A sudden waft of foetor overtook the figure, causing it to abruptly halt in its tracks. It had been marching through the woods for hours at an almost mechanically steady, regular gait, barely taking any notice of its surroundings beyond the least degree necessary to avoid the tree-trunks which occasionally rose to bar its way. It would have been apparent to an onlooker that its mind was quite far from the path it was following, the trees surrounding it and the forest altogether; whether it might have been conceived just [i]how[/i] far it had drifted from path, trees and forest, however, was a somewhat more difficult matter to determine. Nevertheless, presuming that some intellect of outstanding quality should have succeeded at that endeavour, it would have been, perhaps, somewhat surprised by the fact that even the stench of a goblin, vile though it might have been, should have prompted the absorbed traveller to gather his thoughts from such distant reaches and restore them to their bodily vessel swiftly enough to act in the latter's defense.

Weary though they might have been after their flight through the aether, the being's thoughts spun and sped along their twisted pathways with remarkable celerity, prompted by the reflection that any encounter - especially those of the unexpected sort - might potentially result in the failure of his task, which event he had come to regard as a fundamentally cosmic impossibility whose advent would have entailed, at the very least, the annihilation of all that he could conceive, which included most things pertaining to himself. A goblin was near behind him, this was apparent. His experiences with goblins had, to that day, been rare, yet generally unpleasant. The impish creatures he had encountered were rapacious, bellicose and tended to adopt a reaction toward unknown dangers diametrically opposed to that of humans - as long as they did not know what exactly stood before them, they were as intrepid as any folk tale hero. The one behind him had apparently never encountered anything resembling him, and its attempt at a stealthy approach suggested a hostile intent. A display of power was the most appropriate response the figure could devise; whether it might have been harmful or even lethal for the goblin or anything else in the environs was none of its concern.

As this conclusion reached its conscious mind, the goblin had probably crept a few steps closer. The figure cast its left hand high into the air, its fingers bent into a claw-like form, and uttered words which, despite not belonging to any of the worlds that those possessed of lips such as its had ever inhabited, had grown familiar to it through years of eldritch invocations: [color=008B8B][i]Yiyakhul uer-dhathh![/i][/color]
The air around the figure's outstretched hand was lit with grey-greenish blaze as it seemed to writhe and fold upon itself, its unnatural movements deforming the space adjacent to it in an advancing avalanche of eye-searing contortions reaching at each other in what might best be described as a circle propelling its centre beyond its circumference. The roiling enormity tore and clawed at all that was caught in its way: grass and undergrowth wilted ad crumbled to strangely-coloured dust, trees snapped as they were bent in circular shapes and turned upon their tops, hapless woodland creatures were twisted into nightmarish shapes before noiselessly crumpling into themselves. Throughout all of its ravages, no sound rose either from it or from the land it touched, as though the latter were too fearful even to cry out in pain.

After what might have been instants or minutes, the nameless distortions faded away, leaving only a few curious stirrings, barely discernible in the darkness, in the air to mark their wake. The figure cast a glance about itself, its unseen eyes gliding over the desolation wrought by its incantation: within a radius of some fifteen yards not a thing stood, the now barren soil covered with a fine dust whose hue might have puzzled a painter or miniaturist. Within some feet from it the dust bubbled in an almost liquid fashion, small clouds of it rising into the night air and drifting away upon a soft breeze. Having spared this phoenomenon but a cursory look, the figure turned about itself to face anything which might have remained of its would-be assailant.