Three men sat around the table with a central candle. Vynessa whispered behind them. Though each man wore a hooded cloak, their eyes plainly reflected the fire.
“Look at the flame. Everything else disappears: the room, table, my voice, yourselves.” She paused, then—knowing although they weren’t aware of her voice, they internalized every word—continued: “A time of great burning comes upon us. Malchor, Lord of the Inferno, will arise and move across the face of the earth.”
Vynessa let the image play itself out inside the men’s minds. What they saw exactly, she didn't know, only that for each it ended with their birthplaces reduced to ember and ash.
“Malchor must be stopped. You must stop him.”
A low hum filled the room. At first Vanessa thought the men made the noise, an odd harmonic of their psychic trance, but when she stepped to the edge of the room the sound didn’t fade.
The candle flame, which had swayed gently on the wick, began to twitch and spark. It grew from half an inch in length to two, three, four inches long. The reflection in the men’s eyes grew; for a moment they resembled cat’s eyes with a gibbous moon glow, then their eye sockets blazed fire itself.
As one, the men rose. The hum lowered in pitch even as it increased in volume.
“Witch,” the trio said, “it is you who must be stopped. Reign, Malchor.”
And with that, the men were upon her.
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