Alvin forgot his original intention, to ask Marguerite if she might have something of the boys to help his faithful steed Woof find the trails, distracted as he was by the looming forest and the rather large rather varied party he had found himself with.  His tiny little Halfling brain well and thoroughly inundated with happy chemicals as they plodded on he was in a sort of fog, just enjoying himself, until he felt Woof begin to move differently.  He'd ridden the old dog long enough he knew how it felt when Woof was just padding along with a caravan or following Alvin's own subtle directions, but old Woof had something on his mind now.  His own purpose.
veered hard away from the well worn road that had taken them this far.  They were heading off across a long hill covered in tall grass and the woods beyond at a bounding pace with Woof's snout pressed close to the ground huffing away steadily at whatever spore or smell his sensitive nose had picked up.

"What you got buddy," Alvin whispered to his mount, crouching low and holding tight to maintain his balance and searching the ground ahead of them as Woof moved, hoping to pick up on something yet finding nothing.  Whatever it was the dog had a track of it wasn't anything he could appreciate just yet.  These hills, as they flew by, were just hills, nothing special about them.  No bones, no blood, no grasping skeletal hands, no pulsating runes inscribed in the earth, but Woof had found something interesting enough to break away from the party.

Just before the woods the dog stopped suddenly, splaying out low in the tall grass and whining slightly until Alvin hopped off his back.  As Alvin unstrapped his bow and readied an arrow he could feel it too.  He couldn't say precisely what it was, but something felt off.  He felt watched by unseen eyes.  He was grateful to be as small as he was, and grateful too for the tall grass.  He scratched old Woof behind the ears and whispered to him again, "What you got buddy."

As the long grass near that edge of the woods waved in the air a keen eye could just make out two small disturbances.  Places where the long grass ought to be waving more than it was.  One created a path head straight toward the woods while the other followed the first in an elliptical pattern.  The first finally reached the woods and stopped until the second passed from the grasslands into the woods some twenty to thirty feet away.  

Making his way carefully through the woods near where Woof had stopped Alvin scanned and moved, scanned and moved, looking for what had drawn the dogs attention.  The feeling had not gone away in all this time, the feeling of being watched, yet he hadn't seen anything to explain it.  The woods were a bit odd perhaps.  Not grown as close together here as they seemed to be a bit further in, but that was normal enough.  Woods tended to thin out before they gave way to grasslands.  He didn't doubt that Woof had a hold of something, but he had found nothing lurking.  Though he couldn't shake an unsettled feeling he crept to Woof, who cowered still near the long grass, well expecting to chalk this up to a loss.  Still, he'd done a good job.  Followed his sniffer, stayed low in the grass, mostly quiet.

Deserved a sausage.

Alvin sat there beside Woof for a moment trying to shake the feeling, scratching Woof on his jaw just like he liked, and looking around.  He saw it now.  Couldn't help but see it.

The forest thins out as it approaches grasslands sure, but this wasn't natural.  It was well disguised, cleared out in natural patterns rather than geometric shapes that would catch the eye.  Even so, from this angle and with enough time to appreciate it this was clearly not natural.  A thick old tree, a clearing about it, with trees surrounding it in a roughly circular pattern.  Odd, but not that odd, until another detail stood out to Alvin.  The trees themselves, there were slight depressions carved in to them.  Not the thick old tree in the center, but the ones surrounding it.  Slight depressions, carved in, and leading upward.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the canopy he could make them out.  Well concealed small platforms set up in the trees, many of them.  Small, but more than enough to space for a sentry to watch from.  They were empty now, but they would not always be so.

As Alvin stood up and walked back into the clearing Woof's whining started again.  He soon discovered why.  Amid the fallen leaf cover gathered all around this clearing he caught a familiar metallic scent, and as he neared the central tree he saw it.  Blood on the leaves.  A few more furtive steps toward the central tree and the ground became darker, warmer, less solid, leaves beginning to stick to his feet.

"Shit," Alvin whispered to himself, before backing up to Woof, slipping quietly onto the old dog, and riding back to the hill to look down toward the trail and find the others.  Woof attacked the hills with a new vigor, happy to be running away from the danger, at least for the moment.