Here's a video of what I've got thus far. Pardon the choppiness, my MBP + QuickTime + Xcode isn't the best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGRwz7n3kNA

It's a really rough draft on what I want, but you can get the idea. Performance is the biggest problem, but even performance aside I'm wasting CPU/GPU time rendering/computing particles that are behind my UIImageView (the demonic rune looking thing).

Does anyone have any idea how to emit particles along a path or a better way to get a glowing animation behind a view? Here's a snippet of my emitter view that set's up the animation: