Author's Note: I am really enjoying writing for fun again, thank you all for your encouragement.

But you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate,
so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
- 'All Along the Watchtower' Jimi Hendrix

Somehow he stood again in the shadow of the broken lighthouse, in the last remaining light as the storm broke overhead.

What looked like a helicopter rushed over, low, and for a moment Dean thought he could hear the faint, warped strains of that famous intro to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, or maybe it was Sabbath's War Pigs. Maybe it was both. Trees shook in the wash from the blades where the stony plateau gave way to the rest of the island.

At his feet, sickly yellow light shone from a huge pit. The edge seemed to creep nearer to him, crumbling away in slow motion.

The man in the gray cloak stood at the edge across from him and leaned on his staff, holding the lantern, just...waiting. Behind him in the flashes of the storm, the lighthouse was a lighthouse and sometimes it was a low, crude stone table and sometimes it was a jagged temple that rose into the darkness, disappearing into the roiling sky.

Dean scrambled to his feet. Fire flickered at the edges of his vision, the air was acrid and hazy. An explosion, maybe an earthquake shook the ground and he nearly lost his footing again as he scrambled out of reach of the thing that grasped for him, some kind of creature he had no name for; nothing but teeth and eyes, smoke and shadow made flesh.

There were other people there, too, fighting them - a dark-haired and vaguely familiar-looking man dressed like Luke from Return of the Jedi, wielding a sword made of white light. Purple electricity flew from the fingertips of a coldly beautiful young woman, jumping from one target to the next to the next as frost rimed the ground around her feet, spreading in dizzying fractals. Her hair was a wind-whipped, opalescent storm, her eyes the color of light through a glacier. A gaunt, handsome man in all black, with eyes the same gleaming chrome as the blood-stained Gurkha swords he bore charged across the rocky ground alongside prehistoric-sized wolves that lunged out of the night, tearing through the creatures with snapping jaws.

Lightning struck at the Warden's unflinching back, and in the searing afterimage, Dean could see another figure in the still-smoking crater; a slight woman in soot-stained white and dented steel plate, blonde hair spilling from beneath a winged, visored helmet like something from a Rackham illustration. With her, a dozen literal berzerkers fell into a phalanx, charging. Her chipped, rusted sword intercepted the creature that rushed the Warden, she drove it back with a blow from a cracked shield, screaming.

That, of all things, seemed to draw the attention of the Warden. He did nothing more than glance in her direction, and snap the end of the staff against the ground, which erupted into flame. It raced toward the creatures like a living thing, and for a moment a helix of blood and steel, a whorl of fire seemed to hang suspended in the air.

The stony ground around the pit cracked and shuddered again, and Dean shuffled backward for purchase, dodging the teeth of another shadowy fiend. In the hellish light of battle, Dean saw that it was not a lighthouse at all, or a temple, or a stone table, but the mountain of things the man had killed, monsters and demons, creatures of all kinds in a towering, rotting heap.

A bodycount, confirmed kills in horrible high-definition.

Crouched on top of it all was another woman in white. Her robe was dirty; she had probably been beautiful once, but she was too thin, her face drawn, auburn hair tangled and streaming in the wind. In the flicker of the storm Dean could see the silhouette of her phantom wings stretched, black and tattered against the bruised sky. Two pair of eyes; one set human, one eerie green and lidless glowed beneath a sigil on her forehead in dull purple, the shape of an hourglass.

An angel. A fallen angel.

He tore his eyes away and gazed into the abyss at his feet, further down than he thought was even possible. They weren't dead, Dean could feel it, hear all of them, calling. Monsters that had no names, names too frightening to speak aloud or names that had been lost to time, eldritch beings and dark gods, and they weren't calling him.

The things trapped in the jaundiced crystal beneath them weren't the confluence of ley lines the Warden had spoken of but the origin – the energy of the collected monstrosities had pulled them here like a neon sign, right to a whole horde of the kind of things that would have loved to get their hands on a soulless vessel tailor-fit for Lucifer himself.

"Warden," Dean heard himself say, and the man looked up at him. "It's a prison."

There was a snap, like a rubber band against the inside of his skull, and he was in the little cabin again, scrambling away in a cold blooded panic. The flash outside the little cabin was too huge, too green to be lightning. It shone through every crack in the roof and missing patch of mortar in the stone, the roar that shook the little building sounded too much like the hollow rumble of wings, like the growl of an angry voice.

"Empty night," the man swore, his head tilting to one side like he was listening.

It sounded like two voices, arguing, and Dean recognized one.

"Agh," the wizard said, annoyed. "Angels. Should have known. Which one of you called in an air strike? This is a no-fly zone, guys. DMZ. Your friend is not landing here. I don't know...if he can't or won't, my Enochian is pretty rusty, and my translator is being belligerent."

The ground shook again.

"Rusty?" Dean demanded in a hoarse voice.

"Don't go anywhere," the wizard said. The door to the cabin flew open, the staff in the corner leapt into his hand and the man stormed out into the night.

"Dude," Sam said, craning around to look at his brother, "What the hell?"

"Dude full-on Spocked me!"

"Well, he said it was Star Trek-y." Sam said, reasonably. "Were you expecting Uhura's fan dance?"

He dug an elbow into Sam's kidney. The circle zapped them both.

The door flew open again a heartbeat later and the Warden stormed in.

"Okay, here's the thing." The wizard drew a line through the chalk with his staff and hauled them each to their feet. "I'm gonna cut you loose since your celestial babysitter is here and I don't want to be smited…smote? Whatever. I want you to swear on your honor as a hunter that neither you nor anyone in your company is going to try to off me, now or ever, in perpetuity."

"Okay," said Dean, bewilderedly, because like hell was he going to try to off the guy without nuclear launch codes, or whatever the magical equivalent happened to be.

"No, Winchester," the wizard spoke his name and it felt like someone had rung a bell inside his bones. "You have to swear it. You know what that means, swearing a binding magical oath?" He unlocked their handcuffs with a key fumbled from a coat pocket. "Any and all action taken against the oath will incur entropic retribution."

"Entropic…?"

"Bad luck?" Sam offered.

"Very bad."

"Okay. I swear it."

"And I swear that I will convey you and your party safely from this godforsaken hellhole—"

The ground rumbled...sullenly.

"Stars and stones!" The wizard yelled out the open door. "I swear on my power to convey you safely from this island paradise as soon as humanly possible. Go get the gas can, Neo."

"Me?" asked Sam.

"Yeah, you. Out the front door, around the corner to the left. You," he pointed at Dean. "Get your stuff."

Sam backed out the door and the wizard turned to the gear scattered across the table. He field-stripped Sam's nine millimeter with the quick hands of an avid shooter and dumped the pieces in the bag, then turned to Dean, leaning down to look him directly in the eye.

"I'm holding you responsible for that kid's actions and you know why. Fair enough?"

"...Yeah. Okay," Dean agreed, still a little stunned. He shouldered their gear and started out the door after the wizard, and then stopped dead in his tracks. Sam was a few feet from him, staring up at a shadowy figure, better than ten feet tall and wrapped in a huge gray cloak, green eyes glowing in its hood, which tilted curiously to one side.

"Holy shit."

"Alfred's peaceful. Well, no. Benign, maybe? Your angel buddy woke him up, I think he thought we were gonna throw down."

"Why the hell is there a freaking Ringwraith in your front yard?" Sam demanded, his voice thin. He clutched a gas can, one hand reflexively grasping for his gun.

"Because," said the Warden with a grin, turning around to walk backward towards the beach, never slowing or taking a misstep. "There is evil here that does not sleep. Go back to bed, Alfred! Everything's cool." The huge figure turned and shambled back into the darkness. "He's the island's genus loci," he explained, as if making excuses for a moody roommate. "And he's kinda... territorial."

Dean felt coldly nauseous, and followed the man toward the shoreline, ready to get the hell off of this literally godforsaken island. Sam sighed glumly and took a few long steps to catch up.

"Why do those faeries keep calling you a Knight?" Sam demanded, because even without a soul, he was unable to suppress the need to find shit out and ask questions that were obviously way too personal.

"I made a deal," the man said, as if through a mouthful of sand, "with a faerie queen, the one we talked about. I'm her mortal emissary."

"No." Sam stopped and stared at him. "You're her huntsman. Like in the fairy tales, all those stories, that's you."

"Yes," the man said, staring steadily back at Sam, his voice cold and absolute, devoid of emotion. "I suppose so."

"You know, in the stories, he always sells her out in the end."

The Warden snorted softly, like he was amused, then turned and walked straight toward the water's edge, hands and staff outstretched like some post-apocalyptic Heston-as-Moses about to part the sea. His voice rang across the water, a command.

"Infriga!"

As he stepped out into...onto the water, there was a sound like a gunshot – like the screaming of metal on metal. The lake froze beneath his feet in a solid sheet for almost fifty yards, huge iceberg crystals the size of Buicks called from the beneath the waves. The weather had cleared to high streams of silver clouds, moonlight glowed on dark ice that reflected the glimmering band of Milky Way. When the terrible sound died away, he spoke again.

"Castiel!" The wizard said dramatically, then paused and tilted his head. "Did I say that right? Okay," he nodded as if to himself, gesturing to the empty ice before him with the wooden staff. "Come in peace, messenger of peace."

The chill Dean felt had nothing to do with the wind sweeping across the conjured ice as a dark-haired man in a rumpled trenchcoat appeared, summoned and bound of action with six words. This wasn't some hedge witch dicking around with a Xeroxed book of shadows. His brain was hardwired for magic from birth, insulated to use it, overclocked by what was essentially a deity. The son of a bitch probably could have killed them with a stray thought.

The wizard and the angel stood on the ice, conversing as amiably as acquaintances that had run into each other at the grocery store.

"What do you think they're talking about?"

Sam's brow furrowed. "Guys-in-flasher-coats club meetings?"

A moment later, Castiel was gone, and the wizard walked back to shore. He struck the surface of the ice with the butt of his staff and it shattered into a channel of water just wide enough for their crappy boat. He helped them drag it to the edge.

"So you'll want to sail kind of southwest—"

"Y'know, I think we can take it from here, Prospero."

The wizard turned and stared at Sam, who, in his current state would never have seen it, but Dean did.

Pain. A nanoseconds' worth of it behind the eyes, a twitch of the muscles in his jaw. And then the man decked him - right in the face, a swift right hook out of nowhere. The Warden caught the front of his brother's jacket as he fell, hefted all two-hundred-odd pounds of Unconscious Sam up with one hand and set him down in the bottom of the shallow boat.

"What the fuck!" Dean demanded as the Warden turned toward him. "Dude, what the fuck--"

"I'm sorry," the man placated, raising a palm. He picked up the discarded gas can and put it in the boat as well. "It'll be easier for you to leave if he's out. I think this place wants him here. You know it. I think you've known since you got here."

"I…saw it," Dean choked out, cold to the core. "I saw all those things, I..."

"Then you know why you need to get your Excellent Adventure-ing asses the hell out of here, pronto," the man interrupted, sternly. "It's incredibly dangerous, him, here, like that…"

"I didn't bring him back that way," Dean tried to explain, his voice breaking. When he shut his eyes, he could still see all of it, permanent, in technicolor, he could still hear the taunting whispered calls of those creatures in the pit.

"I know."

"I don't know how to fix this."

"I know," said the Warden again, sadness and sympathy in the lines around his eyes. "I don't even know how the fuck he's walking around like that, or if there even is a fix. For something like that, you'd have to bring in the big guns. Summon a god, or something. If it's possible at all to restore a soul to a body, I don't know."

"Who, though?" Dean asked, desperate for an answer, any answer, any help at all. "What?"

"I can only tell you what to avoid, kid." The wizard leaned on his staff, suddenly weary. "Demons. Necromancers. The goddamn Sidhe, avoid them like the fucking plague. At least if you piss off a brand-name god, there's a passing chance they'll just liquefy you, quick and painless. Odin and Hades seem like okay, if terrifying, dudes."

Dean stared at him, the seed of an idea prickling at his subconscious. "The big guns."

"The biggest you can find. Come on."

Together, they shoved the boat out into the channel of icy water.

"Definitely head southwest. This thing doesn't look very reliable. You'll be in Chicago in an less than an hour, give or take. I've got a friend there who can get you a ride to wherever, just tell her I sent you."

The wizard produced an old, crumpled but official-looking business card from the pocket of his long leather coat, silver lettering gleamed in the moonlight. There was a cell number neatly inked below the name, the title and department had been crossed out with a single line:

SGT. K. Murphy, CPD Special Investigation

Dean read it once, twice, his memory conjuring a cute little blonde with a sword, vampires, an abandoned hotel, a wrecked Harley.

"She about so high," he held his hand level with his shoulder. "Blonde, kind of Bruce Lee-meets-Princess Leia, rides a sick black Street 750, carries plastic explosive around like candy?"

The Warden blinked at him, then began to laugh, harder and harder until he was wheezing as he leaned on his staff, knee-deep in the lake.

"I take it that's a yes," Dean muttered, pocketing the business card.

"Yeah." The Warden wiped at his eyes, still chuckling. "Yep. That's her."

"You are Harry...something," Dean accused, wracking his memory of the case for details, but it had been a few years and beers since then. "Dresden, right? The PI from Chicago."

He grinned toothily. "That's what it says on my tombstone."

"Yeah, everybody said you were dead. Well, everyone except Sergeant Murphy."

"How do you know Karrin?" His tone was congenial, curious even, but the way Dresden took a towering step closer, dark eyes slightly narrowed even though he was still smiling, well, it kind of felt like a threat.

"We ended up on the same case, and killed some whaddya call'ems…blampires?, together a while back. Outside of South Bend. Some bad bitch named Marla. Martha?"

"Mavra," Harry the Wizard supplied in a murderous tone, wearing an expression to match. The air felt like it had dropped ten degrees. The thought of stepping out of reach crossed Dean's mind, but fleeing makes you look like prey to things higher than you on the food chain. His feet were too cold and numb to move, anyway, but the icy water didn't seem to bother Dresden in the slightest.

"Well," Dean rambled. "She killed them while Sam and I tried to stay out of the line of fire. And then I kinda rebuilt her motorcycle. And there was a thing with some ghouls, too, no biggie. So, not dead, huh? I bet Sarge was pretty happy to see you."

"Sarge—oh, Karrin, yeah." Harry rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and shrugged sheepishly. "When she was done being mad."

"Understandable. God, and even with the fireball thing — I gotta say, you're terrifying, but not half as scary as she is."

"No question there," Dresden nodded, proudly. "But it's time for you to go. I'll take care of those kappas for you."

"Thanks. I think."

"Yeah, yeah. Get the hell out of here, archangel sockpuppet," he said, cheerfully. "Yeah, I saw that, too. Breathe a word about this place to anyone and I will find you and your giant nerdy brother and turn you both into archangel sockpuppet gravy."

"Don't even worry about it."

"I won't." He put a hand on Dean's shoulder, and with as much gravitas as he could muster, which wasn't much at all, intoned, "May the Force be with you."

He gave the boat a shove, and over the slapping of water against the hull, Dean could hear a half-mad cackle.

When he felt like they were far enough out, Dean killed the engine and sat down.

"Alright," he said to the empty sky. "So what the hell was that?"

In the next breath, Castiel was sitting on the bench seat in the bow of the speedboat, staring out over the water. "For years, the Magi were hunted in droves by people like you, and burned alive in the name of God. I would be suspicious of strangers, as well."

"Suspicious? I was handcuffed and mind-melded, that's straight-up paranoid."

"And when you proved you weren't a threat, he swore safe passage and sent you on your way, according to the ancient laws of hospitality."

Dean glared, but said nothing.

"I don't think you grasp what kind of honor that is coming from someone who could have willed you into nonexistence with less mental effort than you use to tie your shoes," Castiel said, eyebrows climbing very humanly.

"Not what I meant," he said, gesturing toward Sam, snoring in the bottom of the boat.

"Sam isn't his usual polite self," the angel returned in a tone that sounded more like he'd said, 'the smartmouthed kid had it coming.'

"So what was with the mind-melding thing, anyway?"

"Dean. I don't know what that means."

"It means that crazy bastard went poking around in my gray matter just by looking me in the eye."

"Not your brain, your soul. Anyone can see a soul. Normal mortals, even, but it's in glimpses over a lifetime. People with the Gift can see souls whole, all at once."

"You can't do that?"

"I have Grace. It's different," Cas said, but didn't expound. He stared out over the water, holding the rail.

The angel was humming a song, and he recognized it after a moment - Zeppelin's Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You.

"Where'd you hear that?" Dean asked.

"What?"

"That song, where did you hear it?"

"I can hear it right now." The angel frowned at him, even more serious than usual. "You could, too. On the island, couldn't you?"

"I heard something. A guitar." Dean glanced back at the shadowy form of the island, shrinking behind them. "It wasn't Gandalf, was it?"

"All living beings resonate at certain frequencies. Those with the Gift are stronger." Castiel nodded. "One of the Fallen tried to possess him. Sometimes that leaves side effects."

"Tried to possess him? I thought fallen angels turned into humans—"

"The Fallen. One of the originals. A Knight of the Blackened Denarius, who possess the thirty silver coins paid to Judas Iscariot as blood money for the betrayal of Christ."

"Oh," said Dean. "Shit. Wait, tried?"

"The wizard apparently showed her the error of her ways."

"Killed her?"

"Converted her. Or the portion of the entity that attempted to possess him, at any rate."

"Converted her to what, the Church of Grumpy Guys in Flasher Coats?"

"To the concept of free will."

"Doesn't explain why I could hear it-" he had barely begun before Cas put a hand on his shoulder.

It was an assault on a sense he didn't know he had; a sucker-punch from sound that was alive, something physical, entirely inside his mind yet infinitely distant. A force of its own, like the opposite of gravity, reaching out to echo violently through the vastness of everything, pulling.

This was a song he thought he knew, no – this was like his first memory of hearing it on staticky F.M. radio when he was ten; it had been so cold out, but Dad had stopped the car for a few minutes on a Minnesota backroad so they could watch the Northern Lights. He could smell the leather seats, burnt dust from the car's heater, taste the sip of coffee laced with bourbon he had swiped when Dad wasn't looking. This was how it was supposed to sound and it would never sound right again; perfected and destroyed in a moment, as pure and crystalline as starlight on water, reverberating off the far end of the universe, off the inside of his skull.

And then he could taste blood in his mouth, felt it drip from a nostril.

"Musical universalis." Castiel pulled his hand away. "The music of the spheres. It's an angelic gift."

Dean scuffed the back of his hand across his upper lip, blood glittered black on his knuckles in the moonlight. He nodded toward the island.

"So that place is a prison, like the Pit."

"No. That place was built by a man."

"What kind of crazy son of a bitch would build that?"

"One of the Magi. Emrys." Castiel's brow creased. "I think it's different in English."

"Merlin," Sam croaked from the bottom of the boat. He sat up, rubbing at his jaw. "Emrys. Merlin."

"Oh, this is way above my paygrade," Dean muttered, as he threw the boat into gear again.

stay tuned...