of the map.  If he truly believed all this, Castiel could believe that he would take off to find the map as soon as he had a starting point.

Now here was the dilemma.  Dean was somewhere in the Amazon.  There were no deserts on South America.  Not true deserts anyway.  Also, the ancient Greeks didn’t know that South America existed.  How could the location of the map, Enoch’s tomb according to Dean, be in the Amazonian rainforest and how on earth would an ancient Greek know that?  He couldn’t.  It wasn’t possible.  However, an ancient Greek might know where Enoch was located.  And Enoch would be a reasonable place to look for the tomb of someone named Enoch.

Castiel picked up his phone and dialed Sam Winchester.  He answered it immediately.

“Hello, Mr. Novak.  Did you find anything?”

“Um.  Cas.  Please call me Cas.”

“Okay.”

“Um, Sam…are you certain Dean went to South America?”

“Yes.  He said he couldn’t get a direct flight there, and he wasn’t sure which airport would be closest to where he wanted to go, which was the Amazon rainforest.  I think he didn’t even know which country he would be flying into when he told me he was going.”

“So, what makes you think he’s there?  That’s extremely vague.”

“Because he wouldn’t lie.  Not to me anyway.  Besides, he managed to text me that he had landed safely, but his phone was dying so he would give me more details after he charged his phone.  But I never heard from him again.”

Castiel flicked the pencil against his desk.  “Sam, I don’t mean to disparage your relationship with your brother, but from what I can tell…he wasn’t planning on going to South America.  He was going to the middle east.  Specifically Lebanon.”

“Well, yeah.  That’s where he went first.”

Castiel dropped the pencil and sat up straight, his desk chair creaking terribly with the sudden movement.  “I’m sorry.  Come again?”

“I know Dean went to Lebanon.  He told me that much.  He just said he didn’t know where he needed to go from there.  It would depend on what he found.  I guess he found what he was looking for and moved on to South America, he just didn’t know specifically where and he never got the chance to tell me.”

Castiel held the phone to his ear, jaw hanging almost to the floor.  If Dean had found what he was looking for…according to his notes that was the Tomb of Enoch and the map to the motherfucking Godland.

“Bullshit,” Cas breathed.

“Pardon?”

“Oh, sorry.  Nothing.  Um.  So, here’s the thing.  If Dean went to Lebanon, I think I know what he was looking for.  And there’s a small possibility I could also find what he was looking for in Lebanon.  But unless I find that…I’ll never be able to find out where he went in South America.”

There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line.  He heard Sam swallow thickly.  “How much will it cost to send you to Lebanon?”

Castiel chewed on his thumbnail.  He was insanely curious about Dean’s theories.  It wouldn’t be any skin off his nose if he made Sam fund his trip.  However, he knew that the odds of finding anything at all were basically nothing.  The idea that there was an underwater cave off the coast of Beirut that no one had ever found before was ludicrous.  And even if it was there and Dean wasn’t a complete nutjob, he’d found his map.  If he’d taken it with him, there would be nothing for Cas to follow.  Either way he’d be wasting Sam’s money.  It would be impossible to follow Dean out of Lebanon unless they could track down his flight records.

“Hey,” Castiel said, suddenly thinking that both he and Sam were complete idiots.  “Did you check his credit card records or bank statements?  There’s no way he carried around that much cash.”

“Uh…about that…”

Castiel lifted an eyebrow.  “Yes?”

“Well, I told you Dean was broke.”

“Yeah…”

“So, he kind of, sort of, maybe committed credit card fraud to fund his trip.  I have no idea what name he might have used.  I already asked the State Department if they could tell me if his passport had been scanned anywhere, but they would only know that if he was traveling back to the United States, not to another country.”

“Well, your brother is quite the resourceful man, isn’t he?”

“Please, Mr…Cas, please don’t tell any…”  Sam sighed heavily.  “I just want my brother back.  I just want to make sure he’s okay.  I have no idea where he is or how to find him, but you said you might be able to figure that out.  Please, I’ll do anything.”

“Including committing credit card fraud to pay for my services?” Cas asked with amusement.

Sam didn’t respond right away.  “Well, I’m not going to admit it out loud,” he finally grumbled.

Castiel chuckled.  “Okay.  Well, I don’t know…look.  Let me keep digging through his notes.  It would have been nice to know that he went to Lebanon first.”

“Sorry.  It didn’t occur to me that that would be relevant.  He’s not lost there.”

“Maybe.  I’ll keep looking.  Maybe there’s some clues even he didn’t pick up on.”

“O-Okay.  Thank you, Cas.  I’m sorry if you think I was keeping anything from you.  I just genuinely didn’t think his trip to Lebanon—or his means of funding his trip—were relevant.”

“It’s okay.  The last three days have actually been very educational.  I still think your brother is nuts, but he’s a logical nut.”

“Um.  Thanks.”

“Yep.  I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.  Goodnight.”

Castiel hung up and looked back at the spread of notes before him.  So Dean had found Point A and supposedly moved on to Point B.  Wasn’t there another Point B floating around somewhere?  Castiel looked at the tabs on the Directions spreadsheet again: “Start,” “Middle,” and “End.”  There were only three, but there were four points he was looking for.  Maybe point D and Point C were the same place?  It would make sense that the door would open into the Godland, right?

Cas shook his head.  None of it made sense.  He clicked on the "Middle" tab and looked over the poem Dean had parsed out into lines again.  Castiel hadn’t recognized the poem upon his first viewing, and a Google search had returned only a few hits indicating that it was contained in a collection of poetry by a Latino poet who was still alive.  What Castiel assumed to be more codes for which dates hid Dean’s oral notes were unfortunately not star dates.  Maybe he should ask Sam what were Dean’s other favorite nerd things.  He attempted to randomly reformat the cells as dates or times, but that yielded nothing concrete.  Cas puzzled over the code until he noticed the time.  Then he jumped up in alarm and dashed for the shower.  He was going to be late meeting Michael.

~~~

The outside of the Austin Four Seasons was pretty drab, but the inside—was standard fare hotel décor.  Castiel didn’t see anything that made him think the place warranted five hundred dollar per night rooms.  He gave Michael’s name to the hostess at the restaurant, and she showed him to a table by large windows with a good view over the Colorado River.  Michael was already seated and drinking a glass of red wine.

A waiter came over as soon as Castiel was seated and poured a glass for him from the bottle sitting on the table.  Castiel thanked him and raised his eyebrows as he took a sip of his wine.  Michael immediately gave the waiter directions.

“We’ll both have the filet, ten ounces.  Both cooked medium rare.  He’ll have the mashed potatoes and would like to substitute a Cesar salad for the vegetable of the day.  I would like to have a double serving of the vegetable of the day, no potatoes.”

“Yes, sir.  Would you like bread for the table?”

“No, thank you.”

“Very good, sir.”  The waiter picked up the menus and hurried away.

“I wanted bread,” Castiel pouted.

“You’re having potatoes, you don’t need the extra carbohydrates.”

“I burn way more calories than you do, Michael.”

“When you’re on assignment or attempting one of your…climb challenges.  When you’re in Austin you stagnate.  And you know it.”

Castiel made a face and took another gulp of the wine.  He didn’t particularly like wine, but alcohol was alcohol.  They sat for a few minutes, listening to the soft murmurs of the conversations around them and the clinking of silverware.  Michael picked up the napkin in his lap and adjusted it, then laid it back down.

“So, Castiel.  You said you’re well.”

“I am.”

“Good.  I’m glad.  I was worried that you would still be…”

“Sad?  Upset?  Grieving?”

Michael cleared his throat.  “Yes.”

“Well, it’s been almost two years.”

“Has it been that long?”

“It has.”

Michael nodded.  “I’m sorry I didn’t attend the funeral.  I…was inescapably engaged.”

“I don’t need to hear about your kinky sex life, Michael.”

“That’s not—!”  Michael caught Castiel’s mischievous smile, which made him finally relax.  He sat back in his chair, his posture losing its stiffness.  “I miss your sense of humor.”

“Do you?”

“Sometimes.”

“How is Hannah?”

“Very well.  The twins started school last September, so she’s enjoying having a break during the day.  She’s started painting again.”

“That’s great.  Look, Michael, we can small talk after, but I need to know why you decided to make this trip to Austin when we’re due for our biannual Thanksgiving get together in a few months.  You have something on your mind, and we should get it out of the way now.”

Michael’s body didn’t grow tense again, but he did look down and fidget with his napkin.  “I’m worried that if we get it out of the way now there won’t be any small talk; you’ll just leave.”

“Well, that doesn’t bode well.  What if I promise not to leave?”

Michael let out a soft scoff of laughter.  “When have you ever kept a promise to stay somewhere?”

Castiel flinched internally.  That had really cut, not the least of which was because it was absolutely true.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.  “I promised I wouldn’t bring that up again.”

“It’s okay.”

“Well, my business tonight is related to that in a way.  You’ve never wanted any part of managing Father’s estate.”

“That’s true.”

“But with the provisions in the will, it’s impossible to make some decisions without you.”

“That’s also true.”

“There is a way though for you to be completely free of the estate and all its affairs.”

Castiel took another sip of wine and finally put his glass down on the table.  “Forfeit my rights to it.”

Michael half shrugged.  “It doesn’t have to be a forfeiture.  I can buy you out.  Or we can just change the language to make you a silent, non-voting partner.  Castiel, this is absolutely not a way to get rid of you.  I’m not trying to push you out or—”

Castiel held up a hand.  “Michael, I know.  I would never think that of you.  I know taking me out of the equation makes running things for you much easier.  I’m not offended.  In fact, I wonder why we never did this sooner.”

“So…you’re perfectly fine with just…cutting all ties to us.”

“Michael.”  Castiel gave his brother a reproving look and waited for the waiter to put down his salad and leave before speaking again.  “You’ve never been one for dramatics, please don’t start now.  It’s just the estate and the business, which I have no interest in.  I assume our Thanksgivings will continue as usual.  I also expect that I’ll at least be invited to the twins’ bar mitzvahs.”

“I hardly think you’ll be able to escape that invitation.”

Cas nodded.  “See?  Plenty of ties.”

Michael looked unconvinced, but he was just as reluctant to unpack their family dysfunction as Cas.

“So, that’s it?  You want nothing in return?”

Castiel shrugged and started to shake his head.  “I…”  He hesitated.  Then he said, “Well, there is one thing I could use.”

“Name it.”

“I…I want to go on an expedition.  But it’s not for a magazine or tourism company.  It’s a personal trip, so I have to fund it myself.  And it’s going to be expensive.  Really expensive.  So, in exchange for me forfeiting my rights and ownership of the estate, I’d like…ten thousand dollars to get me started.  And a line of credit…up to fifty thousand.”

Michael looked nonplused.  “Anything else?”

“Uh…I don’t intend to ever pay the credit bill myself…”

Michael smiled.  “I figured that much.  Is that really all you want?”

Cas shrugged.  “It seems like a lot to me.”

“Castiel…you live in a crappy apartment.  You drive a junker on its last legs.  You haven’t bought a new piece for your wardrobe in five years.”  Castiel glanced down at the sports coat he was wearing; it looked fine.  “You’re worth millions.  Why do you choose to…live like that?”

Cas shrugged.  “I think because I can.  Because I finally have a choice.  I spent a lot of years not having any choices.”

“None of us did.”

“I know, Michael,” Castiel replied softly, looking down.

They were silent for several minutes, and Castiel finally started chewing on his salad.  It was good.  At least this depressing meeting with his brother hadn’t dulled his taste buds.

“Where are you going?” Michael asked.

“What?”

“On your expedition.”

“Oh.  Um.  Well, I’m starting in Lebanon.  I’m going to Enoch.”

Michael stared at him with wide eyes.  “Oh, Cas, I’m sorry…I didn’t…I believed you when you said you were okay.”

“I am.  I really am.  I’m not going because of Balthazar.  There’s something else I want to…investigate.”

“I think it’s too soon.  I think you should go somewhere else.”

“It’ll be two years in October.  I’ve grieved, I’ve moved on.”

“You don’t just get over the love of your life dying that easily, Castiel.”

“Geezus, Michael, he wasn’t the love of my life.”

Michael played with his fork.  “No, I suppose not.  You two always did fight more than you did anything else.”

Castiel bobbed his head.  That was the truth.

“But you feel guilty about what happened.  I know you do.”

“I…I’ve gotten past that.  We both made the decision to free solo that wall.  When he slipped, I was nowhere close enough to reach him.  People die rock climbing every year.  It’s just a fact of the sport.”

“I wish you would choose a different sport,” Michael said sourly.

“Well, if I ever meet someone who makes me want to settle down, maybe I will.”

“Hannah has a brother.”

“Dude.  I am not going to date your wife’s twin brother.”

“Why not?”

“Because!  It’s weird.”

“Fine.”

The waiter returned with their meals and Castiel had to fend him off with a threatening poke of his fork to keep him from taking his salad plate away.  He still had three croutons left.  If they were the only bread he was going to get tonight, he wasn’t giving them up.

“So.  I’ll have my lawyers draft the paperwork,” Michael said, moving back to the safer territory of business.

“Okay.  Just tell me where to sign.”

“And all you want is ten thousand dollars and a high line of credit?”

Castiel shrugged.  “I assume if I’m ever in dire straits you wouldn’t shut your door on me.”

“Never.  Though I do wonder what your definition of dire straits is if the way you live now isn’t it.”

Castiel rolled his eyes and cut open his delicious smelling steak.  It was perfect.

“Are you sure I can’t at least buy you a new car?”

Castiel chewed on his piece of steak while giving his brother what he believed the kids were calling a “resting bitch face.”  Michael sorted through his pile of vegetables like they were very interesting.

“Okay, fine,” Castiel said.  “I’d like a Tesla.”

Michael looked up, smiling.  “Really?  Sure.  I can buy you a new one, or you can have one of mine.”

Castiel almost choked on his sip of wine.  “I’m sorry.  Did you say one of yours?”

Michael shrugged sheepishly.  “I bought one of each model.  I thought I should try them all out.”

“Mm-hmm.  So, tell me about Hannah’s paintings.  I’m not going to show up for Thanksgiving and find nude pictures of you everywhere, am I?”

Michael glared at him, but was too well-mannered to speak while his mouth was full.  Cas grinned, having waited until his brother’s mouth was full to ask his question for just that reason.

~~~

Castiel settled into his seat and only felt the tiniest smidge of guilt for buying a first class ticket.  He always flew coach to keep his costs down for his clients, but it wasn’t like Sam Winchester was paying for anything.  He’d sounded a little suspicious over the phone when Castiel had told him that he was going to look for Dean and fund the trip himself, but he hadn’t questioned it even once.  Either he was enough of a criminal not to question other people about their business, or he wanted his brother back too much to care about the means.  Castiel suspected it was the latter.

He’d received permission from Sam to take Dean’s tablet with him and they’d arranged to make contact at least once a week.  Castiel also promised to relay any information he found out about Dean to him as soon as he possibly could.  With a few supplies he thought it would be best to purchase in America, Dean’s notes, and a credit card with a one hundred thousand dollar spending limit and a five thousand dollar cash advance, Castiel had boarded a plane for Beirut.  He was now officially bound for Enoch and on the trail of a rogue archaeologist.

Cas had intended to study Dean’s second poem while on the two legged, eighteen hour flight.  It was four days after cracking the star dates code and he still had no clue what to do about the second code even with Sam’s suggestions of Dean’s other favorite programming.  Instead he reclined his seat, propped his feet up on the foot rest, and plugged his headphones into Dean’s tablet.  He may have used the extra storage space to bring along his entire music collection.  He pushed play on the media player and settled back in his seat.  Rather than the soothing sounds of Chopin, the first track picked up one of Dean’s journal entries.

“Captain’s log.  Star date…” he muttered something, clearly not bothering with converting the actual date.  “It’s three o’clock on Saturday, November 14, 2015.  I’ve deciphered the poem.  It was originally written in Greek, but I think the poet was Enochian.  The way certain things are phrased are more reminiscent of the Enochian way of writing than classical Greek.”

You would be the only one who would know , Castiel mused.

“Of course that does create a dilemma interpreting the third line.  ‘ From the corner of my homeward bound mind.’  If one assumes the poet is Greek, then Greece is always northwest from Enoch.  Of course, knowing that the poet is Enochian, his home is Enoch.  From the first line I know that his back should be to the desert, facing the city on the shore.  Also, only the west corners of the building would be over the water.”

Building? Cas wondered.   What building?

“So it has to be either the north or southwest corners of the building.  I can check both, but I’m going to assume that the intent to write the poem in Greek was not only to hide its true meaning, but to give the allusion to Greece being the place the author’s mind would wander to.

“But I really don’t know jack shit about poetry.  Hell, for all I know this poem could be nothing but some whiny teenager angsting over being forced on vacation with his parents.”

Castiel smiled.

“But, it feels different this time.  I know I’ve made some bullshit claims in the past, but sometimes attention of any kind is better than none at all.  Every time I made the news, even if it was just to have people call me a crackpot, there was a boost in my book sales.  I’m not going to the media this time though.  I could feel it, when everything fell into place.  When I realized that that Brazilian's poem was plagiarized from ancient texts suppressed by the Catholic church…”

Castiel raised his eyebrows .  Say wha…?

“It’s not only incorrectly translated, it’s incomplete.  If I ever get to Point B, it’s going to be a bit tricky navigating the Temple of the Disciple.  If I can even find it.  Gotta find the map first.  Gotta figure out which building in Enoch the poem is referencing.”  There was a gagging sound.  “Ugh.  Gotta go to the grocery store.  This egg salad is rancid.”  There was more spitting and Cas made a face.  Gross.  “Oh, yeah.  Note to self, poem two is Dr. Sexy, MD.”

The recording ended and Rachmaninoff’s Vespers began to swell in his ears.  Castiel scratched his chin.   Dr. Sexy, MD .  Sam had mentioned that Dean was obsessed with the show and hid it very poorly.  He didn’t really know enough about the show to guess at what the random words beside each line of poem could mean.  He opened the spreadsheet on the tablet and clicked his way onto poem two.

Beside the first line were the letters “DS cht Pic.”  Castiel thought that DS could maybe stand for Dr. Sexy himself.  Maybe there was a picture of him somewhere, but the P in Pic was capitalized.  Grumbling, Castiel paid to connect to the plane’s Wi-Fi, and then navigated to IMDB.  He searched through the list of actors and characters, and there was one named Dr. Piccolo.  Dr. Sexy chats with Dr. Piccolo?  But how did that relate to a date?

Castiel closed the website and the spreadsheet.  He was determined to enjoy his first class seat.  There was no rush on deciphering poem two’s meaning anyway.  He still had to find out if Point A was real or the delusions of a desperate, albeit super smart and hot, archaeologist.  Now he also had the mystery of finding a specific building in a city that was nothing more than ancient ruins no taller than two or three foot piles of rock.   But, no…that was a problem for when he landed.  He shuffled down lower in his seat and examined the menu for dinner.

~~~

Castiel completed his second circuit of the ruins of Enoch.  The site was little more than a quarter square mile and only predicted to have extended another few hundred yards on the east and south sides.  It was quite a small city considering the reputation it had for being a seat of power in the ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian records.  Castiel had spent an entire summer on a research team excavating a part of the city in between his junior and senior years of college.  Not much had changed in the interim.

There were a few foundations of buildings demarcated with tall wooden dowels, but none of them were near the Mediterranean Sea, which was about fifty yards to the west of the city.  None of them were even near fountains or anything that looked like it had ever held water.  Maybe Dean was wrong about the clue meaning to “swim.”  Maybe it meant “dig.”

Castiel walked to the edge of the ruins and then across the thirty meter divide that the vendors weren’t allowed to cross.  He bought a bottle of water and drank the whole thing in three gulps to replace everything he’d sweated out in the ninety-five degree August heat.  The one good side to the extreme heat was that it was keeping most of the tourists away.

He examined his brochure again, looking to see if he had missed anything during his meandering.  He’d seen all the foundations listed and all the wells and the fountains and the temple ruins.  He flipped the pamphlet over and saw a small box on one half of one of the accordion folded sheets.  It showed the ruins in one corner, and then an arrow pointing northeast proclaimed that a new site would coming in the Spring of 2018:  The Tomb of Enoch.

Castiel knew that he didn’t keep up to date with the academic world anymore, but he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t heard about the discovery of a burial site near Enoch.  He purchased another bottle of water and walked back over to the ruins.  He made a wrong turn or two, but eventually he found the little tent set up that housed Information.  There were two men sitting in folding chairs, fanning themselves lazily with brochures.  One was a young, fat man with a thick mustache and dark sweat stains on his chest and at his pits.  The other was an older man with white hair and a face well worn by decades in the sun.

“Can I help you, sir?” the young man asked with a thick accent but perfect English.

“Yes, I was wondering what you can tell me about this new site, the Tomb of Enoch?”

“Oh, yes, it’s very exciting.  It was found about a year and a half ago when a group of developers were looking to build a new resort.  They were quite put out to discover ancient ruins.  There goes their plans.”

The young man laughed loudly and the older one swatted a fly on his arm.  Castiel smiled to show he appreciated the humor of the situation.

“Is it an actual burial site?”

“Oh, yes.  It is quite reminiscent of the underground tombs of the ancient pharaohs.”

“Really?  From what I know of Enochian culture, they would never bury their dead.”

“It’s a clearing for a pyre,” the old man said.  “That’s all.”

The young man turned around to glare at him.  “That’s not all.”  He faced Castiel with a smile.  “There are chambers and passageways.”

“Storage for oil and chimney flues.”

The young man stamped his foot.  He turned around and spoke in a flurry of Arabic.  Castiel had known the language conversationally at one point, but he couldn’t follow the young man’s quick mutterings.

“Can I ask…” Castiel started and the young man quieted and faced him again.  “The phrase Tomb of Enoch…is that implying Enoch was the name of a man?  Or just that it is a tomb in Enoch?”

“It’s not a tomb,” the old man said.  “It’s just—”

The young man waved him silent.  “I can see your confusion, sir.  The Tomb of Enoch refers to the tomb being at Enoch.  There was no man known as Enoch.”

“There was,” said the old man.  “The first king of Enoch was self-styled as Enoch the Elder.”

“That’s legend, not history,” said the young man, clearly irritated.

“Legends, history…most people can’t tell the difference after enough time has passed.”

“Who was Enoch the Elder?” Castiel asked.  “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Because he is not in history books,” said the young man.  “Because he is a children’s fable.”

“Enoch the Elder and his wife, Zora, were said to have received enlightenment in the Godland.  They were married by divine providence, joined in body, mind, and soul as the song explains.”

“Yes, and they had glowing eyes and fingers that exuded stardust.  It’s unsubstantiated.  For one thing, everyone knows that the city of Enoch knew nothing of the Godland.”

“We don’t know that.  No one can read their language.”

They launched into an argument in Arabic and Castiel waved his hands.

“Uh, thank you.  For the information.  I appreciate it.  Just one more question.  The, uh, pyre or tomb, whatever it is…is it located near water?”

The old man looked at him sharply and the young man shrugged his lips as he thought for a moment.

“No, no water.  It’s actually in a fair bit of desert as the tree line doesn’t grow within half a mile of the site.  There’s not even a river or creek.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?” the old man asked, eyeing him curiously.

Castiel shrugged.  “Just wondering if they built it near water in case the fires got out of control.”

“Oh,” the old man looked disappointed.  Then he shrugged his shoulders and settled back into his chair, waving the brochure lazily at his face again.  “Part of the legend of Enoch the Elder was that he did have a tomb built underwater.”

“How is a tomb built underwater?” the young man scoffed.

The man shrugged.  “In the old days, magic was stronger because more people believed.”

The young man’s face contorted with some very acrobatic expressions and he scoffed and sputtered about getting water as he stood up and walked away.

“Is there more to the legend?” Castiel asked.

“Well, not really.  Just as you pointed out, the Enochians didn’t bury their dead, so Enoch the Elder having a tomb seems incongruous.  However, since he was the Elder, it stands to reason there was an Enoch the Younger.  The legend says that the younger Enoch died at sea, and consumed with grief and longing for his son, Enoch the Elder decided to be buried at sea so he could join him in the afterlife.”

“Buried at sea, like, dumped off a ship?”

“Perhaps.  Some interpret it as a poetic way of saying that he drowned himself.  Then again, perhaps there is a magical bubble under the sea where he buried away all his secrets.”

Castiel smiled wryly.  “I might be willing to believe that a legend has its roots in reality, but magic bubbles are where I draw my line.”

The man shrugged.  “Fortunately reality is not solely based upon what people believe.”

Castiel smiled.  “That’s very true.”  He glanced back at the sea and could just see the white, foamy evidence that proved the water was moving into the shore at all.  “And that pyre site is the only new discovery in the past decade?”

The old man nodded.

“Well, thank you for answering my questions.  I’m glad to have learned about Enoch the Elder.  I’ll have to look up that legend.”

The old man tipped his head, but seemed loathe to move more than that in the heat.  Castiel walked back to the edge of the ruins closest to the ocean.  He walked over to the foundation that jutted out the farthest and stood at its northwest corner, then he faced southwest.  Even if the building was several stories high, jumping from it wouldn’t put him anywhere near the water.  Sunset was still hours away; he didn’t want to wait to see if there was a flash in a certain place when the sun went down.  At least not today.  He’d gotten up early and it was just too damn hot to hang around the ruins for much longer.  The site was secluded and there was nothing else to keep him occupied.  He’d travel back tomorrow, later in the day.

Cas made his way to the bus stop and waited with a few other people, including a family with two small children who were cranky and crying.  Even when they were on the air conditioned bus, they continued to wail incessantly and the parents were too weary to attempt to placate them.  The ruins were about an hour outside of Beirut, and fifteen minutes into the ride Castiel couldn’t take the screaming anymore.

Most of the coast of Lebanon was developed as residential or commercial hotels and resorts, so he could have gotten off at any stop and grabbed a drink in a bar while he waited for the next bus.  However, feeling his nerdy anthropologist roots again, he decided to get off at the site of a military structure from the early Ottoman Empire.

He sighed in relief when the bus doors closed on the screaming children and followed the signs through the small town to the Outpost of Jadra.  He was a little disappointed to find that the structure was built out of modern materials despite originating in the mid 1600’s.  It had been primarily made of wood though, so it would be impossible for it to have left much of a ruin behind.  Then he came across a sign that explained why it had been completely built anew.

The sign showed the coastline near the site, and then indicated that the original structure had actually been built about one hundred yards west in what was now the Mediterranean Sea.  The land where the outpost had stood had completely eroded away in four hundred years.  How much land would have eroded away in two thousand years?  Had anyone even looked for Enochian ruins in the sea?  He’d never heard of any, but he was quickly learning that he certainly didn’t know everything about the site or the region.

Castiel hurried back to the bus stop in time to catch the bus just behind the one he had been on.  By the time the bus fought through the traffic and back into Beirut, the public library was closed.  He went to his hotel room instead and performed a Google search on ruins of the Mediterranean.  There were a lot of well-known cities that had fallen into the water after earthquakes or simply succumbed to the land they sat upon wasting away.  It wasn’t uncommon in the slightest, but he didn’t find anything referencing any ruins of Enoch being found in the sea.  After all, even two thousand years later the sea was still fifty yards away from the city itself.

Castiel flopped onto his bed and put a hand on his stomach as it rumbled angrily at him.  Feeling too lazy to get up and go find food, he called for room service.  While he waited he grabbed Dean’s tablet and clicked on another journal entry.  Maybe he had found something out about heretofore unknown underwater ruins.

“Captain’s log.  Star date…42898.8.  June 12, 2017.”

Castiel looked at the name of the file; it indicated that it was dated from 2014.  If he ever found Dean Winchester, he was going to ask him what the heck was up with his filing system.

“I leave for Lebanon in two days.  I don’t know what I’ll find there, but I know what I’m hoping to find.  If I do find it, I really have no idea where I’ll be going from there.  My best educated guess is Brazil, or at least the South American continent.  The Catholic church did their job too well hiding the ruins of the Temple of the Disciple; not even the people who know about the cover up know where they are.  The fact that the guy who found the tablet he plagiarized his poem from is from Brazil doesn’t really mean anything.  Heck, the ruins could be in Mongolia or India.  Who knows if he liked to travel?”

Dean sighed.  “It doesn’t matter though.  Point B means nothing without Point A and I’m still lost on where to apply the directions from the Barringer Poem.  There are no Enochian ruins by the sea.”

Castiel sighed.  So Dean didn’t know any more than he did at this point.

“I wonder if I should make a verbal will or something.  Instructions on what to do with my stuff…or me…if I don’t make it back for some reason.  It would be responsible, but it seems a little pessimistic.  Besides, it’s not like I have anything of value.  Just my car and my notes, and those are going to Sammy before I leave.  And he’ll be fine.  He’s got Jody.  I mean, they’ve got a slightly weird mom-son vibe going on, but what they get up to in the bedroom is none of my business.”

Castiel snorted in amusement.

“I’m not worried what will happen to him if something happens to me.  Or Jody.  He’s got a good head on his shoulders.  I like to think I played a part in that, but I think the kid’s just special.  In both the good way and the bad way.”  Dean chuckled.  “I did worry at first that he might be like Dad, especially after Jessica died.  I kept waiting for Sam to lose his shit like Dad did when Mom died, but Sam was stronger than that.  I always thought Dad was the strongest person in the world, but after knowing Sam, I now know Dad was pretty weak.  I think I’m the same way.  I guess that’s why I’ve got a string of one night stands and failed short-term relationships in my wake.  Loving somebody that much just doesn’t seem to be worth the risk of falling apart if you lose them.”

There was a long silence.  Castiel traced a pattern on the edge of the tablet with his finger.  Then Dean cleared his throat.  “Anyway.  Sammy’s good.  I’m feeling a good 60% sure that I know where I’m going and what I’m doing.  That’s better odds than a coin toss.  See you on the flip side.  Oh, note to self: delete this whiny BS.”

The recording ended and Castiel let his head fall back on the pillow.  He felt a little guilty about listening to Dean’s inner thoughts.  Clearly he’d never intended for other people to listen to parts of them.  Then again, he didn’t delete it either.  Castiel clicked on the next file.

“Side to side.”

The recording ended.  Castiel clicked on it again.

“Side to side.”

He must have randomly found one of Dean’s notes for the second poem.  Or maybe the third one.  He added the word “poem” after the file name so that he would know this was one of the coded lines.  Maybe he would be able to reverse engineer the code if he knew where it ended.  He set aside the tablet for the time being and napped until room service arrived.

~~~

Cas walked down the row of shelves, fingers trailing over the spines of hardcover books.  He glanced at the paper in his hand and then at the code on the books.  The Lebanese public library system did not use the Dewey decimal system and he had no idea if he was even in the right section.  Finally he came across a small collection of books on Enoch.  There were only about ten, nine of which were in Arabic.  He took all of them though, hoping that some of them would have pictures at the very least.  He spread out his pile of books on a round table in a quiet corner and started with a book that had a map on the cover.

A couple hours later he had exhausted his memory of Arabic and all of the books.  He learned nothing new, although the book in English was actually a collection of the different versions of the Godland fable from around the world.  They were surprisingly similar considering how geographically widespread they were and how large a time span they covered.  The oldest version was actually the Indian one Dean had in his notes.  It was the only one that didn’t allude to the Godland being an actual physical location, but more of a state of mind.  Possibly it was influenced by the idea of nirvana from the Hindu religion.

While reading the different interpretations of the fable had been interesting, it had nothing to do with Enoch or its ruins or the changing coastline of Lebanon.  Castiel closed the book and stood up.  He gathered the books together into a pile, ready to take them back to the shelf he had found them on, but then he noticed an elderly man pointed to a wheeled cart with other books on it.  He didn’t blame the librarian for not trusting its patrons to put stuff back where it belonged.  He dropped the books off on the cart and was about to head back to the computer catalog to do another search, but he turned toward the librarian.

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”

“Some.  Not so good.  Okay.”

Castiel figured that was good enough.  “Maybe you can help me.  I’m looking for information about the coastline of Lebanon.  Particularly how it’s changed.  Like, near Enoch.  Was there ever a part of Enoch that is now underwater?”

“Enoch?  Underwater?  Hmm…On land.  You take bus there.”

“Yeah, I know…”  Castiel sighed, and then smiled.  “Thank you, sir.”

Castiel started to walk away.

“Lighthouse underwater.”

Cas turned back.  “Lighthouse?”

The man shook his head and waved a hand.  “Is wrong word.  But.  Five years back, people…finded…stones underwater.  Ruins.  Out in water.  Underwater.  Only one ruin though.  No more.”

“Near the Enoch ruins?”

The man nodded.  “Very near.  But, very out in water.  No one is…okay…that lighthouse ruin is Enoch ruin.  Understand?”

Castiel thought he did.  A single building, a tower of some kind, was found near the site of Enoch, but far enough out in the water that people were skeptical if the two were related.

“Is there information on where this lighthouse ruin is located?”

The man nodded and crooked his finger inward several times, indicating for Cas to follow him.

“We have map.  I show.  Show to American…earlier.”

“You showed this map to an American earlier today?”

“Not today.  Back.”  He waved his hand over his shoulder, but didn’t try to elaborate on the exact timing.  He led Castiel into a room filled with large filing cabinets.  He sorted through a couple of drawers before he pulled out a large four by three foot map.  He spread it out on one of the tables in the room.  It depicted the current coastline of the eastern half of the Mediterranean sea, and then using a dotted line showed where the land used to be five hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred, and two thousand years earlier.  Various underwater ruins were marked on the former coastlines.  The man pointed to a marked ruin directly out from the site of Enoch.  It was so far out it still wasn’t on land even with the two thousand year old coastline.

“How was it built there if there was no land?”

“Mm.  Deep water.  Small section land.  What call?  When at beach.  Very far out, look like walk on water.”

Castiel shook his head, confused.

“You know.  Small section land.  But not land .”

“A sandbar?” Castiel asked skeptically.

The man nodded.  “Yes, yes.  Sandbar.  There is children story of Enochians.  They walk on water.  Like Yasue.”

It took Castiel a moment to recognize the Arabic name for Jesus.

“But not gods.  No.  Sandbar.  To lighthouse.  No more.”

Castiel scratched his chin.  He was pretty sure the librarian was suggesting that the Enochians had built a lighthouse, or tower, way out on a sandbar not far from their village, and that visitors had seen them walking out to the structure in what appeared to be very deep water.  The sandbar was long since gone and the tower with it.

He looked at the map again.  The tower would be a single ruin out in the middle of the ocean.  It wouldn’t be difficult to determine the northeast corner of a single building.  And if it had been built on the end of the sandbar, if someone jumped off the top, they might very well find themselves in very, very deep water.  He looked up at the man again.

“You said an American asked to look at this map?”

“Looking for underwater ruin.  Like you.  I show him map.”

“Was his name Dean Winchester?” Castiel asked, not believing his luck.

The man shook his head.  “No.  Plant.  I remember because plant.  Leaves.”

Castiel nodded.

“Richard.  Robert.  Ringo?”

Castiel smiled.  “It’s okay.  Um, is this map accurate?  I mean in terms of placement.  It has latitude and longitude on it.”

“Yes, yes.  Ruin here.”

Castiel took out a pad of paper and a pencil and carefully calculated the geographic coordinates for the tower.  He thanked the man profusely and then found an empty table back in the main section of the library.  He opened his laptop and entered the coordinates into Google maps.  There was definitely nothing around that section of water, and it was a good three or four hundred yards away from the shore.  There would be no getting to it without a boat.  The depth of the water was also indicated as being around 750 meters deep.  No one could free dive that deeply.  Even extreme divers couldn’t go much more than 200 meters.  Heck, SCUBA divers couldn’t go much beyond 300 meters.  Even if he had SCUBA equipment, he probably wouldn’t be able to dive deep enough to see the ruins.  It was probably why nobody mentioned them in the tourist pamphlets because they were too deep to have been thoroughly explored.

He was here though, and it was a lead that he was certain Dean would have followed.  He was going to need to rent a boat and SCUBA equipment.  He was thankful that he’d kept his certification current and that he’d asked his brother for an open line of credit.  This was going to be an expensive hunch.

Castiel packed up and grabbed a quick lunch, moaning loudly as he ate and disturbing several people.  He’d forgotten how much he loved Lebanese food.  Then he went in search of a business that rented out small watercraft to foreign tourists.  Not an easy feat.  Especially to find one that would let him take it out without supervision.  In the end he had to find an individual willing—bribed—to let him use his boat rather than a company.  He was able to procure rental SCUBA gear easier though once he provided his certification.  He arranged to pick up the equipment and the boat at first light the next morning.

He spent the rest of the evening preparing his equipment in his hotel room.  He made a copy of Dean’s poem instructions and sealed them tightly in a plastic bag and then duct taped the opening shut.  He also looked up the names Richard Plant and Robert Plant on the Internet, just out of curiosity.  Apparently Robert Plant was the lead singer for Led Zeppelin.  Dean hadn’t talked much about his musical tastes on the journal entries, but Castiel wouldn’t be surprised a bit to find out the gruff man was a fan of classic rock.

When he finally forced himself to try to sleep, he tossed and turned for most of the night, filled with excitement and anxiety.  Also a little dread.  What if he found Dean’s bloated body somewhere underwater?  He knew Sam said he had made it to South America, but they really just didn’t know.  He tried to distract his thoughts by listening to more journal entries.

“There’s a reason why the Godland story has persisted as long as it has with so little variation despite being told across the globe.  It’s different from religions, which have their origins in specific, small geographic regions.  The Godland fable is found on every continent in almost every culture.  Cultures that never interacted with each other for hundreds or thousands of years.  And yet they—we—all know the same story.

“That’s the argument Mom always used to make.  There’s a reason why everybody knows.  It’s because everybody was told the same thing.  I remember asking her once that if that was the reason she believed the Godland was real, then why did she think vampires and werewolves and monsters were real.  Not every culture had a universal story about any particular one.  Things differed depending on where the legend came from.  ‘Evolution,’ she said.  ‘Natural selection.  It affects everything.’  Is that why vampires in Europe couldn’t come out in sunlight but in the Philippines they could?  Maybe.  I’ve never seen a real vampire before though.  Unless the thing that killed Mom was one.  But I’ve never heard a tale where vampire eyes glow yellow.”

Castiel curled in on himself as he listened to Dean tell horror stories in the dark.  That wasn’t really how his mother died, was it?

“In the Godland, all things are eternal.  That’s the story.  It’s not a fountain of youth or some kind of Utopia.  It’s a place where everything… is .  Everything that was or will be…it’s all there.  And if that’s not worth looking for, I don’t know what is.”

Castiel shut down the tablet.  He clutched his pillow tightly and tried to imagine what Dean had seen that made him think a monster had killed his mother.  He tried to imagine a woman teaching her child that everything that went bump in the night was real.  He wondered how old Dean had been when she had died.

Sleep still eluding him and the mystery tugging at his brain, Castiel sat up and turned on a light.  He went to his desk and opened his laptop.  It took a bit of searching through old Lawrence, Kansas newspapers to identify the couple that had given birth to a Dean and Sam Winchester, but he found them.  John and Mary Winchester.  The obituaries were easy to find after that.

John Winchester had died around ten years ago in a car accident.  That was the way the obituary put it.  The newspaper article about the accident identified that he’d been drunk and had taken out a young couple with him.  Mary Winchester had died in 1991; Dean would have been eight years old.  She was the victim of a serial killer who had stalked a large portion of Kansas and Missouri in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  The killer had never been found though his kills had stopped around 1994.  There was no mention of Dean being present during his mother’s murder, but he could imagine an eight year old child having nightmares about his mother being killed by a boogieman even adults were afraid of.

Castiel went back to bed after that.  He shouldn’t have looked it up.  It wasn’t his job to delve into Dean’s past.  He was just a lost man and Cas’ only responsibility was to find him and take him home.

~~~

Despite his limited and restless night of sleep, Castiel was wide awake the next morning.  After a quick tutorial from the small motorboat’s owner, Castiel was cruising out of Zaitunay Bay as he munched on a banana.  The trip out to Enoch took a little over an hour, and he passed only fisherman who were heading farther out into the sea.  Using the boat’s GPS device, he navigated to the coordinates of the supposed site of the lighthouse ruins.  He looked over the side of the boat.  He saw nothing but slightly choppy, opaque water.  He checked the instruments to see if they could detect anything.

The depth reading came back oddly variable.  He turned on the radar, which was really nothing more than a fish finder, and was able to ascertain that while a lot of the water was very deep, there was the line of a rock formation only about one hundred fifty meters down.  The owner had told him that he had a one hundred eighty meter long anchor line, so if he hit the rock formation, there would be enough to hold the boat and provide an aquatic breadcrumb trail back to it.  Castiel moved the boat until it was situated more completely over the rocks.  He dropped anchor and began to suit up.

According to the poem, there was supposed to be a flash at sunset, or at least that’s what he thought it meant.  However, he wasn’t going to wait all day to go exploring.  He had SCUBA gear that would allow him to look around the area for longer than a free diver would be able to do in ancient times.  Once he was prepared he still checked the instructions though.  He stood on the northeast corner of the boat, faced the southwest, and stepped off into the sea.

He swam a slow circle around the anchor line down into the depths.  Within a few minutes he was at a depth of one hundred and fifty meters and had reached the large rock.  It wasn’t actually a rock, but the end of land itself before it dropped off into the deep parts of the sea.  It was odd to see the drop off in a sea.  Usually drop offs like that were the result of the continental shelf ending in the ocean.  The entire Mediterranean Sea sat on top of the continental shelf.  It must have resulted from a massive earthquake in the past.  Possibly the same one that had sunk the sandbar.

Breathing slowly and swimming past bored looking fish, Castiel used his flashlight to explore the edge of the drop off.  After about twenty minutes he spotted a piece of rock that had just too perfect of a right angle to be natural.  He swam toward the rock and soon was able to see the clear outline of the foundation of a small, square building resting in pieces near the edge of the drop off.  Castiel grinned and nearly lost his regulator.  He swam closer and snapped a few pictures of the ruins.  There were only several large blocks spilled around the foundation, but it was clear that it was a manmade structure in five hundred feet of water.

Cas swam to the northwest corner of the ruined foundation and looked over the drop off.  He looked up.  The morning sun was slowly gaining strength and penetrating the dimness in the water.  He could see the shadow of his boat bobbing a few dozen yards laterally.  He looked back down and made the decision to swim down the side of the rock face.  He moved slowly, shining the light over the whole of the surface, looking for a cave or a hole or something that might have a pocket of air.  Although two thousand years later, he couldn’t be surprised if it had filled in.

When he got to two hundred twenty five meters in depth, he still hadn’t found anything.  He was pretty much beyond what any human could dive without equipment, and wasn’t feeling so hot himself even with a protective suit.  There was nothing in the rock face.  If the tower was still standing, jumping off it wouldn’t have put him in a place to find anything.  Then again, if it had sunk due to an earthquake, maybe it had shifted off its mark.  Cas knew he would never get rid of that nagging feeling if he left without exploring the area thoroughly.  He set up a search grid of the wall in his own mind, willing to go only a hundred yards in either direction from the tower and cover a depth of up to two hundred meters.  He started on the south side of the tower and began methodically working his way up and down and across the rock wall.

Less than ten minutes later he was startled to find a large hole in the rock.  It was only about twenty-five meters below the drop off and large enough to easily fit a man.  A man with SCUBA equipment would be a little trickier, but not impossible.  He swam close to the hole and shined his light inside.  He couldn’t see anything.  Was he really going to swim his ass into an underwater cave where literally nobody knew he was?  He checked the time on his tank.  He had just over twenty minutes.  He could swim inside for five minutes, which would leave five minutes to swim back out and five minutes for a safety stop before he surfaced.  He figured that was good enough.  It was also possible that he might not spend more than a minute or two in the cave if he lost his nerve.

After saying a quick prayer more out of habit than belief, Castiel swam forward into the entrance of the cave.  He carefully watched to make sure he had the clearance, and then shined the flashlight all around to make sure the tunnel didn’t narrow.  After only a few feet it curved up.  Castiel followed it, feeling safe he wouldn’t get lost because there were no branching tunnels anywhere.  As he swam, he became aware that the pressure around him was reducing drastically.  He paused when the sides of the tunnel disappeared.  He swam forward hesitantly and shined the light around.  He appeared to be in a large chamber.  Above him the light shone on ripples.  There was a surface—there was an air pocket.

He waited a couple minutes even though he could tell he was now in less than ten feet of water, which was too shallow for a decent safety stop.  He checked the time on his tank: thirteen minutes.  He decided to surface.  He poked his head above water, the flashlight revealing only rock walls and the lip of a rock in front of him.  He might be able to crawl onto it.  He held the regulator close to his mouth and took a very small, tentative breath of air.  When he didn’t choke, he took a deeper breath.  It was breathable air.  At least for a short amount of time.

He turned off the flow to his tank to preserve what was left and then hauled himself out of the water.  He shuffled out of the tank and swapped his flippers for the water shoes he’d clipped onto the suit.  It was completely quiet in the cave except for a soft, steady dripping noise.  He shone the flashlight around, trying to see if there was anything written on the walls or a sticker with the words “You are here” on it.

What he did find was a basin hewn into the rock wall at about shoulder height.  He walked closer to it and found it filled with a liquid.  He pulled off one glove and touched the liquid.  It was oily and smelled vaguely like kerosene.  The dripping sound was the result of the same liquid dripping out of the wall and into the basin.  Cut into the wall next to the basin was a small shelf.  On it sat a sharp rock and a flint stone.  The dust on the shelf looked disturbed.

Castiel picked up the flint and rock, tucked the flashlight in between his head and shoulder, and started striking a spark toward the basin.  Suddenly, one of the sparks caught and a flame burst from the surface of the oil.  Fire raced down the length of the basin, disappearing down a tunnel and lighting the way.  The source of the dripping liquid was far enough away not to catch fire, but the drops lit just before they fell into the fire.

The initial burst of flame had already fallen away quite a bit.  Castiel realized most of the basin must be filled with water and the flammable liquid was burning on top of it.  He could tell it was going to burn itself out in a fairly short amount of time.  While an ingenious pre-electricity way of lighting a room, it also seemed terribly inefficient.  Until he realized that if Dean had come through here, the drip in the wall had only had about a month and a half to replenish the basin, and he had no idea how large the basin was.

Castiel waited a few moments to see if the fire would burn its fuel out immediately, but it stayed steady.  He then turned off his flashlight and hesitantly stepped into the cave.  It led straight back into the earth, not turning or going up or down.  After a few minutes Castiel heard a whooshing sound.  He froze, poised to run back the way he had come, but it was just the flame completing a circuit and filling in the basin on the other side of the tunnel.

With both basins lit he could see quite well, but was a little nervous from the heat wafting in on him from both sides.  Fortunately after only a couple more minutes of tentative walking, the tunnel opened onto a large cavern and the basins followed the circle of the walls, spreading out and away from him.  Castiel stepped forward, his mouth agape at what he saw.

A huge, columned temple appeared to be floating over a pool of water giving off a pale blue-green light.  The light caused the white marble to glow blue.  All around the pool the ground was covered in gold and ivory and brass and silver and copper items, gleaming in the firelight.  Castiel stepped close to the pile of treasure and carefully extracted a large, heavy, flat piece of decorative art.  It had been shaped into a creature with many limbs with small circles molded onto each.  It looked like an octopus.  It was also easily worth thousands of dollars if the gold was melted down.  Not that he would.  He set the piece down and walked closer to the temple.

Now he could see that the floating was an optical illusion.  Thick rock pillars had been set at angles underneath the structure and anchored into the walls of the pool.  The reflection from the water and the way the stone blended with the rest of the walls made the pillars all but disappear from a distance.  The light in the pool had to be caused by some kind of bioluminescent microbe.

Castiel walked around the pool, looking for a way to access the temple.  There were no stairs or bridge and it was much too far away to jump.  As he circled, he stopped to examine a piece of the treasure every now and then.  Every ancient culture was represented.   Every ancient culture.  Not just the ones in the corner of the world ruled by Greece or Rome.  Not just the ones along the Silk Road.  Not even just the contemporaries of the Enochians.  There was a Byzantine helmet and a Sanskrit idol.  There was an ancient Greek urn and a Chinese jade dragon.  There was an Olmec jadeite mask and an ancient Egyptian cartouche.  There was an Aboriginal boomerang and a Tinglit copper tool.  It was exactly like going through one of his old textbooks on ancient peoples of the world.

Unless this was the collection of a highly eccentric modern day collector, which he seriously doubted, this completely blew apart the current understanding of the history of the world and the contact the global community had with each other.  At the very least, it proved that the Enochians had traveled to every corner of the earth.  How did no one know about this?  Granted it was in a hole in a fairly deep amount of water, but no one had noticed the entrance before?  He supposed it wasn’t completely unfathomable.  It had taken two thousand years for the ruins of a tower to be found.

Castiel wondered if he was the first human to ever see it in millennia.  Maybe Dean hadn’t made it this far.  Wouldn’t it have made the news otherwise?  If he revealed this to the world, he might have saved his reputation, even his career.  Had he found it and then run off to South America without telling anyone?  Why would he do that?

Because he was looking for something greater.  If he revealed this to the world, it would make it difficult for him to continue his journey.  Particularly if the map to the Godland was here.

Cas whirled around to look at the temple, forgetting the silver ring he’d just tried on.  The map.  What if this really was Point A?  What if this was “A finding of the map?”  Would it lead to the key and the door and…the Godland?

Castiel renewed his search for a way into the temple.  He attempted to step onto one of the slanted pillars, but his foot slid on a smooth surface made slicker by an accumulation of algal build up.  He circled again looking for a rope or handholds in a pillar or the entrance to another room.  He found none of those, but did look more closely at a section of wall not too far from the golden octopus that looked smooth and even instead of the natural bumpy appearance of a rock wall.  After picking his way through the treasure, he could tell that the smooth section had been made by human hands and that text had been carved into it.  There was a passage of Enochian written on the wall.  He was excited for a moment until he remembered that the only person who could read the goddamn language had gotten his fool ass lost in an Amazonian jungle.

Cas stared the text and chewed on his lower lip.  He had to squint a little to see it.  He glanced at the basin under the text; the flames looked smaller.  The layer of fuel was running low.  He’d be stuck with nothing but his flashlight before too long.  He inhaled deeply and decided he had better try his best to figure out what was on the wall.  He’d hate to leave here empty handed.  He knew he could always come back with more equipment, but it would be nearly impossible to do without help.  He didn’t want to tell anyone about the cave until he recovered Dean—alive or his body.

He started by trying to trace the doodads’ pattern around the right letters, but he remembered that Dean had said he often had trouble doing it from the right way around.  Unfortunately, Castiel didn’t have a mirror on him.  Then he remembered, his compass!  He unclipped the compass from the belt at his waist and pressed the spring loaded clasp.  The lid popped open revealing his compass, and the underside of the lid was a mirror.  He grinned excitedly as he turned around and held up the mirror to the writing.  He had to step forward, away from the wall, a few feet in order to fit the passage in the small mirror.  In reverse, the pattern of the looping doodads and letters jumped out at him.  He remembered Dean had taken the letters both above and below the line, but he couldn’t quite remember how he had pieced them together.  He should probably write them down and try to work it out, but the light from the basin had already grown noticeably dimmer again.

Castiel sounded potential words out as his eyes flicked over the letters.  The problem was that he had a very limited vocabulary when it came to Enochian and a five year gap from the last time he’d studied it.  He wished he’d taken more time to study the process Dean had used to figure out the language, but how he was supposed to know the crackpot archaeologist was going to be right about a hidden treasure map in a language nobody but he could read?

Then he saw it: North.  That was the word for the cardinal direction north.  He knew it.  And he knew that one…it was like a tool.  An ancient tool.  What tools did the ancients have?  Hammers, inclined planes, levers…Lever!  Castiel had no idea what any of the other words meant, but he knew it was talking about a “north lever.”  He stepped down off the treasure and followed his compass to the north.  At least he hoped it was north and the walls weren’t packed with iron ore.

When he reached the North wall, he looked around for a lever.  He looked around the edge of the pool and all of the support beams.  He nudged a foot against one or two of the beams, but they didn’t budge.  He dug through the pile of treasure to see if it had been buried.  Finally, he looked up.  He started when he saw that the roof of the cave was covered in huge, vicious looking spikes.  He suddenly felt nervous to be standing under them.  In amongst the spikes, eight large, flat rods of stone stuck out perpendicular to the floor at the eight points of a compass.  He knew that the entrance to the cave was about eighty feet below the lip of the drop off.  He had swum up the tunnel for a little bit, so that meant that the lever was probably no more than sixty feet off the ground.  No problem for a professional rock climber.  Who had his equipment with him.

Castiel decided the water shoes had enough of a grip on them and removed the belt with its attachments from his waist.  He clipped the camera onto the zipper pull tab of his suit, just in case the view from the top was worthwhile.  Then he reached up and took hold of one of the many grips on the rough rock wall.  He easily pulled himself up several feet.  He didn’t even have to stray far from his target because the rock offered him plenty of foot and hand holds.  He reached the top in less than two minutes, made sure he had secure placement of his feet, and then reached out with a hand to pull on the lever.  It didn’t move.  He leaned out and pulled harder.  He thought he felt it move just a bit, but he knew he would never have the leverage from his current position to get it to move (ironically enough).

Castiel inhaled deeply and closed his eyes to center himself.  Then he opened his eyes and reached out to put both hands on the bar of rock.  Then he carefully removed his feet from the wall so that he was hanging from the lever.  It still didn’t move.  He made a face and began to inch his way along the bar toward the end.  About halfway there he felt the lever start to move.  He was almost at the end when the whole thing dipped slowly but steadily down.

Almost immediately a loud grinding sound like rock moving over rock echoed around the cave.  It took Cas a moment to notice, but then he saw that the beams under the temple were moving.  Some were pulling into the wall and others were pushing out.  The temple was slowly rotating and lowering.  After a couple minutes, in which Castiel’s grip started to strain, the temple came to rest at the level of the ground, the front of it butted up against the lip of the pool.

“Awesome.”

Castiel started to inch his way back toward the wall.  When he was almost there, the lever started to raise and the loud rock grinding started again.

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me!”

Castiel grabbed for the wall and scrambled down it quickly, scraping his nails bloody as he slid more than climbed down the wall.  He jumped from about ten feet up and tucked and rolled onto the hard ground.  It jolted his shoulder painfully, but he ignored it and ran toward the temple, which was pulling away from the ground again.  He launched himself off the edge and grabbed onto a part of the rising monument.  He forced his screaming muscles to pull himself up and then lay on the floor panting while the temple settled back into place high above the pool.

He only allowed himself a minute to recover as he knew he was racing against the light now.  He’d left his flashlight attached to his belt which was on the ground under the lever.  He checked his nails as he stood up.  The three main fingers on each hand had chips in the nails and the skin had been scraped off the tips, but fortunately he hadn’t completely cracked or split a nail.  It was more irritating than painful.

Castiel finally looked up and around the temple.  The whole thing looked like it had been carved from one single slab of perfect alabaster marble, which was impossible of course.  There was no way a piece of marble that big would have fit through the cave entrance, but its connections were flawless and made the structure look seamless.  Intricate shapes and patterns and people and animals and flowers had been delicately carved onto every surface.  He could spend a year examining the temple and still not see everything.

He was tempted to hurry back to civilization and tell everyone what he had found so that he would have the time and equipment to study it properly, but he couldn’t waste this opportunity to search for what had brought him here.  He wasn’t an archaeologist or anthropologist by trade and he wasn’t affiliated with any school.  More than likely if he reported the site, he’d be given a handshake and sent on his way, never to see it again until it was behind glass in some museum.

There was only one structure in the temple and Castiel walked to where a dais covered in a dome on ten foot tall pillars stood center stage.  He walked up three steps and found that it was much more difficult to see in the slightly enclosed space, but the lectern at the center was still quite visible.  There appeared to be a stone book carved onto the top of the rock lectern.  There was nothing written on it.  Castiel searched the walls, squinted his eyes at the roof of the dome, and then peeked underneath the lectern.  There was nothing.  Castiel’s brow creased in confusion.  There was no way someone had gone to all the trouble to make this purely for decoration.

Cas decided to look at the carved book one more time before starting a search of the temple itself.  He hadn’t noticed anything else present in the temple other than the dais, but if there was nothing here, there had to be something somewhere else.  He leaned over the book and examined its surface closely.  Nothing seemed unusual, except perhaps there was a dent in the middle?  He reached out to touch the dent and realized that it wasn’t the stone itself, but the layer of dust on top of it.  Something—or someone—had disturbed the blanket of time that had settled over it.  Recently, too.

He bent even closer and saw that there was a small hairline crack down the middle of the book.  Or maybe it wasn’t a crack.  Castiel attempted to insert his fingernails in the crack and pull the two sides apart.  His chipped nails slipped and he hissed in pain as his raw fingertips scraped against the rock.  He shook his hands out to dispel the pain, and then walked to the side the lectern.  He grabbed onto the two ends and attempted to pull it from one side.  He put his weight into it and grunted as he yanked back hard a couple of times.  He felt the rock slide, just a fraction of an inch, but it was enough that he could stick the tops of his fingers in the crack and push the stone book open.

His heart sank when he saw that the space was empty.  Of course if there had been a map and Dean had been here, he had taken it.  Then he noticed the picture etched into the surface of the lectern.  There were Enochian characters and random clusters of points.  The fuck kind of map was this?  He squinted to see them better, and then realized the light was nearly gone.  He quickly unclipped his camera and took several pictures with the flash on from various heights and angles.  Then he stepped back and started to close the book.  It wouldn’t move easily, so he decided to abandon it before he got stuck on the temple platform with no light.

When he reached the edge of the temple, he realized he was in quite a pickle.  He was elevated, which would enable him to jump farther, but he still thought he was too far away to reach the floor even with his hands.  Also, if he did reach it, it would be a hard fall from twenty feet.  He could break something or smash his head.  He contemplated just dropping into the water.  The walls of the pool looked similar to the rest of the cave—in theory he could climb out easily.  But if the walls were slippery or he couldn’t find any holds, he would starve in a cave in the dark.  Plus, he had no idea what kind of ancient microbe was lurking in the pool; it might kill him dead months from now.

Castiel did another circuit around the temple.  There were no materials he could use to get safely back to the cave floor.  He already knew he couldn’t walk down the beams because he would slide right off them.  He was starting to think he was going to have to make a jump for it when it occurred to him that “sliding down” was technically the way he needed to go.  He circled the temple again, nervously eyeing the dwindling basin flames as he searched for the beam that ended closest to the lip of the pool.  He found one that he thought was no more than his height away, and then climbed over the side of the temple platform.

He carefully let his knees slide over the sides of the slippery beam, and then dropped down and wrapped his arms around it.  He didn’t move.  He jerked his body a little bit, and then started to slide down.  He picked up pace alarmingly fast.  He closed his eyes and squealed as he zoomed down the beam, and then squawked when his butt smashed into the wall.  He stayed still for a moment to make sure he had completely stopped moving.  Then he peeked his eyes open.  He was about thirty feet above the water, clinging to the beam like a baby koala.  Very carefully he got his feet and hands under himself and then stood up.  He turned around very, very slowly, and then reached up to the top of the pool.  It was easily within reach.  He hauled himself up and out and then lay flat on the floor, letting out a huge sigh of relief.

Cas got to his feet, made a disgusted face as noticed the trail of slime down the front of his suit, and then picked his way over to where he had left his belt and tools.  Just as he snapped the belt into place, the flames in the basin guttered and went out.  He turned his flashlight on and walked very slowly and carefully out of the room so that he wouldn’t accidentally fall into the pit.  There was an ambient light from the pool helping to guide him, but for some reason he didn’t trust it.  He made his way back through the tunnel and found himself in the chamber with the pool that led to the underwater tunnel and the way back to the surface.

In five minutes he was back in the water, and in another ten he was breaking the surface of the Mediterranean Sea next to his borrowed boat.  The sun was barely midway into morning.  It was strange.  He felt like he’d been in another world for a long time.

He had a little trouble pulling himself onto the boat; his arms were absolutely spent.  He shed his equipment and sat wearily against the side of the boat.  With a little trepidation he picked up the camera and switched it to view mode.  His heart plummeted to his stomach when the screen revealed a dark, murky blur.  Then he realized that was his first shot of the lighthouse ruin.  He scrolled through his shots, some of which came out halfway decent, and then he scrolled onto the first shot of the map.

The flash had done its job.  The images of the map were bright and clear.  He was still hesitant to call it a map though; there was nothing but little groups of dots and a few Enochian words.  He’d probably be able to translate them when he got back to his hotel room, but unless Dean’s poems revealed some clue as to how to read the map, he’d hit a dead end.

Maybe he should report the cave and enjoy his fifteen minutes in the limelight.  He sighed as he pulled a little ice chest toward himself.  No, he’d already decided to find Dean first and there was no doubt that announcing the find to the world would hinder that goal.  He popped the top on the ice chest and drank half a bottle of water.  Then he ate some labneh with fresh pita bread.  He dropped his head back against the boat and savored the salty and tangy cheese.  He loved Lebanese food.  As he ate, the sun reflected off something on his finger.  He turned his hand over to investigate.

Castiel sat up straighter and let out a squeak of surprise.  He was still wearing the ring he’d tried on down in the tomb.  It was a simple silver band, and yet it was made up of dozens of extremely fine filaments twisted together.  He did have a second tank of air, so he could go back down and return it.  Then he figured since the tomb didn’t Cave of Wonders him a la Aladdin, it was probably okay if he held onto it.  Heck, it might be the only proof the cave existed since there was always the possibility that when he tried to show others where it was it would have mysteriously disappeared.  That seemed like a reasonable enough justification for grave robbing.  Then again, he wasn’t sure the place was a tomb.  He hadn’t seen a sarcophagus or anything similar.

Castiel twisted the ring around his finger.  He wondered if Dean had snagged anything while he was down there.  He wondered what Dean would say if he knew Castiel had pinched something, however unintentionally.  Then he wondered why he gave two flying figs what Dean Winchester thought about anything.

~~~

Back in his hotel room, after a shower and an unintentional nap, he fired up his laptop and Dean’s tablet.  He’d found Point A, and now he had to determine where Point B was. Then he would know where to look for Dean.  If Dean could figure out where to go from here, then so could he.  Well, maybe.  He’d never have been able to find Point A without Dean doing most of the work.  But Dean had done most of the work for the next location too.  He just needed to figure out how to hack Dean’s brain.  Or what Enochian dot art meant.

Castiel started by clicking on every single journal entry to see if he could find the short fragments that were meant to be clues to the poems.  He labeled the Barringer Poem clues, and then identified seventeen other short recordings.  One of them he was pretty certain was just Dean’s grocery list, but he marked it anyway.  He tried to match the fragments with the lines of the two remaining poems, but there were only a couple that he thought might even be remotely related.  Unless he knew what Dean had used to make his interpretations he had no chance of deriving the answer himself.  The only recourse left to him was to figure out his stupid code.

Two hours later, in a fit of desperation, Castiel found himself trawling the chat boards of a Dr. Sexy, MD community forum.  He ran a hand down his face as he read another rant about how Nurse Angel was ruining the whole show by coming in between Dr. Sexy and Dr. Piccolo’s epic love.  Cas had never seen the show, but from what he had gleaned after only thirty minutes of piecing together the plot, Dr. Sexy and Dr. Piccolo could probably stand to spend some time apart.  In fact, it would probably be to everyone’s benefit if all the characters found jobs at different hospitals.

He forced himself to commit to at least another half hour of research, such as it was, and twenty minutes later, it paid off.  In a thread about “Most Shocking Episodes EVAR” (emphasis not his), he spotted a person who used abbreviations to refer to all the characters.  One sentence in particular stuck out: “When DS cheated on Pic, I completely flipped my shit.”  He clicked over to the Directions spreadsheet.  There was Dean’s code: DS cht Pic.  Dr. Sexy cheated on Dr. Piccolo.  After the painful task of reading through most of the thread, he finally discovered the name of the episode.  It was the third episode of the ninth season, but those numbers didn’t compute to a journal entry date.

Cas strummed his fingers on the desktop, and then he looked up Dr. Sexy, MD on IMDB.  The original airdate for that episode was October 19, 2015.  There was a journal entry for that date that he had marked as a poem piece.  He fist pumped and hissed, “yes,” in victory.  He quickly added the recorded phrase next to its correlating line.  Only seven more to go.  Castiel’s face fell.  He had seven more Dr. Sexy references to figure out.

After grabbing a couple of tiny bottles of whisky from the mini bar, he settled down for a nightmare inducing foray into the Dr. Sexy fandom.  He sorted through all the conversations user Sexcolo Only posted in because s/he used the same abbreviations as Dean.  Part of him wondered if Sexcolo Only was Dean.  He hoped not though because they seemed like a real crackpot, and not in a sexy archaeologist kind of way.  After what may have been the longest hour and a half of his life, he had seven of the eight lines matched.  Unable to read through any more inane drivel, he just scrolled through the list of airdates to see if he could find one in the journal entry list.  He focused on seasons nine and ten as all the other episodes referenced had been from those seasons.  Finally he hit on one that he hadn’t marked as being a poem fragment due to its length, but as soon as he heard it, he knew it was the right match.

“Not the original ending.  A part of me wonders if any of this is even all that close to the original.  If it’s not, I could wind up looking in the wrong spot.  I could misinterpret an instruction and get myself killed.  The only thing I can hope for is that the map eliminates the need for the Silva Poem altogether.”

There was a crunching sound as Dean ate something.  “I’ve been giving some thought as to why there are no mentions of the Godland anywhere in the ruins of Enoch.  I think they were erased by the steady stream of conquerors the area saw.  Either that or the Enochians deliberately erased all traces alluding to the Godland to prevent it from falling into the powerful hands of untrustworthy outsiders.  I know Alexander the Great conquered the region in three hundred something BCE…”

“Three thirty-two,” Castiel said.

“But I don’t think they hid from him.  The whole area didn’t resist his advances until…”  Dean grunted.  “Something car related…gasket, wheel, pedal…”

Castiel gave the tablet a look.  “Are you trying to remember Tyre?”

“Tyre.  That’s it.  They put up a fight for some reason.  And paid for it in the end.  Kind of makes one wonder that if Alexander the Great had lived long enough to see his empire crumble, would history remember him by a less sycophantic name?  I really wonder what he would have done if he’d known about the Godland.  I feel like he wouldn’t have let some puny Himalayan mountains and a whiny army deter him.  But that’s beside the point; the Enochians didn’t hide it from him.  I think it didn’t happen until Ze Romans arrived.”

Cas snorted in amusement at his use of a German accent to refer to the Romans.

“Who was it?  Not Caesar but that guy who stood against him.  Funny name…”

“Pompey,” Castiel said.

“Like, really funny.  Almost like being named Arrogant Asshat.”

“Or…Pompey?”

“What was it?  Arrogant, narcissistic, prideful, pompous, Pompey!  There we go.”

Castiel rolled his eyes.

“Yeah.  He was a badass general.  Took shit left and right, expanded the Empire—”

“Republic,” Castiel corrected.

“Republic, I mean.  Not an Empire yet.  But Pompey pulled Lebanon in, in…”

“Sixty-four BCE.”

“Let’s see, Cesar bit it in forty-four, so we gotta back it up.”

“Sixty-four.”

“Pompey got whacked in forty-eight…”

“Sixty-four.”

“And had a triumvirate or two and a triumph or three.  Back it up…”

Castiel almost picked up the tablet and shook it.  “ Sixty-four .”

“Sixty…Ah, I don’t remember.”

Castiel let out a frustrated growl and threw his hands in the air.

“Whenever.  Sixty something when Pompey conquered Lebanon and Syria, I think that’s when the Enochians started scrubbing their records.  But, they never changed their writing system.  They were always elitist prigs in that regard.  But if their language is so difficult to read, especially without instruction, why did they feel the need to hide all mentions of the Godland?”

Castiel opened his mouth, but Dean cut him off, “I’ll tell you why.”

“They did it because the Godland is real.  Nobody goes through all the trouble to hide something that’s not even real.  Just a fable or a moral tale.  They knew it was real and they knew that it could never be put into the hands of the unworthy.”

Dean was quiet for a moment and then began crunching on his snack again.  “Who’s to say I’m worthy?  I haven’t really done much with my life from a personal standpoint.  I haven’t been a particularly good person for that matter.  I mean, I’m not a bad guy, but I’m sure as fuck not a saint.  I hope there’s not some sort of mystical litmus test at the end of this.

“‘A melding of the body, a meeting of the mind, a mating of the soul.’  If the first challenge is a test of the body, as the poem suggests a very deep dive to find a hidden underwater cave, and the second test is a riddle for the mind…what could the third test be?  How does one…a god…test the soul?”

Dean crunched—to Cas’ ears—thoughtfully.  Castiel ran his hand over his mouth as he watched the seconds tick away on the recording.  Then the sound of a squeaky chair moving upright and feet hitting the floor startled him.

“Ah well.  There’s no point worrying about Point C if I haven’t even found Point A yet.  I’ll worry about it when I get there.  I’m usually pretty good at talking my way into places.”  Cloth whispered as Dean leaned forward to stop the recording.  “Oh, yeah.  Sixty-four.”

The recording ended and Castiel laughed.  He ran a hand through his hair and sat back in his chair.  Dean Winchester was a peculiar man.  He leaned back more, allowing the chair to bend and support his weight.  The sun had set while he’d been working and he’d never turned on the lights in his room.  As a result, he could see the stars in the night sky fairly clearly.  His hotel was a resort right on the beach and he’d paid for an ocean view room.  The lights of the city were all behind him and the blackness of the sea helped combat some of the light pollution.

Castiel stood up and opened the door to his balcony.  He breathed in the warm, fragrant air and leaned on the railing.  He gazed up at the stars.  He couldn’t tell if they were the same or different from what he would see in Austin.  He never paid attention to the sky; he was always looking down at the ground.  Which was probably odd for a professional rock climber.

His eyes searched the sky for the one constellation he knew: Orion’s Belt.  He couldn’t even recognize the whole constellation, just the three stars in the middle.  He didn’t see it in the summer night sky over Beirut.  He shook his head at what he did see.  He never understood how people saw constellations in stars anyway.  It was completely arbitrary what stars they connected together as far as he could tell.  Just random clusters of dots.

Castiel stood up straight.  Random clusters of dots…

He walked back into the room and retrieved his waterproof camera.  He’d already downloaded the pictures onto his laptop, Dean’s tablet, and a thumb drive for safe keeping.  He carried the camera out onto the balcony and looked up at the night sky, and then down at the pictures of the map.  The map wasn’t random dots, of course not.  They were star constellations.  How else would an ancient people be able to navigate across oceans and around the world?

Castiel smiled self-deprecatingly.  “I wonder if it took you this long to figure it out, Dean.”

~~~

The captain came on the speaker to announce that they had reached cruising altitude and that passengers were free to use their electronic devices.  Castiel already had his open and was quadruple checking his theories of where Point B might be located.  If he discovered a mistake or second guessed himself, it was kind of a little too late as he was already on a plane to Colombia. He suspected the Temple of the Disciple was actually in the Brazilian Amazon, but the Vasquez Cobo airport in Colombia was physically closest.

Castiel had spent the day after his epiphany about star constellations trying to decipher the Enochian symbols associated with each diagram on the map.  He knew that depending on where someone was in the world and what season it was affected what constellations could be seen and their orientation in the sky.  He’d assumed that the Enochian characters were a means of orienting oneself before following the map.  The problem was that only one word from the map appeared in any of the extant text samples and no one knew what it meant.

He’d sorted through all of Dean’s notes on the Enochian language, but if he’d made a dictionary of some kind, he’d kept it in his head.  Cas had turned to the Internet and the research of Enochian scholars around the world.  He’d even emailed a couple of professors to ask if there was lexicon of Enochian words or phrases that weren’t associated with the Rosetta Stone translation.  Before he received replies, however, he came across an amateur website for a group of live action role players (whatever those were) who based their fictional world on Enochian culture.

What had caught his eye was that they had an Enochian word for each month of the year.  He’d spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out what logic they had used to assign the words, which were not a part of any historical Enochian text sample and yet, some of their words matched the words on the frickin’ Godland map.  He’d already started to feel like an idiot for spending so much time on something that had clearly just been made for shits and giggles, when he’d finally seen what Dungeon Master Carpellian had seen.  The words did not consist entirely of letters…there were also numbers.

Enochian script twisted and curled much like Arabic making it difficult to distinguish individual letters in long words and sentences in particular.  Combined with his assumption that words would only have letters in them, he’d completely misread all of the words.  Once he knew that each of the fantasy words contained a number, he was able to determine that the group had recognized the number in the real Enochian word (no scholars ever had) and created their words by simply swapping a known Enochian number for all twelve months.  There was no doubt that while the role play group had someone very clever in their midst, the words, aside from the one real one they based everything else on, were fake.

Castiel could now recognize that the letters in front of the number was the word “cold.”  The letters succeeding it were reminiscent of the word “passing,” as in time passing.  Essentially the word read “cold two time.”  The second time of the cold.  Month two of the cold season.  The fantasy group had simply traded out the Enochian number two for numbers one to twelve to match with the modern Gregorian calendar.  However, that would mean there were twelve months of cold.

On the map, now that he could recognize numbers, he could see that the words for hot, rain, and dry preceded the numbers.  The Enochians had apparently separated their seasons into cold, hot, rainy, and dry with three months in each.  He had to hope that they had understood the turning of the world like the ancient Greeks and had compensated for the fact that even though the lunar cycle was twenty-eight days, the solar cycle was not three hundred and thirty-six days, unlike the Islamic calendar.  If their months shifted from year to year, then the placement of the constellations in the sky would not be constant.

With a little more research into Enochian cultural patterns, which he really should have remembered from studying them for years, he felt confident that he had correctly matched up the Gregorian months with the Enochian months.  Now the map told him which month to look for each constellation.  He’d already managed to figure out that the placement of the clusters on the map had made approximations of the continents.  There hadn’t been much continental drift in a mere two thousand years, so Cas decided that they properly aligned with the current global arrangement.

The constellation that had been placed in what Castiel assumed was Enoch itself had the equivalent month of January (or possibly February) next to it.  He’d pitched a fit for a few minutes cursing the fact that it was currently summer and he wouldn’t be able to see winter constellations.  Then he remembered that scientists could use math to figure out not only where stars and planets had been hundreds and thousands of years ago, they could also accurately predict where those stars would be hundred and thousands of years in the future.  They could even predict where they would be from season to season.  Fortunately the shift of stars over thousands of years was only noticeable by small degrees, so he’d felt confident that he didn’t need to look up where specifically a constellation hung two thousand years ago over Lebanon.  Where the stars would be this coming January or February would be close enough.

He’d searched the Internet for depictions of the winter sky over Beirut and finally managed to come across a web site that showed all the major constellations and planets visible on a given night in a certain region.  It took a long time to match the map cluster with a constellation, but at last he’d been confident that it was Andromeda.  Of course he had no idea what that meant in terms of direction.  He looked at the map again, wondering if somebody had to travel to every continent to try to locate the key.  With no other leads to follow, he looked up the constellations in China, North America, Australia, India, South Africa, and Greenland.  Well, it was probably Greenland.  Maybe the UK.

It had taken him the rest of that day and most of the next to identify all the constellations.  They were definitely oriented differently in the night sky than on the map, so clearly one had to be able know what position the constellation took during that month.  But why?  As far as he could tell the stars were just stars in the sky.  They had nothing in common.  Except perhaps they all had a tail or extended arm.  He’d checked to see if they all pointed in the same direction.  They did not.  But then…they were located all around the world.

He’d determined where each constellation pointed in relation to its terrestrial placement. It seemed so obvious he felt foolish.  They all pointed toward the northwest part of the South American continent—right to the Amazonian rainforest.  The map wasn’t a step by step guide on how to find the Temple of the Disciple, it was a simple “If you are here, go this way” instruction.  Surely there had to be more to it than that?  If he’d had to guess, Dean hadn’t waited to figure out the rest.  He’d just taken off for South America with nothing more than an incomplete and inaccurate poem to guide him.

Castiel had packed up and done the same.  It was a long flight; maybe he’d be hit with some inspiration along the way.  He reviewed the Silva Poem and Dean’s interpretation of it.

With ambition and fortitude  Faith in the instructions

I move toward the eternal plane   The key to the Godland

With a stalwart heart but a sinister hand   To the left

I dart to and fro among the perils in my way   Side to side (this is some Indiana Jones shit right here)

Up, up, up and down the path leads me   Reach the top, then come down

God’s enemy serpent, large and flowing   A river

Where sin meets virtue, look up at the pinnacle   At a tributary, high noon or high midnight

I find the beginning is a fitting end Not the original ending

Castiel really wished he had some clue of what Dean was using to make his interpretations.  Some source or a reference to his line of reasoning.  When the plane arrived in Colombia he really had no idea where he would go from there.  Sighing heavily, he put on some headphones and clicked on a journal entry.

“The poems should be taken with a grain of salt as they are not meant to be authorized releases of instructions.  The accounts come from outsiders, people who thought that the Enochian secrets should not remain secrets.  They used flowery language to hide their true intent, and then of course we have to rely on translations into modern language to try to understand them.  The Barringer and Hampi poems are reliable since we have surviving copies from the Enochians’ time.  It’s the Silva Poem that concerns me.

“Even without the map I feel that the key has to be somewhere in South America.  How else would this kid have come across Fafen’s Temple?  We know the Catholics destroyed it, but we don’t where the site of it was.  It had to be in Brazil if some snot-nosed Brazilian kid stumbled across a piece of it.  I know people can travel, but…I just—”

Castiel stopped the recording.  His brows furrowed heavily, he searched through Dean’s notes until he came across a section he’d only glanced over one or two times.  Dean had had a whole theory about Fafen of Enoch, a man who wasn’t referenced in any Enochian text, but was mentioned in a list of crucified Roman prisoners.  He’d written down theories about the man being an emissary or an explorer.  His purpose was to find places to expand Enochian culture or to found a sister city.  Dean took all this from one phrase in a Roman record.  “Fafen of Enoch, sentenced to crucifixion for subversion of the gods abroad.”  It was such a farfetched leap in logic—it was simply storytelling or wishful thinking.

However, at this point it wasn’t about actually finding Point B and the key.  He realized he was now on the trail of Dean Winchester.  And if he was going the wrong way, it didn’t matter.  Castiel’s job was to find the man.  So, he had to think like Dean.  If he thought that Fafen had established a temple somewhere in Brazil, which was subsequently destroyed, then any piece of the ruin found would potentially provide guidance to finding the lost temple.  The lost temple that Dean deemed to be Point B, the location of the key.

With the map pointing to South America and his belief that the temple was in Brazil, it made sense that Dean had traveled there.  But why had he decided it was in the Amazon?  Brazil was huge and had gone through the same European upheavals as basically every other continent.  There could be destroyed ruins anywhere, hidden and covered up by natural disasters, city building, ethnic cleansing…He restarted the recording.

“I feel like this kid never went anywhere in his life.  I can’t find much information on him, but he seems pretentious enough to have studied the indigenous peoples of Brazil just so that he could rip off their culture and plagiarize it.  He probably didn’t even realize that one of the things he found wasn’t native to Brazil.  I wish he hadn’t fucked around with the poem so much though.  The best I can gather is that a river is a landmark.  The Amazon is the most famous river in that part of the world, but unfortunately it’s famous for being the longest.  And it has dozens of tributaries.  Where would I even begin to look?  The map had better offer up a decent clue to that.”

Castiel made a face.  So much for the map being super helpful.  He clicked on another journal entry.  It was silent for a few seconds and then loud rock music burst out of his headphones and into his ears.  He moved to turn it off, but then…

“Back in black!  I hit the sack, I've been too long I'm glad to be back.  Yes, I'm let loose, From the noose, That's kept me hanging about!”

Castiel put a hand over his mouth to keep his sniggering under control.  He was pretty certain that even if he hadn’t been singing in falsetto, Dean still would have been a horrendous singer.  He listened with growing amusement as Dean really got into his performance, he even vocalized the guitar solo.  While Dean distracted him, Cas decided to do a little research on the indigenous peoples of Brazil in case it gave him some insight to how Silva or Dean might have interpreted native poetry.

He was still casually clicking through Wikipedia articles when dinner was served.  Dean had long since ended his concert and Cas was thinking about putting away his research for the remainder of the flight.  He could get a hotel room in Colombia or across the border into Brazil and spend a few days working on it.  Then an Enochian word caught his eye: Manaos.  It was a word they knew from the Rosetta Stone translation.  It meant scribes.  What was an Enochian word doing in an article about Brazil?  As he read on, he discovered that the city of Manaus had been so named in 1832 as an alternate spelling to the name of the indigenous peoples who populated the area before the Europeans had arrived.  One of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon had been…Enochian scribes.

He quickly looked up Manaus on Google maps.  It sat right at the point where the Negro and Solimoes Rivers merged and became the Amazon river.  That could certainly be a tributary and a large flowing river like the poem suggested.  He clicked onto the imagery view just to see if anything jumped out at him.  Something did.

The Amazon, he knew, was a fairly muddy river.  It was famous for a lot or reasons, but being a beautiful, sparkling, clean river was not one of them.  The Solimoes River was no different.  However, the Negro River was a deep blue and contained none of the yellowy-brown mud that clogged the other two rivers.  Not until it met up with them at Manaus.  A clean river met a dirty river.  A pretentious young poet might change that to virtue meeting sin to support the religious allusions he was trying to make.  If he made the “beginning a fitting end,” maybe he just reversed the placement of some of the stanzas.

If Cas started where the Negro and Solimoes Rivers met, then when the moon or sun rose to its pinnacle, it might just…what?  Lead him to the temple?  Sure, why not.  If Dean had drawn any of the same conclusions, that’s where he would have gone.  It was the only lead he had and he was going to have to take it.

~~~

Three days later, Castiel was in Manaus.  He’d had a little trouble getting from Colombia into Brazil, and after that had been cleared up, he’d been unable to obtain a flight to the Amazonian city and had no choice but to take a very long, humid boat ride.  He’d emailed Sam from the holding room at the Vasquez Cobo airport while the American Embassy in Bogota was contacted.  He’d informed him that he had followed Dean’s trail from Beirut to South America and that if he wanted he could concentrate his search from America on the State of Amazonas, Brazil.  He didn’t mention Manaus just yet because he wanted a little time to do some exploring.

After packing a backpack with climbing gear, a light sleeping bag, some food and water, Dean’s tablet and a spare charger, he put on the clothes he had bought in Manaus to go on his trek into the jungle. Unfortunately he was a little taller and larger than the average citizen, so the shorts were a little short and the tank top a little tight.  He strapped a large-bladed knife and an even larger serrated knife onto his thighs.  He put on heavy, waterproof black boots, and then drenched himself from head to toe in bug spray.  After slinging his backpack into place and getting a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he had to chuckle at how dorky and very unsexy he looked.

He informed the bored kid at the front desk of the only hotel in Manaus that he was intending to explore around where the three rivers converged.  If he went missing, hopefully the kid would remember where the weird looking tourist had said he was going.  He left around dawn in order to give himself enough time to make his way across the Negro River.  There was a point of land that stuck right into the center of the rivers, and a small island at the mouth of the Solimoes River.  He decided to try the peninsula since there was some civilization on it and some clearings in the thick bunches of trees.

Castiel made it to the tip of the peninsula well before noon and wondered if there was more to interpreting the poem than simply looking at the sun.  If that was all that was needed, wouldn’t someone at some point have noticed it?  Perhaps they had, and that was why the temple had been destroyed.

Castiel fiddled with the cheap cell phone he’d purchased in Tabatinga, just across the Colombian/Brazilian border.  He had zero service despite using a Brazilian company, but at least he could still play Bee Pollinator offline.  He sat down on the ground, munched on a granola bar, and let the sun climb up the sky.  He was so immersed in getting his bee to pollinate his cabbages that he would have missed the sun’s zenith altogether if a flash of light hadn’t hit him square in the face.

Castiel shook his head to dispel the flashbulbs going off in his field of vision, and then shielded his eyes as he looked west, then north, and then south.  He turned east, and he saw it.  The light reflected off the rivers on either side of him, but at different intensities due to the muddiness of the Solimoes.  The light bent northward and Castiel’s eyes followed it into the thick, untouched rainforest to the east of the Puraquequara River.  He gaped at its vastness, his eyes searching for some other clue before the sun moved and he lost the light path.

The light path, leading up…he traced the light path from the rivers up until they merged in the sky.  “ Up, up, up and down the path leads me ”…His eyes found the pinnacle of the reflecting beams, and then he let them drop straight down.  He marked the point using a tree that was slightly taller than those around it.  He pulled out his cell phone and opened an app that turned his phone into protractor.  By the time he looked up the light beam was gone, but he knew which tree he had been looking at.  He measured the angle from the ground to where he guessed the lights had converged in the sky.  Using the angle and guesstimating how high the top of the beam had been based on the average height of the trees, he determined that the beam had fallen on a place about twenty miles from where he stood.

He knew it was a bad idea, but he made his way back across the Negro River and found someone willing to take him ten miles up the Amazon River.  After getting paid a hefty sum, the boat driver didn’t do more than give a perfunctory warning about him getting off on unsettled land and heading straight into the wilds of the Amazonian rainforest.

The sunlight was cut in half as soon as he stepped underneath the canopy.  The sounds of human life were replaced with the clicking and buzzing of a uniquely evolved ecosystem.  Castiel had never been in the rainforest before even though he had been to South America several times.  He’d trekked the Andes and scaled the Mantiqueira Mountains, but this was definitely a new experience for him.  He found himself jumping with every sound and drip of water.  He forced himself to keep checking his compass to make sure he wasn’t walking in circles, but his eyes kept jumping around frantically, convinced that everything was moving.  Finally, in a bid to distract himself, he connected his headphones to the tablet and played the journal entry that was clocked at forty-five minutes.

“Captain’s log.  Star date…”  Dean sighed heavily.  “Fuck it.  It’s September 18, 2016, and I’ve lost everything.  I was called to the President’s office and accosted by everyone in my department.  I was called a hack, a fraud, a delusional joke, a media whore, a two-bit treasure hunter.  Not one person stood up for me.  Not one.  Victor didn’t say anything against me, but he sure as fuck didn’t stand up either.”

Dean continued on, describing how each person he thought to be a friend or at least a trusted colleague criticized and attacked him for over an hour.  People he had shared his theories with who had reacted with curiosity and pushed back with questions to make him work through his research and logic, but never once accused him of falsifying anything.  His research into monster stories and urban legends was brought up as well even though he had never presented any of that to his students or for publication as anything more than myths and legends.  The fact he believed in some of it really shouldn’t have factored into whether or not his Godland research was legitimate or not.

Dean talked about the process of cleaning out his office.  How they’d only given him fifteen minutes and no help.  He’d had to make on the spot decisions about which of his personal effects and notebooks and artifacts had been important enough to grab.  He’d left his degrees hanging on the wall.  He’d sat on the steps of the Finnerman Building, surrounded by his life’s work, as his students walked by him on their way to class.

Castiel swiped angrily at the tears that fell from his eyes as Dean’s voice broke with the misery of recalling the pitying and scornful looks of people who had been on waitlists to get into his classes and now couldn’t even say a word of solidarity or encouragement to him.

“Maybe I could have saved my reputation—what was left of it—if I’d presented my theory for reading Enochian.  I probably could have worked out some deal.  Probably nothing more than a better severance package.  Maybe saved myself a public disgrace.  But hell, they wouldn’t have listened to me.

“To be honest I’m not really that upset by it.  They were mostly just a bunch of stuffy, unimaginative jerks who cared more about making money than learning anything.  I just don’t want to have to tell Sam.  He warned me and I didn’t listen.  But he knew I wouldn’t stop, so he shouldn’t be surprised when he finds out.  Maybe I’ll make the news and I won’t have to tell him.

“Anyway, I’m going to look at this as a good thing.  Now I’ve got plenty of time to focus on finding the Godland.  I should probably just go out there.  To Lebanon.  To Enoch.  It makes sense to start there.  Would you start anywhere else?”

“No.  Even without your notes, I—”

“Great,” Dean grumbled. “Now I’m talking to myself.”

The recording ended and Castiel’s face was warm with embarrassment.  Why was he talking to a recording?  He started when something scurried by his foot.  It was smallish and furry, but it just had way too many legs.  He jumped again as the detritus on the floor rustled.  He fell into a tree and found himself face to face with a teeny, tiny blue frog with black markings.  He slowly and carefully backed away from the creature.  If there was anything the Discovery Channel had taught him, it was that the smaller it was, the more quickly and painfully it could kill you.

He checked the pedometer on his watch; he’d come about five miles from the riverbank.  He looked around and saw a tree root curved up about two feet off the ground.  He examined it closely for critters, and then sat down to take a water break.  As he sat, he told himself that he was lucky to be here, to experience the wilds of the Amazon while it still existed.  To see nature, untouched by man.  By the time he finished his water, he’d almost convinced himself.  Then his eyes focused on a tree branch about fifteen feet away.  The largest snake he’d ever seen outside of a zoo sat placidly on the branch, its little snake eyes staring right at him.

“Okay,” he said just to hear something human.  He stood up slowly, turned around, and started walking again.  He was too on edge to listen to any more journal entries; he wanted to keep his hearing unimpeded.  After another four miles of walking more or less in a straight line toward the northwest, he came across absolutely nothing that wasn’t miles and miles and miles of dense, untouched rainforest.  He kicked at a rock in disappointment.  What had he really been expecting though?  He’d follow a random sunbeam into the frickin’ rainforest and just happen to come across an ancient temple built by a civilization that existed on the other side of the planet?

Castiel cocked his head as he looked at the stone he had kicked.  He walked over and picked it up, but the smooth, grey rock cut in a perfect ninety degree angle lost his interest as he noticed five or six round, flat stones laid together.  He walked over to them and cleared some of the wet, murky plant matter away with his foot.  A few more stones were revealed in what was clearly a non-random pattern.  It was only a few stones wide and few more long, but there was no way they had fallen that way naturally.  Nor did the stones look native to the area.

As he moved forward, he found bigger and bigger chunks of slate and limestone.  He spent the next hour finding the perimeter of the site.  It was only about twenty feet square, not very large for a temple.  There was also no noticeable difference in the shape or number of limbs on the trees, so it must not have been very tall either.  He started to circle around the interior of the foundation, looking for artifacts or some indication that it was a small building of a larger complex.  At the center of the site he found where a large pile of dirt had been disturbed, and then stomped back down.  It had to have been done recently.

With his heart beating excitedly, Castiel dropped to his knees and began to dig.  Dean had been here, he was certain.  He had dug something up and then tried to cover it back up.  Before long he cleared away a two by two foot stone with a large block of text on it.  He swiped his hand over it, clearing away the dirt.  Cas sat back on his heels, his lips parted in awe.  Enochian.  There was a cover stone plastered in Enochian script in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest.  He couldn’t carbon date it to prove its authenticity, but he had spent enough time around ancient relics to recognize the real deal when he saw it.

He dug his camera out of his backpack and snapped several photos.  He started to pull out his compass to use the mirror to attempt to read the text, but then noticed a distinct separation between the dirt and the side of the stone.  It had been moved.  He attempted to get his fingers underneath it, but couldn’t find purchase.  He took the large knife out of its holster on his left thigh and used it as a lever to pry the stone up.  It was much thicker than he had assumed and weighed fifty pounds at least.  Rather than try to slide it to the side, he pushed it all the way to a vertical position and then let gravity take it the rest of the way.  Underneath the cover stone was a hole.

“Oh, hell no,” he breathed.  “No way!” he yelled up into the sky.  “Dean Winchester, I am not going down some creepy hole in the jungle after you!”

He let out a raggedy breath and then considered his options. Unless someone had followed him and then buried him alive, Dean must have come back out of the hole.  Someone had to have put the cover stone back in place.  Grumbling to himself, Cas retrieved his flashlight and shone it down into the hole.  It was a fairly narrow cylinder of rock, not earth.  He was pretty certain that geologically speaking hard rock wasn’t what was right under the ground in the rainforest.  He couldn’t tell how far down it went, but to one side he did spot the start of a spiral staircase carved into the wall.  It curved around and down, past the reach of his light.

He clipped the light to his belt, secured his backpack, and slid the knife back into its sheath.  With a deep breath and a curse for Dean Winchester on his lips, Castiel lowered himself down to the first stair.  It was wide enough to hold him comfortably, but there was no rail.  He could reach across the space and just touch the other side with his fingertips, so he trailed them along the wall as he descended at a slow, careful pace.

The stairs ended at a narrow, short tunnel.  He had to duck his head to walk toward the end of it.  He tilted his flashlight back behind him and confirmed that there definitely was light at the end of the tunnel.  He had no idea where it could possibly be coming from, but he continued to walk toward it.  The tunnel ended suddenly in a small chamber with two openings.  Light came from both of them.  He shone his flashlight around the mouths of the new tunnels looking for writing or markings or some kind of indication of which way he should go.  Maybe he should have read the text on the cover stone.

He mentally sorted through Dean’s notes.  Hadn’t there been something about a direction in the Silva poem?  “To the left,” he believed.  He wondered if Dean had decided that “sinister” had been based on the Latin “sinistra,” meaning left.  Well, he felt confident Dean would have gone left and since he clearly (possibly) made it back out, walking into the left tunnel shouldn’t equal instant death.

Castiel edged very slowly into the tunnel on the left.  He moved his flashlight from the floor to the ceiling to the sides, looking for drop offs, guillotines, or giant saws coming out of the walls.  Nothing happened as the tunnel opened up suddenly upon a massive cave.  The ceiling curved up to about twenty feet above his head and the floor was a dizzying two hundred or more feet down.  The space expanded in front of him far enough that he couldn’t see the other side clearly.  The walls were covered in something—a microbe or algae—that glowed very softly.  It wasn’t producing a bright light, but it was enough that Castiel could see without the use of his flashlight.

Castiel shuffled closer to the edge and looked down.  The rock face had been carved into rows of sharp spikes, each lower row sticking out farther from the wall.  The spikes were clearly honed by human hands into viciously sharp points and offset so that there was no climbing down amongst them without risking falling and being skewered.  There was a series of twelve long, rectangular rocks protruding from the wall to his right.  There were four Enochian words carved at even intervals along the rocks, and they were different on every rock, at least as far as the third rock which the farthest he could see.

Beyond the rectangular rocks there was a narrow ledge running along the wall.  At one point there was a scar in the rock, like something heavy had smashed into it.  He looked to the left and raised his flashlight.  Held against the wall by thick ropes eleven huge boulders were suspended from the ceiling.  If the rope were broken, the boulder would swing across the cavern and smash into the wall.  Castiel shone his flashlight back down onto the cavern floor expecting to see a mangled body.  The floor was made of some kind of white material, which would have made a body easy to see, but there was nothing but pieces of smashed boulder.  The only other blemish on the stark white bottom was a small, dark speck, but he couldn’t tell what it was.  He did noticed that the right wall of the cavern didn’t extend all the way to the floor.  The chamber must be connected to what was through the other tunnel.

Castiel backed out the way he had come in and decided to take a peek in the right tunnel.  It opened onto an identical cavern in size and width, however the wall to his left and the drop off were completely sheer.  There were no stones in the wall or boulders tied to the ceiling.  He walked back over to the left side and squinted to see what was beyond the ledge lined with body crushing boulders.  There appeared to be some sort of platform, but he couldn’t see anything beyond that.

Castiel walked cautiously to the first rectangle stone.  He tapped it with his toe, and nothing happened.  He put a little weight on it, and it suddenly dropped like a pin had been pulled out of a hinge.  And not just that rectangle moved, they all did.  They clacked against the wall with a sharp rock on rock sound, and then slowly returned to perpendicular.  He moved along the stone and tried putting his foot on one of the words; the stones all fell again.  He tried the next word, and again the stones dropped.  When he touched the third word, the stone held.  With his heart in his throat, he put his full weight on the word.  The stone held.  He stepped back onto solid ground and tried to figure out what the four words were, if they were in any particular order, and if they related to the words on the other stones.

He pulled out Dean’s tablet and turned it on.  He looked anxiously at the test before him.  He had little doubt that one misstep on one of the other stones, particularly the ones in the middle, would cause all of them to drop and he would have nothing to hold onto.  A two hundred foot drop was not in any way survivable.

Once the tablet was on, he opened up Dean’s notes to look for something to help him decipher the correct path across the rectangular stones.  He would worry about the boulders if and when he got there.  Then a thought occurred to him.  He walked out of the chamber and around to the other cavern.  The walls were completely sheer and had no beams or ledges to cross the space.  He scratched his chin and walked back to the left cavern.  He observed the “path” to the other side, which required a strong knowledge of the Enochian language.

“Well, fuck this Indiana Jones shit,” he muttered.  He put Dean’s tablet back into the backpack and pulled out his climbing gear as he made his way back to the right tunnel.  He made short work of putting on a harness and finding a good crack to anchor his nut.  He put on gloves and pulled out the seventy meter rope he had packed.  He was usually pretty spot on about eyeballing distances and depths, so he felt confident that he had more than enough rope to reach the bottom.  He clipped himself to the rope and the harness and then backed over the edge.  He walked a few feet down, gave the nut a good tug, and pushed off the wall.  He rappelled the two hundred feet in less than a minute.  He unclipped from the rope and stepped onto a floor made of smooth, solid quartz.  It sparkled in the soft glow of the creatures on the wall.  It was quite beautiful.  The gap between the floor and the shared wall of the two caverns was about three feet, but he didn’t duck under it just yet.

Castiel adjusted his pack on his shoulders and started to walk across the floor.  Halfway across, about where the boulder had smashed into the wall, he saw the large chunks of the fallen boulder and the black object he’d spotted from the other room.  He ducked under the wall, which was about two feet wide and glanced up as he entered the room. Far above him were the stones and the ledge.  He walked over to the object and picked it up.  It was a Samsung cell phone.  The screen had shattered completely off and the casing had popped at at the seam, spilling out its electronic guts.

With trepidation, Castiel searched around the area, looking for…pieces of human.  He saw nothing.  No parts, no blood.  He glanced back up.  Maybe Dean had made a mistake, but somehow managed to keep himself from being obliterated by the boulder.  He kept reminding himself that someone had to have reburied the cover stone, so the odds were good that Dean had made it back out alive.  But if that were the case, why hadn’t he contacted his brother?  He knew there was crappy service out here, especially if one lost their cell phone in an ancient cave of booby traps, but if he’d gotten out he could have reached a landline or a computer at some point.  Unless he’d never made it back out of the rainforest.

Castiel inhaled deeply and decided to deal with one problem at a time.  He put the pieces of Dean’s cell phone into the front pocket of his pack and continued walking to the other side of the cavern.  He looked around, intrigued by the stillness and the quiet of the space.  His footsteps sounded muted and there were no sounds of running or dripping water.  On the other side of the cavern, the wall had again been carved into spikes that made it impossible to climb, but it was only about fifty feet up to the floor.  He hadn’t even noticed that the ground had been on an incline.  He ducked back under the wall, fearful that he would find the spikes on the right side as well and be stuck on the floor.  He might have to go back to the left cavern and figure his way out across the series of riddles after all.

The tightness in his chest loosened when he saw a normal rock wall.  A fifty foot free climb was nothing.  He quickly found some hand and foot holds and pulled himself up.  A fall from thirty feet or higher was pretty much a guaranteed death, so the height wasn’t something to sneeze at, but it wouldn’t stress his strength or stamina much.  Especially with a wall that had large crags in it, giving him plenty of places to rest his weight when needed.

Cas pulled himself on top of the floor and walked forward.  The dividing wall ended, joining the two caverns together.  Castiel was able to see that the third challenge to cross the left side was a series of boards suspended from the ceiling with rope.  He had no idea how the rope, which had to be hundreds if not thousands of years old was still holding together, but it definitely looked unstable—possibly on the brink of disintegration.  He couldn’t tell what one had to do to get across the planks, they were too far apart to safely jump between and he didn’t see any text or symbols on them.  He shrugged.  Not his problem.

He walked toward the single tunnel in the back wall.  He flipped his flashlight on and stepped into the darkness.  The bioluminescent organisms didn’t seem to extend beyond the challenge cavern.  As he walked slowly forward, he could tell that the tunnel opened up onto a large space.  Now he could hear a dripping sound.  He swung his light around until he saw a basin like the one in the underwater cave in Lebanon.  He searched the wall for a moment until he found the flint and stone.  After a couple of attempts the spark caught and the flame began to burn on top of the water, following the path of the basin along the wall of the great chamber he now stood in.  It took about a minute for the fire to complete the circuit and reach the other end of the basin, and when it did, Castiel felt nearly overwhelmed with the majesty before him.

The cave from floor to walls to ceiling were the same white quartz he had just walked on.  It glowed and shimmered in the firelight, surrounding him on all sides and soaring above his head.  At the center a massive tower had been carved out of jasper or malachite.  The swirling patterns of white in the green surface of the stone wasn’t at all random; it had been manipulated to align perfectly to create a mural of wispy humans dancing and frolicking and unless he was mistaken…coupling.  There was a set of narrow, steep stairs leading to the top.  Castiel circled the cavern, but there was no treasure or other structures.  When he returned to the stairs he climbed them to the top.

The stairs led onto a flat surface.  Carved into the back wall was a relief of a man in a style instantly recognizable as that of the one used on the temple walls in the Enoch ruins.  Castiel walked closer to it and removed his climbing gloves before reverently running a hand over the stone.  It was cold and smooth and without flaw.  His eyes caught on a divot in the wall near the figure’s hand.  Castiel ran his fingertips over the carved hand and then the divot.  It was as smooth as the rest of the carving.  It was there intentionally.  The figure had been holding something.  Perhaps a key?

Castiel backed up and sat down on an incongruously roughly hewn bench made of the same rock as the outer caverns.  It poked uncomfortably into his butt, but he ignored it.  He’d hit a dead end.  He could already tell that the tower was bare.  If there were further instructions for the key, they had been carved onto or attached to it in some way.  The map had led him here, but the key was gone and he had no way of finding the door.

Well shit.

Castiel looked at the time.  He was surprised to find that it was almost seven o’clock.  The sun would be setting soon and under the canopy of the rainforest it must already be quite dark.  He didn’t want to risk trying to find his way out of the jungle in the pitch black of night.  He knew the basin would burn out in a half hour or so, but he actually felt safer spending the night in the Enochian temple than above ground with the wildlife.  Besides, he could use the quiet to try to figure out his next move.  He was going to have to revisit the Godland fable and the children’s rhyme, all of Dean’s notes, and the third directional poem.  He hadn’t actually cracked Dean’s code for the third poem yet.  Maybe it would provide him with the clue he needed to figure out where the door was located.

And if he found the door, how would he open it without the key?  No, no…he was not going to get ahead of himself.  He was going to unroll his sleeping bag and hunker down for an evening of study—below the surface of the earth in a long lost ancient temple.  What had his life become?

An hour later with only the light of his flashlight and the tablet to see by, Castiel opened a packet of dried meat and smoked gouda squares.  He’d peed over the side of the challenge cavern half an hour earlier, watching his urine glow in the blue-green bioluminescence as it trickled over the spikes.  He would have felt bad about it, but clearly those caverns had been made with the possibility of blood and guts being splattered everywhere.  Now he was settled on the floor next to the odd bench, using the spare charger to keep the tablet running.  At least it wasn’t cold in the temple.  Castiel put on the headphones and listened to Dean again as he flicked his eyes over the seemingly random mix of letters next to the four lines of the final poem.

“The Hampi Poem was found in the ruins of the Kingdom of Vijayanagar, which existed from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.  That’s obviously too late to have been received from a contemporary of Enoch, but it was written in Telugu, so it could have been a translation of the original Enochian, or a translation of a poem that was translated from Enochian.  The reason I think the Hampi poem is legitimately connected to the Enochians and the Godland is because it outright states it.

“ The map reflects

The door is static

The key can turn

The Godland moves

“It references the map and the key and the door almost three hundred years before the earliest documentation of the children’s rhyme.  Those who have been entrusted with the secret have known a way to get there for millennia.  I don’t know if someone has already made it and the map and the key are gone.  I don’t know if someone has found the door and smashed it in or locked it up even tighter.  This could all be a fool’s errand.  Because I have to be honest at least with myself.  I’m not looking for the Godland to prove my theories correct or to receive credit for the greatest archaeological find in history.  I’m looking for the promise of the Godland.  The gift from the stars.

“Hmm.  I wonder if it’s aliens.”

Castiel snapped his head up.  “What?”

“No, think about it.  We can’t live in their home, but we can receive their gifts if we’re chosen by them?  They’re coming from outer space to bestow their advanced technology on us.  It makes a kind of sense.”

“You’re nuts,” Castiel chuckled and opened up the picture of Dean that Sam had emailed to him.  Seeing Dean’s handsome face didn’t make him seem less crazy for bringing up aliens.

“Okay, maybe not.  But, I mean, are aliens really so farfetched over a supernatural being…or a deity?  Because if you believe the Godland is real, you have to believe in something that science can’t explain.”

“Maybe.  But not little green men.”

“My mom always told me that belief is as dangerous as a weapon.  That a person had to be careful about what they believed in, and they had to feel it in their hearts and souls, not just because it was popular.  Or because they were threatened with ‘believe or suffer for eternity.’  If you’re going to believe in something that you think is worth dying for—worth killing for—it had better be worth your soul.”

Castiel kept his eyes on Dean’s picture as he tapped his fingers along his bottom lip and took in the man’s words.  His mother’s words.  Cas wondered if he’d ever believed in something like that in his entire life.  He didn’t think he had.  His reverie was shattered when Dean suddenly let out a complaining groan.

“Are you fucking kidding me?  Dr. Sexy, it’s clearly a ruse!  A ruse .  Oh my God. Why do I put up with this sh—”  He gasped.  “No.  No!  The Director is alive…No!  No, go back!  No one cares about Charity and her stupid date!  For one thing, who the fuck goes to a rock wall climbing place for a date?”

Castiel tsked in offense.  “I do.”

“Honestly, I’m not saying dinner and a movie; that’s such a crap way to try to get to know someone.  But at least put some effort into it.  Ask them what they want to do for their date.  Really force them to name a hobby or something.  Then when they say something lame like ‘I really love art and attending galleries,’” he said in a high pitched voice.  “You take them to a gallery opening and then when they’re clearly bored you know they’re a dud who lies to tries to make themselves sound better.  Or if it is someone who likes art, well, then I guess you’re stuck with an arty nut for a while.”

“But you’re an archaeologist.  You have to like art a little bit.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m an archaeologist, I should like art, right?  But most of it isn’t made by the common man.  Most of it doesn’t really depict the day to day life of people.  Hell, look at the Renaissance.  It’s touted as having some of the greatest art, but it’s all Christian iconography.

“The reason I became an archaeologist is because I’m interested in people.  How we lived, how we fought, how we communicated, how we evolved.  We’re such a unique species on this planet and every person is a unique part of that mystery.

“I don’t mean in an ‘everyone is a special snowflake’ kind of way…”

Castiel chuckled and ran his finger along the edge of the tablet.

“But…we’re capable of doing such amazing and wonderful things.  And we’re capable of committing the most heinous atrocities.  Sometimes I think that’s why my mother was so willing to believe in all the creepy-crawlies.  Why I do.  It’s easier to believe a monster destroyed your happiness than a person.

“God.  I’ve got to stop drinking before watching Dr. Sexy.  I’m downright maudlin.  Maybe I just need to get laid.  Sausage or tacos, sausage or tacos…”

The recording ended and Castiel shook his head.  Dean was odd.  He was talking about getting laid and then all of a sudden he was wondering what to have for dinner.  And that was after he had an existential crisis and described the best way to figure out what a person was really like was through sneak dating.

The tablet flashed a warning that it was running low on battery.  Castiel decided to pack it in for the night.  He put everything away and set an alarm on his watch.  Then he wriggled into his sleeping bag and settled down to sleep on the smooth, cold stone floor of the tower.  This wasn’t even close to the worst place he’d ever slept.  He situated his head on his arms and closed his eyes.

A moment later his eyes popped open.  “Sausage or tacos!  He’s bisexual…”

For some reason this revelation made his insides squirm and face flush with heat.  He found it difficult to fall asleep, and when he did he dreamed of finding Dean Winchester.  And when he found him, Dean kept trying to give him a key.  It wasn’t the key to the Godland, Castiel knew that much.  But it was a key, and Dean wanted him to have it.

~~~

Waking up in the morning was hard because it was so dark, but he forced himself to sit up and finish his meat and cheese.  He had one bottle of water and two granola bars left.  That should be enough to get him back to the bank of the Amazon River.  If he didn’t get lost.  He could continue his research in the hotel in Manaus.  Hell, he could continue his research in the comforts of his own home.

Cas switched on his flashlight and checked the area carefully to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind.  As it flashed over the bench, something shiny winked back at him.  It wasn’t like the way the stone in the caverns shimmered, it was like a piece of metal.  He moved the flashlight back and saw something down a crack that had split the top of the bench.  It wasn’t wide enough to stick his hands or his fingers down, so he rummaged through his pack until he found one of his wired stoppers.  He stuck it down the crack and snagged a part of whatever was down there.  He pulled the item up and out and discovered a small flip-top spiral notebook.  He shone the light on it and flipped through a few pages.  He instantly recognized Dean’s handwriting.

It was a relief to know that he wasn’t just guessing that Dean had made it this far, but it did put him right back in square one.  Dean wasn’t here and he had no idea where he’d gone.  He flipped through a few more pages, and then turned to the last page.  What was the last thing Dean had written down?

He’d written down the first phrase of the Hampi Poem, “The map reflects” and then circled and underlined it several times.  Beneath that he’d written “Polaris.”  Confused he flipped back one page.  It was a mess of words and arrows and underlines and question marks.  He flipped back a few more pages until he found the source of Dean’s frenzied notes.

“Found the map, found the key.  Find the door?  How?  No more instructions.  The map only leads here.”

So Dean had been the one to find the key in the tower wall.  Unfortunately he hadn’t gleaned anymore information from it than Castiel had.  He flipped back through Dean’s mad scratching.  The last page was the only one that had something underlined and circled multiple times.  He must have figured something out.  The map reflects.  Reflects what?  A person’s true desires?  It reflects a path to the door?  It…it literally reflects.

Castiel dug out his compass.  Dean had speculated that the Enochians hadn’t actually reversed their words when they’d written since good mirrors and reflective surfaces back then were hardly comparable to their modern equivalents.  However, the text was much easier to read when reversed.  It couldn’t just be a coincidence.  And if they reversed their written language, it stood to reason that they might use the same technique for any number of things.

Castiel turned the tablet on in order to view the map on the largest screen he had with him.  He held the flashlight at an awkward angle so as not to shine directly on the mirror or cancel out the screen.  He really ought to wait to do this until he was out of the temple, but he was too excited to test his theory.  He put the tablet on the bench and laid his head next to it so that he could look up in the compass’ mirror.  He had to stretch his arm to its limit in order to fit the whole map in the tiny mirror.  He struggled to hold his position as he looked at the reflected constellations.

He didn’t think they were pointing anywhere new because the constellations would never look like this in the night sky.  Then again, maybe that was the point.  Was it just meant to be the exact opposite spot on the planet from the temple?  Would that be somewhere in Asia?  Then his eyes caught on a familiar pattern.  Not on any individual cluster, but all seven clusters.  Each of them made a point and together they formed the shape of maybe the one other constellation he knew: Ursa Minor.  The most well-known star being the North Star.  Polaris.  Dean had figured out that the map was showing the way to the door as following Polaris.  Was the entrance to the Godland really at the North Pole?  Hundreds of people had been up there on various expeditions, how had anyone not found it yet?  Maybe one really did need the key.  And Dean had it.

Castiel did a final check of his gear, and then walked down the tower stairs and back into the glowing caverns.  He peed over the wall spikes again, and then carefully climbed down the sheer side of the other cavern.  He crossed back to the other side and used the rope he’d rappelled down the day before to help him climb back to the top.  Then he hurried down the tunnel and was relieved to see a square of dim light above the spiral stairs.  He climbed to the top and actually found the intimidating world of the rainforest a comfort.  Humans really weren’t meant to live their lives under the earth, away from the sun.

After a moment of indecision, Castiel put the cover stone back in place and covered it back up with dirt and detritus.  He tried to use his watch to get a read on the geographic coordinates of the temple’s location, but the satellite signal couldn’t penetrate the dense canopy of the treetops.  He carefully tracked his distance back to the river, and recorded the coordinates along the riverbank.  If he or anyone else came here, in theory they should be able to find the temple again by knowing how far into the rainforest it was located and using a compass.  Castiel hurried back to Manaus and made arrangements to go home.  He needed to plan an expedition to the North Pole.

~~~

“I don’t understand,” Sam said, his voice warring between anger and confusion.  “You think my brother never made it out of Brazil, but you still left.”

“No, I…”  Castiel chewed on his bottom lip as he tried to think of the best way to explain it to Sam.  “I’m certain he found a ruin he was looking for.  That’s why I showed you the phone and the notebook.  They’re his, he was definitely there.  I think he also left the temple with a third location in mind of where he wanted to go.  The fact that he never called you is what makes me think that maybe, possibly, something happened to him after he left the ruin.”

“And you didn’t look for him?  See if he got lost on his way out this…ruin.  Whatever it is?”

“I…”  Castiel trailed off.  He hadn’t.  “I thought I knew where he was going.  I’ve actually spent the last four days making arrangements to go there.  My flight leaves for Canada in a few hours.  I just thought you should know what I’d found so far.  It’s just that, based on the way he talks about you—and family in general—in his journals, it seems odd that he wouldn’t have contacted you if he had made it out of the rainforest.”

Sam’s jaw flexed as he repressed his sudden worry and fought against the undesirous thought that Dean might be dead.  Unfortunately, the result was that all that emotion channeled into more anger.

“So why did you leave the rainforest?  Are you chasing after the Godland now too? Do you think with him out of the way you can prove something or claim the glory for the ruin you found in Brazil?”

“No.  Look, Sam.  I actually don’t have any reason to believe that Dean didn’t make it out.  If I was just tracking him and following his trail, the next step for me would be to continue on to the next place his notes indicated he would continue his quest.”

“Canada,” Sam spat.

“Sort of.  Sam, I don’t think he’s dead.  I don’t think he’s stuck in a Brazilian prison.  I think he’s moved on to the next portion of his search.  But.  He would have needed to find a way to get there, bought equipment.  He’s your brother; is there a possibility he would have jumped from one adventure to the next without contacting you?”

Sam shook his head, but didn’t answer verbally.  He chewed on his lip and then ran his hands back through his hair.

“I think you’re right.  Dean would never just leave me hanging like this.  But then…I don’t know.  Sometimes when he gets absorbed in his work.”  Sam walked away and looked out the window over his sink in his Lawrence home.  “He’s been gone for over two months, missing for almost as long.  It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have gotten a hold of me somehow if he was okay.”  Sam let out a humorless laugh.  “He can be a real jerk sometimes though.”  Sam turned back to face Cas.  “You really think he’s still alive?  And in Canada?”

“Um.  Yes.  Well, the North Pole, not Canada.”

“Dean is at the North Pole?”  Sam shook his head.  “He’ll be pissed if the Godland turns out to be nothing more than a precursor to Santa Claus.”

Cas smiled.  “I think it might be a bit more than that.”

Sam crossed his arms.  “So.  That’s where you’re going?”

“Yes.  I would ask that you give me a couple of weeks before you go to the press or the police or anything.”

Sam shrugged a shoulder.  “I doubt anyone would care about a claim that the Godland is up with elves and flying reindeer.  Just answer me this: should I be looking for Dean’s body in Brazil?”

Castiel looked down.  “I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty that Dean made it out.  It’s up to you to decide what you want to do.”

“Well, I didn’t hire you to potentially abandon my brother in the rainforest.”

“Technically you didn’t hire me at all.  I paid my own way.”

Sam made a face, but didn’t argue.

“Sam, if I can’t find him up north after a couple of weeks, I’ll go back to Brazil, okay?  I just need to…run down this last lead.”

Sam nodded, but he looked like he was holding back a lot of different emotions.  “You’re right.  I’m not paying you.  So, you can do what you like.  Thank you.  For at least bringing me word that he was in Brazil, and that he was alive at some point.”

“Sam…”

“Do you still need his notes?” Sam asked, sniffing back the threat of tears.

“I copied everything to my computer,” Castiel said morosely.

“Then it’s okay if I have his tablet back?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, Cas.  Please let me know if you find anything.”

Sam turned around and walked away even though he was in his own home.  Castiel rubbed the back of his head.  He’d thought talking to Sam would bring him some measure of peace, or some hope.  He felt like he’d just confirmed Sam’s worst fears.  He unfortunately didn’t have time to dwell on the conversation or attempt to explain himself better to Sam.  His flight was leaving out of Kansas City at seven o’clock.  Castiel left Sam Winchester’s house feeling awful for causing him pain, but he was determined more than ever to find Dean, and find him alive.

~~~

“Are you sure about this, Cas?”

Luke’s voice buzzed distantly in his ears through the headset over the deafening thump of the chopper blades.  He turned to look at his situational friend.

“Yeah.  I’ve been up here before.  No big deal.”

“With a team, Cas.  No one goes wandering around the arctic alone.  Not unless they’re suicidal.”

“Not suicidal.  I just need to do a little looking around and I don’t want a Russian audience.”

“What are you looking for?”

“You’d call me crazy if you knew.”

“I’m going to call you crazy either way.”

Cas just smiled and looked back down at the white ice and snow flashing beneath him at a hundred miles per hour.

“Look, maybe I should come back for you in two or three days.”

Castiel looked at Luke.  “You have to be the station for at least a week.  Don’t you think your commanding officer would notice if you took a bird and disappeared for a few hours?”

“Yeah, but…sunset is going to start next week, man.  If you wanted to go roaming around the arctic you should have come in high summer.”

“I didn’t know I needed to be here until now.”

“And it can’t wait until next summer?”

“Come on, Luke.  Where’s your survivalist spirit?  I think the military has mellowed you.”

“I’m not mellowed.  I’m just a father now.  You don’t go off and leave somebody’s kid in the middle of nowhere for a week.”

“Well…I’m not somebody’s kid anymore.  Got no parents to worry.”

“Someone would notice you’re missing,” Luke said pointedly.

“Exactly.  So, don’t forget to come back and get me.”

Luke shook his head.  “Is this some sort of mid-life crisis thing?  You hit that point where you realized you can’t rock climb forever?  Life goes on beyond risking life and limb for the thrill of the summit, you know.  You haven’t actually reached the middle of your life yet.”

“Luke, trust me.  This is a completely rational decision that has nothing to do with me worrying that my best years are behind me.  I know thirty is still very young.”

“Thirty?” Luke questioned.  “I thought you were a lot older than that.”

Castiel shot him a dirty look and he grinned back at him.  He brought the helicopter low to the ground and banked to the left, circling a wide swath of ice as he searched for a place to drop Cas off.

“Are you certain there’s only two floating stations up here right now?” Castiel asked.

“Yeah.  One Russian, one American.  The Russian base is empty right now.  They don’t staff it in the summer, just in case all the ice melts away.  Anyone who says global warming isn’t real hasn’t been to the North Pole.”

“Just get me as close to ninety degrees as you can, but still keep me out of sight of the stations.”

“As you wish, man.  But we’re even now, okay?  This goes south and I could get court martialed.”

“Relax.  It’s just for a week.  You go to the station, deliver your supplies, do your military thing, and on your way out you pick me up.”

“It’ll almost be full dark by then.  Don’t waste your flares.  Don’t waste the radio batteries.  And mark down this heading,” Luke said as the helicopter hovered about seven feet over the ice.

Castiel noted the geographic coordinates, which didn’t really make much of a difference since all longitudes converged on the pole.  He unbelted himself from his seat and squeezed past the pilot’s seat and into the back.  He opened the heavy side door and dropped his gear onto the ground.  The wind gusted suddenly and the helicopter shuddered and spun about forty five degrees to the right.  Castiel clung to a handle and waited for the chopper to steady.

“We good?” Castiel asked.

“Yeah, but I’d hurry.”

Cas removed his helmet and set it aside.  Then he tied one end of a short rope to the handle on the outside of the chopper door, and the other end he wrapped tightly around one hand.  He glanced back at Luke, but he was concentrating on keeping the helicopter steady.  He faced the door and sat down on the edge, letting his feet dangle.  Then he pushed off and dropped the few feet into a thick covering of snow that broke his fall quite nicely.  He turned around and walked toward the front of the chopper, pulling the rope attached to the door with him. He yanked hard and got the door to the close.  Then he let the rope go and ran several feet away from the swiftly rotating blades.  He made eye contact with Luke and gave him a thumbs up.  His friend returned the gesture, and then pulled up on the controls, causing the helicopter to rise several feet.  Then it swung gracefully to the right and began moving forward again.  Within a few seconds it was nothing more than a speck on the horizon and the only sound was the howling of the wind.

Castiel walked back over to the large pack that contained his gear and hiked it up onto his shoulders.  He pulled the goggles down from their place on his hat and settled them over his eyes.  He glanced around in a vain attempt to get his bearings.  There was nothing but flat white tundra as far as he could see on all sides.  The sun was very low on the horizon, providing full, but weak light.  He knew that the sun wouldn’t dip below the horizon for some days yet, but the time of perpetual day was quickly drawing to a close.

Castiel pulled out his GPS device and waited for it to locate him.  It probably wasn’t one hundred percent accurate since the satellites rarely passed directly over the axis of the planet.  However, it was good enough for him to make an educated guess as to the location of true north.  He was less than a mile from where he thought he needed to be.  He checked that his clothing was still tucked in and sealed, pulled the bottom of his knit mask up over his chin, mouth, and nose, and then set off for the top of the world.

It had taken him a couple more days to break the third code in Dean’s notes, but it was childishly, almost stupidly simple.  The numbers had simply correlated to the letter of the alphabet and the letters had correlated to a number.  Unfortunately the journal entries for the short poem had all said the same thing: “no interpretation.”  He supposed “the map reflects, the door is static, the key can turn, the Godland moves,” was pretty straightforward.

They’d already figured out the map reflects part, and it made sense that the door stayed in the same place.  It made it possible to locate but still was unobtrusive enough to stay hidden from explorers.  Otherwise someone would have had to have stumbled across it by now.  There was no part of earth left unexplored, except perhaps the deepest trenches of the oceans and no ancient peoples had ever been there.  Perhaps the door was only visible if one had the key.  A key that could turn.

The conditional part of the key turning had him a little concerned.  The key can turn, but that didn’t necessarily mean that it would or had to.  He hoped there wasn’t some sort of weighing of the soul to determine a person’s worthiness.

 Finally, the Godland, if it was in fact an actual physical location and not a metaphor, wasn’t simply behind the door.  He wondered if the door was a portal to another dimension, or maybe Dean was right about the aliens.  Maybe it was a wormhole that would zip anyone who entered billions of lightyears across the universe.  What was most likely, of course, was that there wasn’t actually a Godland.  It was merely the journey one took to find it, which resulted in some kind enlightenment.  Castiel could understand that—he’d always believed the journey was more valuable than the destination.  He had a feeling that Dean would not share his opinion though.

After a few hours of wandering around the featureless tundra and walking over what he though was the true axis of the planet, Castiel hadn’t found anything.  No snow covered gear, no tracks, no door with a sign over it proclaiming, “This way to the Godland.”  For the first time, he started to feel foolish.  He had no idea what had possessed him to believe that he could just wander aimlessly around the North Pole and find some yahoo who had probably gotten himself lost in a rainforest back in Brazil.

The sun had continued its horizontal path around him, no nearer to the horizon than it had been since he’d been dropped off.  He decided to set up his tent and establish a place he could go to for cover in case a storm suddenly whipped up.  Inside his tent he pulled off some of his gear.  It was only about fifteen degrees outside—extremely cold to be sure, but he’d experienced much colder during a Chicago winter.  Really, the North Pole wasn’t nearly as cold as people thought it was, not like the South Pole.  He’d been there once for only a couple of days and he was set for life.  If the map had indicated that the door was at the South Pole then Dean would have been shit out of luck because no way in hell was he searching for him down there.

Castiel flopped back onto his thick sleeping bag.  Who was he kidding?  He would have followed Dean to the South Pole.  He had to meet this person.  This smart, funny, brusque, opinionated, strong, resilient—crazy, don’t forget crazy—man who had taken over his every waking thought.  Even some of his sleeping thoughts.  He was certain his interest was purely academic, except for those times when he found himself gazing at the man’s picture like a love struck teenager.

Castiel rolled over and pulled out the new Nanosoft tablet he’d bought for himself.  He opened the folder containing Dean’s notes and looked through everything though he’d long since had everything memorized.  He opened the folder of journal entries, all renamed so that he could tell what each one was.  He’d listened to them all by now, so he clicked on his favorite one and stretched out on his sleeping bag, his head propped on one arm as he listened.

“Captain’s Log. Star date 42736.0.  It’s January 1st, 2017 at midnight.  Happy New Year.  And it’s very happy.  I know you’re thinking that it can’t be that happy if I’m by myself in my car, homeless, jobless, friendless with no one to smooch at midnight.  But it’s a new year, and now I know about the ‘sea tower.’  I’ve been looking at cities all around the Mediterranean, at the shore, sunk in the sea, trying to find a structure that would make sense of the Barringer Poem.  I didn’t even consider looking into Enoch itself because it was built so far back from the water line.  But there’s an account of Alexander the Great passing through Lebanon on his way to Tyre that makes mention of another tower near Enoch that looked as if it floated on water.  The account isn’t one of the three sources generally accepted as being reliable narratives, but if I based my work on what was ‘generally accepted’ and ‘reliable’ I wouldn’t have much of a career.”

Dean burst out laughing and the sound made Cas smile and feel a little giddy.

“I don’t have much of a career now .  But I sure as hell would take the same path and make the same choices if I was going to end up here anyway.  Anyway, I can’t find anything specific regarding underwater ruins around Enoch, but maybe Beirut will have better resources.  So, I guess I’m going to Beirut.  It was mostly a joke when I thought about it the day I got fired, but it makes sense.  I should go to the start.  It’s going to take some planning.  And I need to get a job to earn a little cash.  Mr. Aframian can only get me so far before I’ll have to drop it.  And, no, I don’t feel bad about it.  The only people who really get screwed over are the insurance companies, and seriously, screw them.”

There was some noise as Dean shifted in his seat.

“I don’t want this to be my white whale.  I really don’t.  But I do know that I’m not doing this to make a great discovery to share with the world.  It’s for purely personal and selfish reasons.  And if I come out of it alive, maybe I’ll toss the world a bone.  I just need to know if it’s true.  This fable has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and for as long I can remember it’s been real .”

Dean was silent for several minutes, but Castiel didn’t fast-forward to where he knew he started to speak again.  He just listened to him breathe, his cheek now laying on his arm.

“ Once upon a time there was a little boy.  He was a sad little boy because he had lost his family when Enoch was destroyed.  One day a fox spirit came to him and asked, ‘Why are you sad little boy?  The sun warms you, the ground feeds you, the river waters you.  Why are you unhappy?’  ‘Because I have lost my family,’ the boy replied.  ‘I am all alone.’  The fox spirit nodded thoughtfully.  ‘That is sad indeed, to be alone.  Everything should feel the joy of belonging to another.  Even if they are parted, even if Death chooses to befriend one.’  The little boy thought the fox spirit was quite right, but he did not understand how he could belong to someone who had been chosen by Death.  ‘Fox Spirit, would I not still be lonely if Death took away the person I belonged to?’  ‘Nay,’ the fox spirit replied.  ‘Your soul cannot be touched by death or life.  Your soul is beyond such trappings as mortal and immortal.’  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ the little boy said.  ‘Follow me, dear child, to the Godland.  There you will find someone to belong to, and you will understand.’  The little boy followed the fox spirit through mountains and jungle and desert.  They traveled along the path of lights in the sky until even the stars stopped moving.  And when they came upon the Godland at last, the lost boy was found, and he belonged .”

There were a few moments of silence, and then Dean said, “Not exactly a Cinderella story, but it has a happier ending than most fairy tales.  Unless one interprets the Godland as death or heaven.  But I don’t think it is.  The spirit in the story clearly views the Godland as being separate from life and death…as being beyond.  God, if I find it will I melt away into a higher state of being? Maybe I’ll Ascend like Daniel Jackson.  And yes, that’s an old ass reference to Stargate SG-1 .  It really holds up twenty years later.

“I think…aw, crap.  It’s the fuzz.  Gotta move the car.  If someone finds this one day and attempts to follow me, bring a mop.  I might just be a puddle of enlightened goo when you find me.”

The recording ended and Castiel smiled.  Dean’s voice was really very soothing to listen to.  He allowed himself to drift off, vowing to renew his search when he was refreshed.

~~~

Castiel had been at the North Pole for not quite forty-eight hours when he finally managed to find himself directly under where Polaris should hang in the night sky.  He couldn’t really see it due to the constant sun, but he’d learned that the North Star wasn’t technically directly over the point of the axis.  It was about two-thirds of a degree off.  So, here he was.  Directly under Polaris.  So where the fuck was this stupid door?

Cas stumbled over something in the snow.  He looked down but didn’t see anything.  He bent down and began to search through the snow with his gloved hands.  He found nothing but snow and ice and more snow, and then his hand nudged something. He turned to his left and cleared the snow from the object.  Castiel felt his heart accelerate with excitement as he picked up a cylinder made of polished malachite, like the stone in the Temple of the Disciple.  It was about a foot long and two inches thick.  Castiel turned it over and around carefully, looking for writing or grooves.  It was completely smooth, nothing on the green surface but the natural white swirls of the stone.  He looked around.  He definitely didn’t see a door.  He dropped back to his knees and began to search through the snow again.  He found nothing that looked like a door, or even a hole that the stone cylinder could be inserted into.

Despondent, Cas sat back on his ankles and glared angrily at the key.  Dean had been here.  Dean had stood right here.  But there was nothing here.  Had Dean realized that?  Had he thrown the key away in anger and then just walked away?  Had he gone home…or had he really given up and just walked into the nothingness around him?

Castiel bent over and screamed in frustration.  He didn’t believe that Dean would just give up like that.  He couldn’t believe that all those clues and the map and the trail led to a dead end.  He sure as fuck didn’t feel enlightened by his journey, it couldn’t just be…over.

Cas sat up and looked at the key again.  There had to be some clue or guidance or something .  Squinting, he thought he saw a small crack in the stone in the middle of the length.  He turned the cylinder over and saw that the crack encircled the entire key.  He tried to pull it apart, but it wouldn’t budge.  He attempted to twist it, but it wouldn’t turn.  In a fit of desperation, he peeled one of his gloves off so that he could run his finger along the seam and see if it was real or his imagination.  There was definitely a groove.  Holding the key in his bare hand, he tried to twist it again with the other.  It moved easily, like it had been oiled.  The ground dropped out from beneath him and he was so startled he couldn’t even scream as he plummeted down.

Something stiff, but with give, caught him on one shoulder and slowed him down.  Then he hit another and another and another.  They didn’t feel good, but his fall was broken by their interference so that when he finally hit the ground it wasn’t much worse than the jolt of falling from ten feet or so.  He’d fallen halfway on his pack, and it had not been a soft landing.  Moaning in pain, he rolled to stomach and shuffled out of the straps.  When his head stopped spinning and he was certain that none of his limbs had snapped off, he finally opened his eyes.

Above him were towering trees, but they didn’t look like any trees he’d ever seen before.  Instead of limbs and branches, they had giant leaves growing directly out of the trunks.  It was these leaves which must have slowed his fall.  Beneath him was a carpet of some yellowish, springy moss.  It had cushioned the part of him that hadn’t landed on his pack and was probably why half his body felt perfectly fine.  Then he suddenly became aware that he was sweating and extremely hot.

Castiel got to his feet and glanced around the odd forest he stood in.  It was warm and humid.  He took off his coat and then stripped down to his bottom layer which consisted of thermal pants and a T-shirt with a cartoon bee on it.  He walked toward where he could see the forest ended in an unnaturally straight line.  Once he was free of the canopy, he looked up.  He could see the pale light of the North Pole near sunset glowing from a crack in the…ceiling? ground?...about one hundred feet up.  The air from the cave (other dimension?) condensed and turned to frost when it hit the cold air.

Castiel turned and looked around.  If there were walls, he couldn’t see them.  He just saw an endlessly stretching ground of yellow moss with a few patches of green and red here and there.  Plants that defied description burst out of the ground in a multitude of colors and shapes.  They were tall and short, bushy and sleek, spiny and flowery.  They swayed in a gentle, warm breeze that came from all directions.  They glowed softly in a light that had no source.  He noticed for the first time that the space was lit up with the soft colors of dawn, but he could not see the sun nor a direction the light was coming from.  There was a small river running in the dip of a shallow valley.  The water was so clear at first Castiel couldn’t tell there was any water in the bed at all, but then he noticed small colorful creatures darting about underneath its surface.

“Toto, I don’t think we’re at the North Pole anymore,” he murmured.

Castiel glanced back up at the opening to…his world?  It was still there.  With the equipment in his pack, he’d probably be able to scale the tall trees and hopefully find a way to climb back out of the crack.  Feeling unjustifiably confident that he could get out any time he wanted, he decided that he had to explore just a little bit.  There was no way where he stood was literally underneath the North Pole.  There was no land at the North Pole; it was just ice on the Arctic Ocean.  Explorers had taken submersibles to the sea bed.  There was no tropical garden with flora and fauna heretofore unknown to man hanging out underneath the Pole.  He couldn’t quite get his brain to say, “I’m in the Godland,” but he knew he wasn’t really on Earth anymore.  Not in the strictest sense of physics anyway.

Castiel made his way down to the river.  It was flowing swiftly to his right, but the surface still looked completely flat and undisturbed.  He knelt down next to it and tentatively dangled a few fingers into the glass-like water.  He snatched his hand back and waited to see if something burned or his fingers fell off.  They just dripped with the clear liquid.  Daringly, he cupped his hand and dipped it into the river.  He brought up a handful of what he assumed was water and took a tentative sip.  It was cold and sweet.  He drank the rest.  His side stopped hurting and the throbbing in his head faded to nothing.

“Cool,” he said softly.  Knowing enough about fairy tales not to be greedy, he stood up and looked up toward the source of the river.  It wound in a serpentine curve over the yellow ground and out of sight.  He looked in the direction the river flowed and started back in surprise.  About thirty yards downriver a large—huge—structure had been carved into the face of a towering rock wall made of a yellow stone.  Columns and arches and intricate designs covered a space at least fifty feet wide and to the top of the stone which was only a few feet shy of the roof.  The carved pieces had been polished to a high shine while the rest remained dull though no less beautiful.  The river flowed right to the base of the structure…and then straight up the wall and over the top.  He was certain his eyes weren’t deceiving him.

And there on the same side of the bank as he, near the temple, a small camp had been set up.  A man sat on a wide mushroom capped plant, bent over as he wrote in a notebook.  He had short hair and a solid build and the back of his T-shirt listed tour dates for Motorhead’s 1999 tour.

“Dean,” the name was barely an exhalation of air over his lips.  He started to walk toward the man.  “Dean,” he said louder.  It was loud enough that in the stillness of the land, Dean easily heard him.  He turned toward him.  Seeing his face made Castiel burst into a sprint.  He called his name again, laughing joyously at having found the man he’d been looking for.  Dean stood up, a confused smile on his face.

When he got to him, Castiel launched himself into Dean’s arms.  The man caught him, “oofing” softly at the impact, but he didn’t let him go.  Castiel wrapped his arms tightly around his neck.

“Dean!  It’s you.  It’s really you.  I can’t believe I found you.  Thank God you’re okay.”

“Uh, yeah,” Dean said, his hands awkwardly patting Castiel on the back.  “It’s me.  And I’m freaking thrilled to have company of any kind, but, uh, who are you?”

Castiel pulled back immediately and stepped out of Dean’s space.  He blushed over his whole body as he realized he’d just leapt into a stranger’s arms like they were long lost lovers.  He found that his blush didn’t improve upon looking into Dean’s face.  He was more handsome in person, his eyes greener and brighter, the stubble along his jaw giving him sharper, stronger angles.  Maybe it was just the effect of being in the Godland, but Dean was inhumanly beautiful.  Maybe it was just the fact that he’d kind of fallen in love with Dean over the past four weeks.

Castiel forced those thoughts away.  “Um.  My name is Castiel Novak.  Your brother sent me to find you.”

Dean raised his eyebrows.  “You came looking for me on purpose?”

“Do you think I managed to find this place by chance?”

“Well, no, but how did you know where to look?  Sam didn’t know I came to the North Pole.”

“I studied your notes.  Followed your path.  And about that, why didn’t you tell your brother you were okay?  He’s worried sick about you!”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, looking a little cowed.  “I thought he’d try to talk me out of it.  I mean, it’s not unusual for me to go wandering.  I didn’t think he’d make that big of a deal out of it.”

“Are you serious?  You told him you were going to the Amazon, and then he never heard from you for weeks.  What did you think he would think?”

Dean shrugged.  “I wasn’t thinking.  About anything but finding this place I guess.  How did you find it?  The notes I left at home wouldn’t be able to guide you to the Temple of the Disciple.”

“I started at the beginning,” Castiel said, feeling a little proud.  “I followed you to Lebanon.  To Enoch.  I found the lighthouse.  The sea tower.”

One corner of Dean’s lips started to curl into a smile.  “You found the sea tower?  And you followed the directions?”

Cas nodded.  “Down to the cave and the temple inside.”

“That was some treasure, huh?”

“I still don’t understand how they had samples from virtually every early culture in the world or how they engineered the beams to hold the temple up over the pool.”

“They were definitely beyond their time.”

“And I found the map on the dais.”

“So, you worked out how to work the levers to lower it and hold it in place?”

Castiel narrowed his eyes.  “ Hold it in place?”

“Yeah.  The north lever lowered it, but you had to activate the southwest and southeast levers first to get it to hold in place.  There was the button underneath the text on the wall which released the pulleys.”

“Pulleys?”  Castiel groaned softly.  “I climbed the wall and just pulled on the north lever.  Then I had to make a run for the temple before it raised back up.”

“Why?  Didn’t you read the instructions?  It was pretty clear cut.”

“Hey, try to remember that you are literally the only person on the planet who can read Enochian.  I did the best I could with your notes, but even your journal entry on it didn’t explain everything.”

Dean made a slightly pained face.  “You listened to my journal entries?”

Castiel blushed again and glanced down.  “Y-yeah.  Your brother gave them to me.  I hope it’s okay.”

Dean shrugged.  “Well, I guess you guys thought I was in trouble…did you listen to all of them?”

Cas glanced up at him and gave a little nod.  Now Dean blushed and laughed embarrassedly.

“Wow.  Well, um, so you found the map,” he quickly changed the subject.

“Yes.  The map.  And it took me a little while to realize they were star constellations, but once I did I was able to identify the season I should look at each constellation from certain points on the globe.  The Internet let me see the night sky from wherever and whenever I needed to, and it was apparent that they were all pointing to northern South America.”

“Oh, you actually looked it up?  I just assumed it was South America because there was no cluster there.  Made sense to go there.”

Castiel gaped.  “Are you serious?  You just looked at a gap in the map and decided it must be there?”

Dean shrugged.

“There was also a gap in Siberia!  Why didn’t you go there?”

“Because of the Silva Poem.  If it had been in Russian, I would have gone to Siberia.”

“I can’t believe you just got lucky,” Castiel murmured.

“I didn’t get lucky,” Dean countered.  “It was an educated guess.  Though it took me a while to figure out that I needed to go where the Negro and Solimoes Rivers joined the Amazon.  I guess you noticed the clear and muddy waters joining.”

Castiel nodded.  “That and the town of Manaus was named after the indigenous peoples.  The Manaos.”

Dean smiled and shook his head as recognized the Enochian word.  “Scribes.”

“Yep.  So, I saw the sun beam and followed it into the rainforest, which was terrifying, by the way.”

Dean grinned.  “Exhilarating, C—what’s your name again?”

“Castiel.  Cas.”

“Cas,” Dean repeated and Castiel shivered despite the warm air.

“And then I found the Temple of the Disciple, with the key missing, of course.”

“Wait, wait.  How did you get over there?  If you can’t read Enochian, there’s no way you could have figured out the riddles.  No offense, but you should be a smudge on the floor of that cave.”

“Did you even look at the right side?”

“Yeah.  It was a sheer drop with no ledges or anything to hold onto.”

“With your hands, yeah.  But with modern climbing gear, it was a snap.  I rappelled down the side, walked across the floor, and then climbed about fifty feet up the other side.”

Dean narrowed his eyes.  “That kind of sounds like cheating.”

“It mostly just sounds like even an advanced ancient people had never heard of nylon rope and metal nuts before.”

“Metal nuts?” Dean asked with a snigger.

“The thing you wedge in the rocks.  Calm down.”

Dean put his hands on his waist.  “I can’t believe I figured out three riddles in a language no one even speaks anymore, risked my life, nearly got squashed by a boulder, and this punk right here just strolled across the floor.”

Castiel smiled and shrugged.  Dean’s eyes flicked over him for a moment, a warm smile on his face, and then he crossed his arms.

“Alright then.  You found the temple.  Pretty cool, wasn’t it?”

“Beautiful.  The quartz was stunning.”

“How about the temple itself?  I didn’t know there was that much jasper in the world.”

“Oh, I thought it might be malachite.”

“Whichever.  I found the key, you didn’t.  But even with the key, I didn’t know where to go from there.  There weren’t any instructions with the key.”

“So how did you figure it out?”

“Well, so much of the Enochian language seemed to make sense when they reversed it, and because I didn’t think the third poem was coded, I assumed ‘the map reflects’ was meant to be taken literally.  However, even after I recognized the Little Dipper, I wasn’t sure what it might mean.

“I had found a record at a dig site in Oman when I was a grad student.  My professor told me it was modern and that it could be ignored.  He didn’t record it at all.  I kept it because it mentioned a map, a key, and a door.  I didn’t have my theories about the Godland formed yet, but I was familiar enough with the children’s rhyme that it stuck out to me.  It labeled the map as the ‘Tomb of Enoch,’ the key as the ‘Temple of the Disciple,’ and the door as the ‘Edge of the Earth.’”

“I was wondering where you’d gotten those terms.  I didn’t find them anywhere else.”

“Yeah, for such a well-kept secret, there were leaks all over that boat.  But as I looked at the constellation and thought about the ‘edge of the earth,’ it occurred to me that the Enochians didn’t—none of the advanced civilizations at that time—thought that the earth was flat.  They knew it didn’t have an edge.  So, maybe the correct translation was ‘end.’  Or even ‘top.’  Follow Ursa Minor to the top of the world—that’s where the door will be.  Or so I thought.  How did you figure it out?”

“You dropped one of your notepads in the Temple of the Disciple.  It was a bit of a walk through your mad comments, but it did lead me to looking at the map through the mirror.  And once I saw Polaris, where else would the map be leading?”

“And so you just came up here, with no key, to look for the door?”

“To look for you.  I told your brother I had found your cell phone and notebook in Brazil.  That I knew you had at least made it there.  We weren’t certain if you had made it out though.  Because you hadn’t contacted him.”  Dean looked a little guilty at that.  “He wanted me to go back to Brazil and keep looking for you, but…I had to come here.  I’d already come so far.  I had to see if you were right.  If you were here.”

Castiel stared into Dean’s eyes, and didn’t look away as the seconds ticked by.  Dean licked his lips and Cas wanted so badly to lick them too.  He dropped his eyes and swallowed.

“So, here I am,” said Dean softly.  “How did you get in without the key?  Is there actually a crack in the ice at the Pole?”

“No.  You dropped the key.”

Dean shook his head.  “No, I didn’t.  I mean I couldn’t find it when I got down here, but after I turned it, instantaneously I fell down into the trees.”

“The same thing happened to me.”

“Do you still have the key?”

Castiel thought back to when he landed.  “I thought I had just dropped it on the way down.”

Dean shrugged.  “Maybe the key can’t pass the door.”

“How long have you been here?” Cas asked suddenly.

“I have no idea.  There are no days, no nights.  I don’t get hungry, I don’t need sleep.”

“Have you only been here, at this spot?”

“No, I’ve wandered around quite a bit.  It’s just more of the same everywhere.  Weird, spongy ground, bizarre plants.  The only animals I’ve seen have been in the water.  Though the expanse of it is an illusion.  I’ve found the outer walls and completed a circuit of the space.  I can’t really guess how large it is, it’s willfully disguising itself, but I don’t think it’s all that big.  The only place I haven’t been is up there,” he pointed to the top of the structure where the waterfall—waterrise?—disappeared over the top.  “I’ve tried to climb it a few times, but it’s very slippery.  One time I made it almost to the top, but then I fell and I’m pretty sure I snapped my femur in half.”

Castiel winced and tried to ignore the squirmy discomfort in his stomach.

“Fortunately the water in the river is a kind of cure all.”

“Did you never try to get out?”

“Oh, I did.  I tried climbing the trees, but I can’t get purchase on the bark and those leaves are too high for me to reach.  The crack in the ceiling isn’t near one of the walls.  I don’t know how I can possibly get up there.  So, I’ve just been sitting here and waiting.  Taking notes, exploring what’s here.  Waiting for someone or something to come along and help me—or end me.

“I gotta be honest with you, Cas, I’m not terribly impressed with the Godland.  It’s a little boring.”

Castiel smiled and shook his head.  “Only you would call this boring.”

“Hey.  Who knows how long I’ve been here.  You might start to find it boring after a while too.”

“Well, I don’t intend to find out.  Come on, gather your things.  I’ve got climbing gear and I think I can get us out of here.”

“Wait, you have climbing gear?”

Castiel nodded.

Dean glanced up at the carved structure.  “Why don’t we go up there first?”

Castiel looked up at the top.  The ambient light of the space didn’t reach the top.  The river flowed into darkness.  He shook his head.

“No.  I think we should get out first.  I think we should make sure we can get out first.  Then we can worry about coming back.  We don’t have to tell anyone or form a full team.  We can come back together, just you and I, but I think after we get better supplies and have a plan.  And after we tell your brother that you’re alive.”

“Oh, come on, Cas.  Do you really think we’ll be able to get back in here?  Do you really think you get more than one shot at this?”

“If the key is still up there, we can come back.”

“It’s not going to be there.  Maybe if someone else came along, but not us.  This is it.”

“You don’t know that.  There’s no reason to believe the key won’t be right where I found it when you fell through.”

“There’s every reason.  Cas, you’ve seen the path it took to get here, the structures, the engineering.  It wasn’t feats of man—some thing made this all possible.  Something that follows the rules of legends and myths.  It’s one and done.  It always is.”

“Dean, you don’t know that.”

“And you don’t know that I’m not right.  How can you possibly walk away from this not knowing if you can ever come back?  I think there’s something at the top of that temple.  There has to be.  The Godland promises that all is eternal.”

“It is!  You’ve found it.  You said there is no time here.  You don’t need sleep or food.  You can be healed by the water.  You can live here forever—it’s an eternal existence, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.”

“No.  No.  This isn’t it.  This temple is here for a reason.  The water flows up for a reason!  Something is up there, Cas.  We have to find it.”

“Dean, I don’t think—”

“Please.  You have to help me get up there.  We have to actually make it to the Godland.  It promised me she’s up there!”

“Dean!” Cas shouted.  “Your mother isn’t up there!”

Silence fell between them.  Castiel took a half-step back at the look of anguish on Dean’s face.  Dean turned away from him and Cas reached out a hand.  He stopped just short of touching Dean’s shoulder and withdrew it.  He tried to think of something to say, but everything sounded trite or condescending.

At last Cas heard Dean sniff a few times.  Then he bobbed his head and stepped heavily toward his small camp.  He knelt down and began to pack his belongings into his backpack.  The sight broke Castiel’s heart.  He turned and ran back toward the forest of leaf trees.  He found his gear and shrugged it on to one shoulder.  When he made it back to the clearing in front of the temple, Dean was just finishing stuffing everything into his pack.  Castiel set his large pack down with a thud.

Dean turned to look at him in surprise, and then tilted his head as he watched Castiel begin to unpack his gear.  He had brought two sets of climbing equipment because he’d wanted to feel like he was optimistic about finding Dean.  He handed the man a harness.

“Put this on.”

“Cas…”

“Well, come on.  Who the hell leaves a place without finding out what’s at the top of a gravity defying waterfall?”

Dean smiled at him as he continued to pull out equipment and make two piles.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Cas grumbled.  “If we get obliterated by some space alien, I’m blaming this all on you.”

Dean chuckled.  “Really, aliens, Cas?”

“It was your idea first!” he snapped.

Dean laughed and the real sound made that giddy feeling he got when he heard it on a recording ten times worse.

“You knew that I had an ‘aliens are real’ theory and you still came after me?”

Cas focused on his work, knowing full well he was red in the face.

“You know, I think you like me, Cas.”

Castiel looked up at him with a huff.  The shit-eating grin on his face faded into something softer as he looked at Cas.   He cocked his head as if studying a rare creature.

“Interesting,” Dean murmured.

Castiel bristled like an offended cat.  “Fuck off, mama’s boy.”

Dean’s jaw dropped.  “Ah!”

Cas took the harness from Dean’s hands and held it open.  “Here.  Step in here.”  He shook the harness, looking everywhere but Dean’s eyes.  He heard Dean chuckle, but he didn’t say anything.  He just put a hand on Cas’ shoulder for balance and then stepped into the harness.  Castiel pulled it up and snugged it around his butt, hips, and waist.  Dean grunted.

“Not the safest thing in the world,” he said as he adjusted the straps around his package.

Castiel quickly stepped into his own harness and then supplied Dean with rope and plenty of carabiners. He traded his boots for climbing shoes, but he had none for Dean.  He suggested he go sockfoot.  They walked to the base of the temple and looked up.  Castiel looped rope through a carabiner attached it to Dean’s harness and then began to climb the wall.  After he got about thirty feet up, he found a crevice in which he could insert a spring loaded cam and attached Dean’s rope to it.

“Okay.  Start climbing.  The rope will hold your weight, so don’t think you have to Spider-Man your way up here.”

Dean tugged on the rope a couple of times, and then began to climb the wall, bracing his feet on the wall and pulling himself up with his hands on the rope.  He managed to reach where Castiel was clinging to the wall in a few minutes.  By that time Cas had fixed two nuts into the arching curve of a design and attached two ropes.  Castiel clipped Dean to the rope attached to one of the nuts.

“Okay, you can relax.  Let the harness take your weight and rest your arms and legs for a bit.”

Hesitantly, Dean followed his instructions.  He swung lightly in the harness, but then then stopped his movement with his feet against the wall.  Castiel removed the cam from the wall and wound the long rope up from where it trailed behind Dean down the wall.  Then he started to climb, going as far as the rope he’d attached to his own nut would let him.  He had to move a quite a bit to his left, nearer the waterfall than he wanted to be in order to find a place to insert the cam.  He clipped Dean’s rope to it and told him to unclip from the other rope and start climbing again.  It took a few minutes of yelling back and forth for Dean to trust that it was okay to unclip the other rope, but at least he was moving again.  Castiel installed another nut and let himself hang in his harness while he waited for Dean to join him.

They proceeded up the wall in increments in a similar fashion, stopping only about five feet from the top.  Once they were together, he helped Dean find hand and foot holds in the rock, and they climbed the last five feet together and peered over the top.

~~~

Cas hauled himself to the top and got to his feet.  He turned back and helped Dean get safely on his feet and away from the edge.  They gazed into the misty darkness before them, unable to see anything.  Castiel looked to his left and saw that when the river reached the top of the temple, it stopped.  It didn’t continue flowing over the top.  There was just a straight line of water, like it had hit a glass wall.

Castiel felt Dean tap his arm several times.  He looked over at him, but he was staring straight ahead.  Castiel faced forward, and saw something moving out of the endless darkness.  As it grew closer, light came with it, but the blackness didn’t decrease.  It was almost like the light was just shining on painted black walls.  The figure was humanoid in shape, with rough approximations of a head, arms, and legs that didn’t really touch the ground.  It stopped about ten feet from them.  Slight dips of shadow on the head gave the impression of a face.  It stood no taller than they, but Castiel could feel the hair on his arms stand on end as it sensed something much more massive in the room.

“Are you gods?”

The voice was quiet, soft, tentative, but it echoed around his head in quite a disconcerting manner.  Castiel felt numb.  He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing.  He couldn’t believe that he’d seen any of the impossible marvels he’d come across in the last month.  This thing before him now was so awe-inspiring it didn’t feel like a real emotion.  It was simply too powerful to process.  But…it had asked him a question.

“N-no,” Castiel stammered.  “We’re not gods.”

“Dude!”

Cas whipped his head around to look at Dean.  He was looking at Cas like he was an idiot.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.  “Haven’t you seen Ghostbusters ?”

Castiel shook his head, wait, no, he had seen Ghostbusters…what did that have to do with—

“Little humans!” the thing squealed excitedly.  “Little humans, you have come at last!  Come, come!  I’ve been preparing the ritual.  It’s been so long.  So long.  I’ve waited so long.  Little humans, come, we must perform the ritual.  I’ve been preparing, you know.”

Castiel tensed as he felt something—not solid, but it must have had mass of some kind because it pushed him forward—around his shoulders.  Dean flinched beside him and the two of them were ushered into the darkness.

“Look at the preparations!  I’ve been making them so long.  Little humans, where have you been?”

Suddenly Castiel found himself nearly blinded with a pure white light.  Once his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he saw a large hole in a yellow stone floor filled with enormous blossoms of blue, purple, and deep red.  They were not like any flower that Castiel could name and were as tall as trees.

“Do you like it?” the being asked again.  “I spent so long.  It took so long.  I prepared them just for you.  Do you like them?”

Castiel glanced at Dean.  He stared back at him in shock.  Castiel looked at the being and unless he was crazy, the thing was wringing its hands nervously.

“They’re beautiful.  Your preparations are very good.  I like them a lot.”

A soft yellow light pulsed around the creature’s shape.

“Thank you.  They are nice, aren’t they?  After all I did have a long time to work on it.  Little humans, why did it take you so long to come?”

“Uh, um…”  Castiel glanced at Dean.

“We had a little trouble finding the door,” Dean said.

“Yes, yes, yes.  I said so.  I said the top of the rock is easy to find, but these little humans are not meant for the snow and the ice and the cold.  Was it very difficult?  I hope the preparations are to your liking.  I spent so long on them.  I hope the cold and the top hasn’t made you cross.”

“No, no,” Cas said, “we’re not cross.”

“Nope,” Dean chimed in.  “We love what you’ve done with the place.  Really.”

The glow around the being pulsed again.

“Just, um,” Dean continued.  “What were you preparing for?”

“The ritual.  The ritual.  Of course you must be anxious to begin.  We can commence if the preparations are to your liking.  I spent so long on them.”

“Right, yes,” Dean said.  “They’re great.  What about the ritual?”

“What color do you like?” the being asked.  “Oh, I only used three.  I like the way they looked together best.  But what if you don’t like the colors?  Oh, I had so much time I should have prepared them all.”

“Blue,” Castiel said.  “Blue.  I love blue.”

“Oh, you do?  So do I.  I love blue.  I love green too.  And red.  And purple.  I like pink—”

“Um, excuse me,” Dean interrupted, “I’m sorry to cut you off.  Do you have a name or something we can call you?”

The being shook and shivered and Castiel was frightened for a moment, and then he realized the thing was laughing.

“Call me by name.  Little human, you amuse me.  Come now.  We will start.  You like blue, little human?  I prepared a blue one especially with a soft core.”

“A soft core?” Castiel murmured, not following the thing’s speech.

Suddenly Dean and Cas were scooped off the floor and flown to the massive flower blossoms.  Just inside the rim of each flower was a shiny yellow disk blocking the inside of the flower.

“Oh my God, we’re about to be eaten,” Dean said.

Castiel looked at him in alarm.  That hadn’t occurred to him.  The yellow disk was lifted and he and Dean were flown inside and then dropped onto something very soft and springy.  It was just slightly firmer than a water bed.  Castiel flopped about on his hands and knees for a minute, and then gave up and lay on his back.

“I’m going to get seasick,” he muttered.  “Stop bouncing around!”

Dean stopped searching along the soft petal wall for a way out.  He stumbled over to Cas and sat down beside him.  The floor stopped moving.  There was some light leaking under the yellow disk, but they were predominantly in shadow.  That is until the being lifted the disk so that it could peer inside.

“Little humans, have you begun?  I prepared this for you.”

“Begun what?” Dean asked, his voice starting to sound more irritated than scared.

“The ritual.  The rite.  The joyous rite.”

“We’re a little rusty on the ritual.  Maybe you can fill us in?”

The being’s shape flickered.  “One moment.”

The disk fell back into place.  Dean grunted and sat back on his hands causing the floor to wave gently.  Something occurred to Castiel about what the being had said about a rite, a joyous rite…

“Dean…”

“If you’re going to tell me ‘I told you so’ about the whole climbing the temple thing…”

“No, not that.  You know the children’s rhyme about the Godland.”

“Yeah.”

“It mentions a joyous rite.”

“Oh…yeah.”  Dean looked up.  “Didn’t it say something about a joyous rite?”

“It did.”

“So what is it?”

“Well, according to the poem…a melding of the body, a meeting of the mind, and a mating of the soul.”

They looked at each other.  Dean let out a soft, disbelieving laugh.

“You don’t think it’s trying to…mate us…do you?”

“No, not literally.  I think it’s metaphorical.  Or metaphysical.”

“That sounds…personal.”

The disk lifted again and they squinted in the light.  The being peered down at them.

“Do not concern yourselves, little humans.  I have been preparing for a long time.  I know what to do.”

In the blink of an eye Castiel found himself naked.  He squeaked and put his hands over his lap.  He glanced at Dean, and yep, he was buck naked too.  The being looked down at them, with a curious look on its shadow features.

“Hmm.  You are not a reproductive pair.  But the ritual will still work.  I know your kind have found ways to join your bodies even with matching parts.”

“Whoa, whoa, hey!” Dean said.  “Who said anything about—”

“Joining our bodies?!” Castiel finished.

“You must.  It is step one.  You can’t finish the ritual without step one.  You’ve come here to belong to each other, have you not?”

Dean and Castiel exchanged looks.

“Um, not as such,” Cas started and then gasped when that solid/not solid feeling pushed against his back and slid him into Dean’s side.  It pushed them together gently a couple of times and Castiel felt mortified as the hint of arousal brushed through him when he felt himself pressed against Dean’s warm skin.

“I must confess, little humans, I’m not very familiar with the physical plane.  You’ll have to take care of this one on your own.”

“I think there’s been some sort of mistake,” Castiel said.

“Yeah, we didn’t exactly come here together,” Dean said.  “We’re not supposed to ‘belong’ to each other.”

“Impossible.  You couldn’t both be here if you were not meant to belong.  I made that preparation first.  I made it a long time ago because it took you so long to get here, but it was the first thing I did.  Belonging pairs only.  The first thing.  I prepared that.”

“Uh, well…”  Dean didn’t know how to respond.

“That may be, but, we’ve uh, only just met…” Castiel said.  “We don’t know each other.  It’s hard to do ‘step one’ with a stranger.”

“Well, not that hard,” Dean murmured.

“When you’re stuck in a giant flower with an expectant God-like creature it’s a little harder than being wasted at the club,” Castiel muttered back.

Dean shrugged in amusement.

“That is no problem, little human.  Your desire is there.  I can see it.”  It jumped and shuddered again.  “I can feel it.  The physical plane is a mystery to me, but I can feel the shudders of the mind’s desire.  Your bodies are receptive.”

Castiel’s jaw dropped.  Couldn’t this thing have a little tact?

“Oh, forgive me, little humans.  You would like privacy.”

The disk dropped and they were in shadow again.  Castiel glanced at Dean.  He had his face turned away and his entire body felt warmer than before.

“You know, I think you like me, Dean,” he teased the man gently with his own words.

Dean looked over at him.  “Well, you’re not hard to look at, Cas.”

Cas smiled and looked away.  “What are we going to do?”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck.  “Fuck me.”

Castiel’s head turned so fast his neck twinged in protest.

“Oh, I didn’t mean—!” Dean spluttered.  “It was just a saying!  Of exasperation.  I mean.  We can’t.  Or, we shouldn’t.  Or, shouldn’t we?  I mean…would it be so terrible?  You know, get it on and then this thing will let us go?  Not the worst ransom in the world.”

“It’s not the idea of sex that bothers me…though doing it in a giant flower with some weird water bed bottom is a little perturbing.  It’s steps two and three.  The meeting of the mind and the mating of the soul.  After our bodies are joined, what will happen to the rest of us?”

Dean pulled his knees up to his chest and circled his arm around them.  Castiel did his best not to notice all the fine, taut lines of his body.

“What will happen?” Dean mused.  “Maybe we’ll belong to each other.  Belong to each other in a way that not even death can touch.”

Castiel’s next breath caught in his throat.  He looked over at Dean and waited for him to lift his eyes and meet his.

“You would be okay with that?" Cas asked.  "To be tied to someone in a way that transcends the mortal and immortal planes?”

Dean shrugged one shoulder.  “Yeah, sounds crazy when you put it like that.  I get how you wouldn’t want that with some random stranger.”

“Dean, I’m not talking about myself.  I at least know something about you.  I’ve listened to your words and learned how you think and feel.  I know quite a bit about who you are and I’ve come to…”

Dean raised his eyebrows in the wake of Cas’ unfinished thought.

“I’ve come to…have…a strong…reaction to you.  When I think about you.”

The corner of Dean’s lips lifted into a hesitant smile.  “Yeah?”

“Yes.  But you…you don’t know me from Adam.  Are you really open to the idea of…this?” Castiel waved a hand at their predicament.

Dean rubbed his thumb over the top of his knee.  He thought for a moment, and then spoke.

“I’ve been obsessed with the Godland since I was a child.  Long before I ever had proof that made me think it was real.  Before my father broke down.  Before my mother…passed away.  I always thought the little boy in that fable was lucky.  He was going to belong to someone he couldn’t lose.  I envied him more and more as the people I loved left me.  Through death, through choice, through circumstance…I’ve been abandoned by everyone in my life.  Even by Sam for a while there at one point.

“I just kept thinking it would be a blessing if there was some way to have someone, to possess them, to be possessed in return—and nothing could change that.  Not distance, not anger, or misunderstandings or just plain shitty life fucking everything up…”  Dean inhaled and looked away.  “I just thought that that would be a good feeling.  A safe feeling.

“I’ve felt happiness and joy and contentment.  I’ve had all those things in my life.  But I’ve never felt… safe .  I’ve never felt comfortable having happiness because I know how fragile it is.  How fleeting.  I just want to have a feeling of…permanence.”

Castiel bit his lip and felt tears prickling his eyes.  “Dean…”

“And I know I don’t know you, but you heard Mr. Glow-Bag McPreparation up there.”  Castiel chuckled at Dean’s term for the being.  “We couldn’t both be here if we didn’t belong.  Now who’s to say a whack job who likes to watch humans get it on in giant flowers is really a good enough judge of character to stick people together for eternity.  But…”

Castiel licked his lips, waiting anxiously to hear Dean’s next thought.  He looked up and met Cas’ eyes.  Then he lightly brushed the backs of his fingers against Cas’ bare arm.

“But…I feel…”

Castiel inhaled and felt the moment they were in draw tight like a bowstring.  He leaned slightly toward Dean.  Dean leaned over just a bit.  Their eyes met, fell away to the other’s lips.  They leaned closer.  Castiel tilted his head and let his eyes flutter shut.

“Little humans!”

Dean and Cas started violently and blinked against the light flooding into their blossom when the disk was lifted.  The being poked its head shape over the side of the petals.

“Little humans, I prepared for situations like this.  I have brought these plants that you can partake of.”  It waved a bunch of green leaves at them with one hand and a small, pale green bulbous thing with the other.  “This will help the mind relax, and the body easily follows the mind.  But not too much.  You must be able to perform step two of the ritual.  I would recommend this one,” it said shaking the leaves again.  “The other distorts the mind quite a bit.”

Castiel’s brow creased in amused horror.  “Is that cannabis?”

“What?” Dean asked.

“Marijuana.  Weed.”

“I know what cannabis is,” Dean said peevishly.

“I think it’s offering to let us get high in order to relax enough to have sex.”

Dean chuckled, and then he started laughing, and then he guffawed and fell backwards.  He sat back up quickly as he realized he’d exposed himself.

“I guess that other thing is peyote,” Dean said.  “Did that once.  Never again.”

“I don’t think we need either.”

Dean gave him a leer.  “Yeah.  Our bodies are receptive without it, huh?”

Castiel let out a noise of mild disgust and bumped Dean’s shoulder with his.

“Uh, thanks, but we’re good,” Dean called out.

“You are taking a long time.  It took so long for you to get here.  I waited a long time, little humans.  I made preparations.  I made them all specifically for you.  The ritual is underway.  It’s meant to be joyous.  Take joy in each other.”

“Okay, well, you noticed we’re not a ‘reproductive pair,’ right?”

“Yes, yes, yes.  I noticed.  I noticed before I removed your false skins.  Oh I used to know that word.  See how long you made me wait?  I prepared—”

“Yeah, great.  Did those preparations happen to include gathering supplies that non-reproducing pairs might need?  Like…lube?”

Castiel glanced at Dean and then hid his face in one arm.  He was a little embarrassed but he also wanted to laugh.  Dean was asking a higher being for lube .  But was he asking for kicks or because…

“You ask if I have all the preparations?” the being asked, flickering.  “I have prepared everything.  I had a long wait.  I prepared.  You want lube…AH!”  The thing shimmered excitedly.  “ Lubricant .  I know this word.  I prepared.  I did.”

Castiel twitched and lifted his feet and hands off the surface of the plant.  There was a thin coating of oily liquid covering the entire surface.  His nose was suddenly hit with the scent of honeysuckle.

“What the—” Dean started.

Then they were both sliding over the floor, slipping down the slightly sloping side, picking up speed until they crashed into the soft petal wall.

“Oh my God!”  Castiel made a face and slung his hands out, watching droplets of slick liquid fly off his fingers.

Dean laughed and rubbed two of his fingers against his thumb.  Then he raised it to his face and gave it a sniff.  He stuck his tongue out to taste it.

“Dean!”

He shrugged.  “It’s sweet.”

“There, little humans.  I apologize.  You are ready now.  Do you want privacy or would you like me to supervise?”

“We’re fine!” Castiel shouted.

Unless he was mistaken, the being looked a little disappointed as it dropped the disk back down.  Dean chuckled and rested completely against the silky petal wall, shoulder to shoulder with Cas.

“I guess voyeurism isn’t one of your kinks,” Dean said.

Cas laughed softly.  “Not during the first time anyway.”

Dean laughed and looked at him.  Then he sobered just a touch.  “Are we gonna do this?”

Castiel rubbed his hand over his face, and then jerked it back in disgust as he rubbed flower lube all over his face.  “Dean, my hesitation isn’t the sex.”

“Ah.  Well, if we have a choice here, don’t you think we’ll have a choice in the other steps?  We can always change our minds.  I think.”

Castiel nodded.  “You know what I think?”

“Hmm?”

“I think you’re just horny.”

Dean laughed.  “Maybe a little bit.  What?  Are you telling me you’re sitting in a soggy flower with all of this beside you and you’re feeling nothing?”

Castiel laughed and tilted his head over to look at Dean.  Dean ran a slick hand up Castiel’s thigh.  He gasped softly as he felt the touch like it had been at the apex of his thighs.  Dean’s hand stilled.

“Sorry.  I didn’t mean…did I—”

“Not a bad gasp,” Castiel sighed.  He closed his eyes and let his head drop back against the petal wall.

In that moment Castiel learned that Dean wasn’t someone who couldn’t take a hint.  Or a very blatant statement.  His hand slid down Castiel’s leg and grabbed his half hard cock.  Cas moaned and arched his back.  His feet slipped on the soft floor, spreading out and apart.  Dean’s lubed hand worked him easily until he was stiff and wanting in his palm.

“D-Dean…Dean are you sure?”

“Fuck yes,” Dean breathed against his ear and then kissed his jaw, his cheek…Castiel turned and captured Dean’s lips first as he threw one leg over Dean’s and straddled his thigh.  He reached between Dean’s legs; he was slick and wet from the lubricant.  He pushed Dean back into the petal wall a bit, making his hips tilt up.  Dean’s body jolted with a spasm when the pad of Castiel’s finger rubbed over his hole.  Cas repeated the motion several times and Dean’s nails clawed into Cas’ shoulders.

Dean pulled away from the kiss with a needy moan.  “Oh, God…Cas…”

Castiel ran his hand through Dean’s hair, the slick substance they were rolling in getting everywhere.

“Cas…please…stop teasing…” Dean’s plaintive whimper made Cas hold him tighter.

His finger pressed against Dean’s entrance, and then with just a little more pressure and the desperate roll of Dean’s hips, his finger slipped inside.

Castiel blinked his eyes, disoriented.  He sat at a table across from Dean.  In between them was a checked board with several black and white pieces placed in little groups.  There was a pile of black stones next to his arm, and white stones near Dean.  Dean blinked his eyes like he was clearing his vision.  He looked up at Cas.

“Um…” Castiel said.  “Weren’t we just…”

“Having sex?” Dean finished.

Castiel turned and looked around.  They were sitting under a small circle of white light, and all around them outside of that spill of light was darkness.  Castiel got the sense that they were in a very large space.  Or perhaps a place that could not be defined by space.

“Well, what kind of bullshit is that?” Dean asked.  “We don’t even get to enjoy step one before it’s on to step two?  What the hell is step two anyway?  What is this?”

Dean waved at the table between them and Castiel looked at it.

“I think it’s Go.”

“Go what?”

“It’s a game.  Called Go.  It means five.”

“Oh.  I don’t know how to play it.  Do you?”

“No.”

“Hey, um, thing that won’t tell us its name?  Do you have anything prepared for us here?”

They waited, and looked around, but the being didn’t appear.  They looked back at each other.

“What do you think we should do?” Dean asked.

Cas shrugged.  “I guess we should play.”

“But we don’t know how.”

Castiel picked up a black stone.  Before him the board rippled and disappeared.  He looked up, and everything was gone.  The table, the chairs, the game, the light…Dean.

Dean?

What happened, Cas?

I don’t know.

Wait…am I in your head…or are you in mine?

Castiel concentrated on what he could…experience was the only word that fit what was happening.  He could sense Dean’s disquiet.  He could feel his uncertainty and the urge to respond to what frightened him with aggression.  He knew that Dean rejected authority from people or things he had no respect for.  He knew that his respect was very hard earned.  He learned that the way Dean thought about society was not in a favorable light.  He thought the rules of society didn’t protect those that really needed it, so he saw no problem with using and manipulating those rules to his benefit.

Castiel also knew that when Dean bucked against the norm, it wasn’t with malicious intent.  He thought carefully about what he did and what kind of impact it would have on those around him.  Dean wasn’t a saint—“lawful good” came a thought that wasn’t his own—but he had a good heart.  He would take any injury or insult before allowing an innocent to be hurt.  Especially someone he felt responsible for.

Don’t get all weird about it.  Anyone would do their best to protect their loved ones.

No, you’re special, Dean.  A rare breed of man.

Yeah, well…

There’s an awful lot of cartoon porn on your mind, but…

You think a little too much about the life cycle of bees.

We all have our flaws.

Castiel…I think…

Dean…I know…

Castiel was aware of pressure, but not a physical pressure.  He felt like he was expanding and contracting and…blending.  Something beyond the ken of his consciousness was happening.  If he’d had a body he would have cried with rapture.  If he’d had arms he would have held on tightly to the new part of himself that felt like it had finally come home.  He felt whole.  He felt…safe.

“Over here, little human.”

Castiel turned.  He had his mind and he had his body, but somehow he knew neither were real.  They were more like facsimiles of his real self.  An avatar for him to experience what was going on around him.

The voice that had spoken had been clear, but flat in its delivery.  It came from a being that much more closely resembled a human.  It had distinct arms and legs and fingers and toes.  It had facial features and even the hint of muscle tone.  It wore no clothes, but had no breasts or genitalia.  It waved Castiel closer to it.

He walked across pale green marble and joined the thing where it sat on the edge of a large opening in the floor.  Castiel sat down next to it, his feet dangling over the side.

“You can see better from here,” it said.

“See what?”

“The ritual.”

It pointed a hand out.  Directly across from where they sat Castiel was startled to see himself and Dean sitting at a table with a game of Go spread out before them.  They looked frozen in place, staring at the board, Castiel holding a white stone in his hand.  No matter how long he stared at the figures they didn’t move.  He glanced up.

Castiel was struck with a sudden burst of despair.  What he was looking at was so heart-breakingly beautiful, he knew he would never see anything close to it again.  He would never know what true beauty or perfection was—he was ruined forever.  It was beyond his comprehension, but he knew that he was missing something vital.

Castiel’s mind swam back into focus.  He realized that the being had turned his head away from whatever was above him.

“Careful, little human.  You don’t have the capacity to understand that.  It will cause your puny consciousness to implode.”

Castiel blinked.  “Well, we don’t want that.”

“Certainly not.  You can look below.  That is base enough.”

Castiel looked down.  He yelped and looked away.  Then he couldn’t help himself and peeked back down.  Covered head to toe in slick oil, their skin mottled with bite marks and red bruises where they had gripped each other too tightly, he and Dean cavorted lasciviously in their blue flower haven.  Dean’s legs were spread wide, held in place by Castiel’s hands as he thrust into his body with a fervor he didn’t ever remember experiencing before.  Dean’s face was a beautiful work of art, contorted in a cry of ecstasy.  His own face looked a little stupid, so Castiel looked away from the debauchery below him.

“So.  Body, mind, and soul,” Castiel said, looking at the frozen tableau of he and Dean playing Go.  He didn’t dare look up again…where their souls must be joining.  Mating.   “Is it really a good thing to be that connected to someone?”

The being shrugged.  “I have no concept of not being joined that way.  I cannot tell you if a solitary existence is better.”

Castiel glanced around.

“Where’s your other half?”

“Not here.”

Castiel bobbed his head.  Fair enough.  “What are you?”

The being smiled at him.  It reached out a hand and touched his head.  Castiel winced against the information crashing into his mind.  He pulled away from the onslaught.

“Did you see it?” the being asked.

Castiel shook his head.  “No.”

The being smiled.  “I didn’t think you could.”

“Is it your job to join the humans that find their way here?  How long have you been here?”

“Not so long.  I know that one down there thinks it’s been a long time.  Thinks it has made a lot of preparations.”

Castiel smiled and glanced down again.  He couldn’t see the being that had bundled him and Dean into the flower, but he did see that Dean had turned the tables on him.  He was on his stomach getting drilled from behind.  Dean was making long, slow, powerful strokes, rocking Castiel’s body with every thrust.

“Damn.  Wish I could be feeling that,” he said with a sidelong glance at the being.

It chittered.  “You are.  In a way.  Just as you’re feeling your mind and soul mingling as well.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Castiel said.  “Why are you doing this?”

“If you can’t even comprehend what I am , do you really think you can grasp the way we think?”

Castiel made a face.  “ Maybe .  But why would you stay here for millennia, waiting for two humans to bungle their way inside?  You couldn’t know when or if anybody would ever show up.  It’s pure chance that we’re here.”

“Is it?” the creature asked with an enigmatic smile.

Castiel frowned at it.  “Don’t be some cliché spirit guide in a movie about learning what’s really important in life.”

“I would never,” it replied.  “But what I do and why I do it is not any of your concern.”

“It is when you do it to me.”

“You consented to the ritual.  In fact, you didn’t just consent to it, you wanted it.  You both did.  It doesn’t work if the joining pair don’t want to belong to each other.”

“But how could we want it?  We don’t even know each other.  Not really.”

The being smiled pityingly at him.  “This is why, little human, we don’t do this for all your species.  You’re much too independent.  Individualistic.  Many rebel against the joining even if they consent to it.  It only works if your souls and minds and, yes, even your bodies are truly meant to be as one.  I know you think it’s been two thousand years since the last humans were here for the ritual, and it’s true, that’s the last time we interacted with humans.  But it has been much, much longer than that since the last time a ritual was completed.  You and your partner are unique among your species.”

Castiel stared at the creature.  “Are you an alien?”

It chittered again and its skin glowed.  “Dear me, no.  My sweet, little human.  I am much closer to you than you think.”

Castiel let his eyes jump back and forth over the creature’s weak features.  Then he looked back at the frozen game of Go.

“We’re unique.  Dean and I.”

“Very special.  We waited a long time for you.”

Castiel smiled wryly.  “And prepared for us.”

He felt a tingling warmth on his simulated body where he believed the being touched a hand to his shoulder.

“It’s almost done now.  Take care, little human.  Be good to each other.  Just because you can’t lose each other, doesn’t mean you still can’t hurt each other.”

Castiel turned his head back to the being, wanting to ask a question, but then his consciousness exploded back into that pressure of more than, greater than…it faded to the darkness of thought.  He experienced Dean’s slight confusion, but what he felt most powerfully was their shared bliss.

Then Castiel felt physical pleasure like he never had before.  He was screaming his throat raw and clinging to Dean’s body with difficulty as the lubricant that coated them caused them to slide on the floor, against the petal, and against each other.  The high of his orgasm began to fade slowly, like a firework fizzling away in the night.  He became aware that he was panting, and that Dean was breathing just as hard where he lay on top of him.  Dean was still inside of him and Castiel’s lips parted in a small wave of pleasure as his body recognized the feeling.  He raised a hand and turned Dean’s face toward his.  They kissed with some difficulty since they were out of breath.  When they pulled back and looked into each other’s eyes…Castiel knew they were joined in every way possible.  He couldn’t experience Dean’s thoughts or feel his soul, not like before, but he knew that they were united.

Dean shifted to brace himself on one elbow.  He brushed his free hand through Castiel’s slick hair.  He leaned down to place a sweet, gentle kiss on his lips, and then pulled back.

“You ready to go?” Dean asked.

Castiel nodded.

Suddenly they were in the leaf forest directly below the crack that led back to their reality.  A staircase of yellow moss led from the ground to opening.  They were clean and dressed and all their gear sat next to them in a pile.  They looked at each other.  For a split second Castiel was worried that what they had experienced had been a dream, or worse, a mistake they would regret.  Then they both burst out laughing.  Dean pulled him in for a hug and kissed his temple.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, angel.”

“Okay.”

Castiel felt completely at ease around Dean.  There was no awkwardness, no doubts.  He knew Dean and what they shared.  Even if he didn’t know what Dean’s middle name was or what was his favorite brand of beer, they had plenty of time to learn all that stuff.  They packed up their equipment and pulled on their cold weather clothes.  Then they joined gloved hands as they began to ascend the staircase.

“Hey, Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Why did you call me angel?”

“Because you’re so pure and perfect,” he replied with mocking sweetness.

Castiel made a face and bumped his shoulder.  “No, really.”

“Your name.  Castiel.  It’s an angel, right?”

“Yes.  How did you know?”

“My mother was an expert on lore.  She knew everything about every myth, legend, and campfire story.”

“Oh.”  They climbed higher.  “My mother knew everything about collectible plates.”

Dean laughed and squeezed Cas’ hand.  Castiel smiled back at him and braced himself for stepping back out into the real world.

~~~

The cold was sudden and snatched the air from their lungs.  They struggled up onto the ice, clinging to each other’s hands.  When they sat up, they could find no break in the snow or ice.  They searched for two hours but could not find the malachite key.  They returned to the shelter of Castiel’s tent, and when Cas radioed Luke he discovered that four days had passed.  Luke was scheduled to pick him up the next morning.

After a night spent warm and safe in each other’s arms, Dean and Cas packed up their campsite and began the trek to their rendezvous point.  When Luke picked up not one, but two men, his jaw didn’t close for a full a ten minutes.  When he finally was able to speak again, his voice sounded very distant through their headsets.

“You know what, Cas?  I’m not even going to ask.  Just tell me you’re not working for the Ruskies.”

Castiel shook his head.  “Nope.  You remain a true patriot, my friend.”

Luke shook his head and concentrated on flying the chopper into Nunavut.

~~~

Castiel looked around his room again, inspecting it to make sure it was clean.  Half his closet was cleared out and the bathroom was cleaner than it had been since he’d moved in.  He turned to the bed and straightened the green duvet.

“Hey!”

Castiel shooed the stray cat off the bed and out the open window.

“I know you have other sugar daddies out there.  You can go to them.  Dean is allergic to cats!”

Castiel shut the window, and then jumped when there was a knock at the door.  He hurried out of his bedroom, anxious to see Dean.  They’d been inseparable for about two days after returning from the North Pole, and then Castiel had had to attend to his backlogged business and Dean had to prostrate himself before his brother and beg for his forgiveness.

They’d intended on reuniting in a matter of days, but it had taken Dean a couple of weeks to wrestle with the decision to share his findings with the academic community.  In the end he’d decided to send his method for reading Enochian to his former colleagues and let them decide whether or not they would take it seriously.  They both decided to keep the whereabouts and the very existence of the Tomb of Enoch, the Temple of the Disciple, and the door to the Godland to themselves.  If anyone else was worthy of finding their way to the Godland, they could prove it by figuring it out on their own.  They’d discussed potentially going back to the Amazon together, just to see if the key had somehow reappeared in its place in the temple, but then they decided to trust the most famous of all fairy tale lessons: Don’t look back.

Now two weeks had passed and they finally had the chance to see each other in person, and not just make mushy noises into the phone.

Castiel flung open his door and there Dean stood, as handsome as ever, a playful smile on his lips, and nothing more than a duffle bag slung over one shoulder and a large, plastic box in his hands.  Castiel tilted his head.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked.

Dean shrugged his shoulders.  “I was living out of my car for the six months before I left for Lebanon.”

Castiel felt his heart squeeze tightly in empathy.

“Hey now, don’t make that face.”  Dean stepped forward leaned over to kiss Cas on the cheek. “It has a happy ending, right?”

Castiel nodded, and then brightened.  “It does.  Come into the bedroom.  Let’s put your things away.”

“Can’t we eat first?”

“Oh, come on, you don’t have much.  Let’s get you settled.”

“Fine.  But let me pee first.”

“Okay.  The bathroom’s through there.”

Castiel took Dean’s duffle bag and the box and carried them into the bedroom.  He opened up the duffle bag, took one whiff, and zipped it closed.  He threw it next to the laundry basket.  Then he opened the plastic box and peeked inside.  There was Dean’s tablet and his paper notes, a few other odds and ends.  He opened a small lacquered box and found a necklace with a horned face pendant, a couple of bracelets and a thick silver ring.  Also in the box was a band of beautiful rose gold inlaid with silver or platinum filament in an intricate pattern that must have taken hours and hours of work to create.

Dean came out of the bathroom and saw what was in Cas’ hand.  He made a guilty expression and then laughed as he rubbed the back of his neck.

“Whoops.  Busted,” he said.

“For what?” Cas asked.

“I may have kind of, sort of—completely on accident—taken that ring from the pile of treasure in the tomb.”

Dean suffered under the judgment of Castiel’s shocked expression for only a moment, and then Cas smiled sheepishly and opened his underwear drawer.  He rooted around through his boxers until he found the small jewelry box.  He pulled it out and removed the ring of twisted silver.  He showed it to Dean.

“I may have kind of, sort of—completely on accident—taken this ring from the pile of treasure in the tomb.”

Dean laughed and took the ring from him.  He examined it closely, and then reached out for Castiel’s hand.  He slid the ring onto his left ring finger, and Castiel did the same to Dean with his “liberated” ring.  Dean grinned and clasped Castiel’s hand tightly in his.

“Hey, Cas?”

“Yes, Dean?”

“Now that we’ve essentially been mated, bonded, and married by some kind of higher being…what do you say to going on a date with me?”

Castiel smiled at Dean.  “I would love to.”