The Lead In - Eleanor and Mal are racing to reach Emmaline having learned that the enemy is planning to murder her at home.

The ring at the door bell surprised Emmaline. There were few callers out here and fewer still at this late hour. She snapped her fingers and the wooden spoon which had been stirring the cookie dough, quite independent from her input, quivered and stopped, then toppled to hit the metal rim of the bowl with a soft thump. There were lights out on the driveway, a pair of cars. A soft knot of worry that Eleanor had been hurt coalesced in her stomach. The doorbell rang again and she walked across to foyer and opened the heavy wooden door, wiping dust from her hands to her apron. A stern looking man in a cheap suit stood in the doorway. He smelled of bleach and cologne.

“Dr Stern,” he began, a trifle hesitantly, perhaps surprised that the woman he had come to find was stained with drywall cement and had her hair pulled up behind a bandana with the words ‘something wicked’ written across it.

“Ja,” she responded, attempting to look around outside. It was dark and the rain was already coming down, but she saw other men out there, similarly dressed, white teeth and rolexes glinting.

“Dr Emma Stern?” he repeated. Emmaline narrowed her eyes slightly, beginning to grow agitated.

“Yes,” she responded again. Something was wrong, but these didn’t seem like police or anyone from the Group.

“Emma Stern,” the man repeated, a self satisfied grin flashing across his face, ugly and cruel. There were others out there, many others, she realized, spreading out in a wide half circle around the door.

“Thrice I name you and bound!” he declared. And she felt the surge of will as he reached out to seize her arm.

Eleanor felt the psychic death scream as Mal gunned the Lexus onto the gravel roadway, fish tailing wildly to keep control at over sixty miles an hour in the driving rain. It hit her deep in the gut, doubling her up in a wail of grief and loss. They were too late. It was over.

“It dosen’t mean…” Mal began, risking a glance from the road at her that nearly put them into an oak tree. He heaved at the wheel keeping them on all four wheels more by luck than skill, ripping away a vast section of the hanging spanish moss that hung from the trees. Before she could reply another death scream sounded. Then another.

“What the..” Mal began, not as attuned to the entropic feedback as Eleanor was but still able to sense something. They bumped up over the slide ridge and looked down into the hollow to the house. They could see two parked SUVs lights painting the front of the house, a figure in the doorway lit by the merry hearthlight. The lights sucked out and the air fluoresced with green white corposant. Eleanor felt a terrible draw of entropy pulling at every atom of her body, energy rushed in towards the house like a giant drawing its breath, like the tide rushing away at full slack. The lights shattered in showers of explosive sparks that hung in the air like fireflies and the roof exploded upwards with a shattering report. A pillar of white gold fire rose thirty feet into the air, the concussion of its creation blowing the walls of the mansion apart like thistle in a hurricane. The force of it literally picked up both SUVs and hurled them away like childrens toys. Two more death screams, so close and loud that Eleanor could taste the sheer terror of them.

“Stop!” she screamed at Mal, who was too transfixed to have responded with anything other than a slackening in his suicidal acceleration. There was no time to explain Eleanor grabbed the hand brake and yanked hard. The Lexus slewed sideways and turned over, spinning once in the air before slamming into the side of a tree. The airbags blew, screaming open with the horrible scent of burning superglue and hammering both of them back into their seats. The entropic detonation came a heart beat later. Everything within a hundred meters of the house died. Birds were struck from the sky, worms died in the earth, bacteria burst their cell walls and expired, every tree and plant withered and crumbled to ash in an instant. All that death sucked in towards the house like a backdraft snuffing a fire. The sound of it shattered the crazed windows of the lexus with its sheer volume. Eleanor’s pistol cracked, sounding tinny and attenuated. The airbag deflated as the bullet punctured it and she pulled her way free by sheer force of will, falling out of the car and onto the muddy road side, pulling herself towards the house on all fours. Pieces of masonry and broken ceiling tiles rained down all around her . Something struck the side of the Lexus and bounced to a stop a few feet from her. It was a human hand severed at the wrist, three fingers burning like candles. The rolex watch on the wrist whired as the hands spun crazily backwards as the very rules of reality were ripped apart.

The light was incredible.

Emmaline stood atop the pillar of flame, her clothing burned away, her nude form shining with the luminous power she was channeling. Nothing in the universe produced as much raw chaos as the destruction of a human mind, and a practitioner, as all thirteen men down there certainly were, were an order of magnitude more potent. Emmaline had snuffed out five minds in the space of a few heart beats, main lining the raw chaos like a light filament that suddenly surged with a billion volts. She blazed with a radiance that would have shamed a magnesium flare, every detail of her burning itself into Eleanor’s mind, even from a quarter of a mile away. It was terrible to behold that light. It was more than physical, more than mystical, they very stuff of creation ripped asunder and forced into the world. It was the ruinous brilliance of primordial magic and chaos, the horrible illumination that men of old had tried to hold back with the black sabbats of the Magna Mater. It was the soul shattering terror which had torn the name of Ishtar from the throats of Mesopetamian farmers, the incredible destruction which had piled the stones in temples to Shiva and Kali-ma in the Indus Valley. It was the atomic annihilation which had burned shadows into the stone at Hiroshima. It was the racial memory of shepherds who had imagined the first words of creation from the lips of their vengeful God. Let. There. Be. Light.
Three of the surviving men died instantly, their minds simply abraded away by what they were seeing. Eleanor could feel their terror and their horror, feel the shape of Emmaline’s blazing form burning their retinas, seared into their minds even as the flesh of their faces ran slick and their optic nerves blazed like guttering candle wicks. Her sanity shivered on the edge of the rushing storm of entropy.

“What the fuck…” Mal breathed. It saved Eleanor’s life, the voice pulling her soul from the blazing existential inferno to look at him. She could see nothing but his shape, black and gray and glittering with visual purple, over layed with the searing image of Emmaline, reflected by that light in his own eyes. She forced herself to turn back. Explosions rippled around the sorceress as hydrogen atoms split from their oxygen partners, only to explosively recombine a moment later. Everything was burning, rock and bone blazed with gorgeous metallic color that seemed drab and boring compared to Emmaline. Another man died, the psychic scream this time more like a sigh of relief. Somehow the man before Emmaline stood his ground, surrounded by a quarter mile of utter blasted ruin. Both of his arms were raised as he screamed a chant that was inaudible over the cacophonous booms and the keening scream of the light itself. He was sucking in power from his surviving coven members, a lethal amount if their lifetimes hadn’t already been measured in moments. With awful majesty, the transfigured form of Emmaline looked down at the chanting man, the first motion it had made since it lifted onto its pillar of witchfire. In the days to come Eleanor and Mal would dispute what happened next. To Eleanor it sounded only like a pure and terrible note of sound, like the chime of some great bell that spoke of the doom of the world and the entropic death of the universe. Mal had a simpler and less poetic recollection. A simple and unadorned word in Emmaline’s voice, audible clearly across a quarter mile of shattered broken hell. Burn. And burn they did. The four surviving practitioners ignited like propane flames, their bodies blasting appart like hammer struck glass. The leader stood a moment longer, screaming desperately. Tongues of white flame burst from his eyes, ears and nostrils. He turned to run, staggering blindly down the track towards the road, flame dripping from his body, gravel beneath his feet cracking and fusing in puddles of glass. It wasn’t his willpower of magical defenses that kept him moving. Eleanor could feel the agony in his mind, the abandonment and defeat of a man who thought himself righteous abandoned in his hour of need, the fire that reached every fiber of his being. Emmaline was keeping him alive as he burned. Perhaps not keeping him alive, but attenating his death, stretching it out infinitely in a desperate attempt to step down the incredible power she had drawn in so that she could stand against so many. The burning man staggered away screaming. The pillar of flame guttered and vanished, dropping Emmaline’s body to the ground. Reality itself screamed in protest at what had been done to it.

Lead out - Emmaline has created a death vortex by drawing way too much power. We have to cross it somehow to save her.