Soren gripped the handle of his wand a little tighter as he realized that this spirit was the Vanir god of harvest. He sighed, exasperated, as he looked at the god.
"Why do you want my help?" Soren inquired. "I'm just a human with a speck of power."
"I can sense it," the god replied as he looked right into Soren's eyes. "You are different than those heathens. You hold more than enough power and ability to free me from the heathens' curse along with destroying the guard they left me. I can feel your presence and what you do to those blasted heathens. The madness and bloodlust."
That left Soren surprised. He didn't know why that this harvest god-spirit could feel the difference between himself and all of the other humans here, but he did know the reason.
"It has to be because I am connected to the Dream and to the [White Void]," Soren thought to himself. "The madness and bloodlust is obviously due to how hunters and the citizens of Yharnam consumed old blood from a sleeping Old One, but the effect must be further expanded due to the influence of the Void."
"So, you know I'm different," Soren replied to the god-spirit. "Doesn't mean I can destroy the guard without attracting attention."
This left the old god-spirit surprised as if this young one before him was new to all of this, but he did understand. The heathens, in his eyes, were careful during the week of sacrifice for harvest each year and would do anything to prevent their precious village from suffering the normal cycles of nature. They always followed the old rites of sacrifice to keep him bound to that blasted tree and to use his powers for keeping their harvests plentiful.
Before the spirit could retreat to accept its fate, Soren spoke up.
"But there is a way to break you free," Soren stated. "All I need is a suitable distraction at the right time."
That made the god-spirit perk up a bit, reigniting the gleam of hope in its eyes. "What do you need me to do?"
"Nothing for now," Soren replied as he walked towards the exit of the orchard, his wand still glowing brilliantly. "There is a hunter by the name of Dean Winchester coming to this town. His clumsy bumbling into this town's practices will help cause a disruption to their preparations and will inevitably cause causality itself to intervene with things here."
"Causality? Do you mean the tides of Fate?" the god-spirit inquired, unfamiliar with the term.
Soren nodded as he neared the end of the orchard. "Fate will intervene to skew it towards the Winchesters. It is, in part, of their cosmic mandate and it cannot be overturned."
The god-spirit didn't fully understand what Soren meant, but what was understood just happened to be enough to let the spirit know he will be freed from his arboreal prison. Even though it was currently powerless to do anything for itself and the young man in front of him also couldn't do anything yet, the knowledge of its impending freedom greatly pleased him.
With that, the god-spirit faded into thin air holding onto that faint sliver of hope. Soren knew that, with the events of the episode soon to play out, he had to make some moves.
"While the Winchesters will inevitably save the day and bring down this town full of cultists, I need to be even more prepared for what is to come. The first season was just to set the stage for the Demon arc and lead into the first Apocalypse," Soren thought to himself as he turned away from the orchard and lowered the brightness of his spell, "yet I know that things will inevitably butterfly. Foreknowledge is dangerous enough in the hands of a transmigrator, but if an actual native got ahold of such knowledge, they'd go insane."
With each step away from the orchard, Soren plotted out the key events. Dean would show up, like in canon, and bungle his way to a personal escort by the sheriff out of Burkitsville. He'd return at night to save the traveling couple from their fates as sacrifices and make the scarecrow angry, but inevitably get snitched by the professor he inquired with. This would lead to him getting tied up in the orchard along with the Jorgeson niece and being rescued by Sam.
The ending of the episode was that they burned the tree to bring the supernatural crop yields to its ultimate conclusion. Soren knew that he would have to make sure he hid his movements well and use his magic to kill the scarecrow.
While he knew that he had more physical means to end the scarecrow, and potentially derail Chuck's games this early in the Winchesters' hunts, Soren didn't want to bring his Hunter's Garments and respective weapons from the Dream to deal with small fry. He knew that things were only going to get more dangerous and, compared to the first bout of the Apocalypse and God's sister getting freed, the scarecrow and a whole town of cultists who worshipped it were indeed just minnow in a vast ocean.
"You have no idea how tempted I am," Soren thought to himself as he was some distance from the orchard now. "I really want to just use my magic to destroy this orchard and raze it down to the very roots just so make these assholes suffer. I survived in a real apocalypse for decades and, unlike the poor bastards in the other world, my world wasn't created by Chuck. There weren't angels vying for power and upturned the entire planet into a vast dead rock in space, but there were monsters. The only issue is that, unlike the natives of this universe, I'm not worried about blasting Chuck with a Cruciatus or an Avada. I don't need that damned Equalizer to killHim."
Soren gripped his wand a bit tighter as his own fury was building within him. His thoughts on making Chuck suffer before He died at his hands were tainted with emotion of a survivor, yet the Angel of Yharnam would make his debut soon enough.
However, it wasn't going to start with a small Indiana township.
The first traces were already destined to happen regardless of Chuck's interventions...
===={-+-}====
In the town of Joshua, Nebraska, a couple lived.
They made their living by spreading faith healing and gave many people hope, but what the public doesn't know is that the wife of the healer went power-hungry. She bound and controlled the reaper meant for her husband and, by killing those she deemed wicked, used the Reaper to heal others. Her desire to save her husband from death led her to controlling an agent of a primal force and the fate she deserved in the show.
However, at the same time as Soren was in Burkitsville, the wife felt a chill down her spine.
She thought she was just cold from the weather, but despite her self-deception, one entity was not blind. The Reaper she had bound to her service through black magic felt it too, but it was something more fundamental than the magic which bound him.
A changing of fortune.
===={-+-}====
Continued in: Dark Tides.
[Please read the Author's Note!]