All God's Men

Prologue:

Outside a broken down, abandoned cantina, the Darkness erupted from the earth. Springing forth from ancient confinement, it boiled out of the ground, collected, and poured like a tidal wave across the Earth.

Half a mile from it's point of origin, it swept around a black Chevy Impala. Inside, Sam and Dean cowered against the seats. Dean's hands were clenched uselessly on the wheel, tires throwing up mud and water and no traction whatsoever. Sam's hands clenched at the dashboard, his expression a mask of shocked horror. Both of them watched helplessly as black fog, the color of concentrated demon smoke and a thousand times more malevolent, rushed around them. Dean swore in a choked voice. "Son of a bitch..."

Several miles away, Castiel and Crowley froze, locked in combat. Black fury slammed into their senses, and angel and demon shuddered in simultaneous horror at the sudden awareness of an evil so black that Lucifer and the Leviathan combined couldn't have compared. Castiel retched violently, doubled over as he fell away from Crowley, angel blade clattering to the floor as pure evil assaulted his senses.

Crowley shuddered, gasped, crossed himself in a way he hadn't done since meeting Cain almost two years ago. "Holy mother of sin...what in bloody Hell is that?"

Not far away, Rowena felt the Book of the Damned heat in her arms, almost glowing with dark energy. Her own innate magic hummed with the power of evil boiling up somewhere distant. "Well now...isn't that interesting?" She kept walking, clutching the book to her.

Miles and miles distant, holed up in a small abandoned room, a man who had once been Metatron, Voice of God, and now posed as Marvin, homeless scholar, looked up from an ancient tablet he was studying with something like surprise. Something unpleasant curled his expression. "Well, talk about your plot twist..." His fingers traced the writing etched into the stone. "I wonder..."

Miles away in a different direction, a slender man with hazel eyes, a man who had once been called a prophet, looked up in trepidation. There was no surprise or fear in his eyes, only resignation, determination, and a touch of sadness.

In the bowels of Hell, demons reacted with mingling shock and awe and wonder, and debated fiercely what their King had done to produce such an incredible outpouring of power.

Deep in the darkest depths, in a cage of hell-fire and nightmares, two archangels who had been trapped for eons of hell time shuddered as one.

In the halls of Heaven, angels flinched. Then they turned to their leader. "Commander...what has happened?"

Hannah had no answers. But she knew the name of one who might. "Find Castiel. He is on Earth. And send observers to gather any information you can. Find out if Metatron is behind this." She wouldn't put it past the vanished angel, now that he'd been broken out of Heaven's jail. Angels departed on their assignments, and Hannah turned her attention to Earth. She had a terrible intuition. This darkness rising was so much more evil than even the release of Lucifer and Castiel's release of the Leviathan had been. She had a sudden fear that not even the Apocalypse could compare to what had been unleashed. She only wished she knew what that was.

The Darkness rose, and rolled over the Earth.