From the distance, curses and grumbling could be heard as the guards bumbled around in their search. They were still quite a bit a ways, but it was clear by the sounds of their voices that they accidentally picked up her tracks every now and then and were making their way closer to her. It would be a few hours, closer to sundown before she would find that they would be coming up to her. And, by the sounds of the extra voices, there was more than the original three.<br/><br/><br/>The landscape itself was odd for where she was able to see. The city itself was surrounded by a forest, a natural means of defense plus many benefits when it came to wildlife. Beyond the forest depended on the direction travelled. In this particular direction, the forest ended in a strange formation of ridges and rocks that were only in a small area, followed by a large cliff just before the plains extended out beyond. There wasn’t much in the ways of hiding from beyond those rocks unless it was harvesting season with the grass and various flora having overgrown enough to be able to be used to sneak through.<br/><br/><br/>These rocks were strange in itself. While the common answer in regards to them by normal people were that they’ve always been there, records on the first founding of the city didn’t mention anything remotely of them. When one used water to wash away the dirt, they were strangely obsidian in colour. Within the darkness, one could see bits of dark violet, as if it were veins, throughout the rock. They were warm to the touch, along with the ground that the rocks surrounded.  Every now and then, there would be a rumor of someone hearing something within the area, not a strange breeze of wind but something else. Those who were inclined magically would say that there was some form of energy that used to be there, as if the rocks themselves used to be lodestones of magic. No one really knew of their origins, and their ideas carried the same number of rumors.<br/><br/><br/>“Hah, I found the bitch, over here!” One called out, a snap and the sing of sinew pierced the quiet evening as an arrow wizzed overhead and crashed into a nearby rock. Whistles and man-made wolf howls began to echo in the distance. It wasn’t long before the small hunting crowd began to gather, torches having been lit as the sun began to kiss the horizon.<br/><br/><br/>“Where is she?” Another called out. There wasn’t much movement from the crowd. They knew they had her cornered, or at least wasn’t expecting her to leap off that cliff. Some hooted and hollered, yelling out crude cat calls, trying to “convince” her to come out of wherever she was hiding at and give up. Every now and then, more arrows were wasted, clanking on the rocks around her. Laughter once again filled the air as they constantly egged themselves on, to them knowing that they finally got their prey in hand.<br/><br/><br/>“Linus, get over here. Let’s have some fun. Light my arrows, eh?” Grunted one. There was a lull in the voices as they seemly all watched the magics being woven to light the arrow on fire, which was shot off. It landed nearby her, the flame not dissipating as it sat, illuminating her along with the terrain around. The magic flickered as if it were being affected by the wind and then suddenly snuffed out.<br/><br/><br/>“Oye, that’s not nice! It took this numbskull some effort to create even that!” Laughter resumed once again, before another similarly lit arrow was sung out, hitting the rock she was hiding behind before sticking into the ground nearby. It took flickered, before something else began to happen. It’s flickering movement was violent, moving in all directions as if wind were all around it before diming to almost snuffing out like the one before.<br/><br/><br/>This time, it didn’t. It remained dim for the longest time before it returned to it’s original intensity. It then began to pulse in a rhythm, diming and flaring violently in measured pulses. Heat built around it, the rocks and the ground seemed to have been affected as they too began to warm up. The violet veins within the rock dimly, only by very close inspection, pulsed, the frequency matching with the flame. The flame itself shuttered with every pulse, the colour and illumination it brought shifted. The shades of red were being pushed aside, snuffing out and changing to a dark violet hue.<br/><br/><br/>The pulsing stopped and the flame erupted. What was once a small flame that was on the tip of an arrow now had exploded into a raging bonfire. Flames touched up near the canopy of the trees tens of dozens of feet in the air. As it begun to threaten to even touch the leaves, with the same sudden burst of raw power, it completely snuffed back out. The air stilled and grew silent, the hues of the rocks started to show more violet to a now non-observing eye. The Earth shuddered around them, as if an earthquake was erupting. The rocks moved, twisting and folding into each other. Remarkably, they did not break when they smashed into each other, but held together as if their shapes were perfectly chiseled to be that way. Trees that were close enough to the rock formations broke free, uprooted without much resistance. A fault line etched between the forest proper and the rock formation, as the formation, along with Vixaria, began to lift up.<br/><br/><br/>What seemed to be a fault line break, was anything but that.  It seemed like another mountain was rising, lifting meters above before crashing back down onto the newly created ledge. The rocks started to wave and creek as soil, sand and debris gave way to pure obsidian.  A large formation began to wave as if they were blades of grass, pulling away as scaled flesh unraveled. It would slide away to reveal a secondary, then a tertiary layer of similar scaled flesh before revealing a massive eye. It was dim at first, mimicking the rest of the revealed landscape that had risen. Though, much like the arrow, sparks of violet ignited within and brightened. It pierced the night that had began to grow, shining brightly down upon those it could see as a large, rumbling growl shaking the ground they stood upon.