Do you see what's happening?

She seemed to take in his words with contemplative silence. Uncertain if that was a good or a bad thing, Wilder doesn't comment on it. Rather, he focuses on patrolling the woods, eyes alert and ears listening for any slight changes. What his nose does begin to pick up more and more as they venture further is the smell of rot and disease. That specific pungent scent that makes your nose wrinkle and stomach curdle.

He doesn't miss how Yara moves closer to a tree, her cautious movements clear that she was picking up the same things he was too. The tree she approaches appears different than the others surrounding them as well. It forces him to stop in his tracks as he notices the bark's pale and brittle state. Bright yellow mottled leaves hang limply from the thin, spindly branches that droop toward the ground. Clearly the tree was sick...

"Yara," Wilder calls out to the girl as she rounds the tree. It's then that she suddenly wheels backward, ears flattened, meeting him with a distressed look. He has to lean in to hear her whisper and he wishes he hadn't. A young deer dead from a mysterious cause? Concern pulls over his face, brows drawn downward as he steps around Yara to take a look for himself.

What he sees nearly makes him step backward as well. Steeling himself by holding his breath, Wilder forces himself to go closer to the dead animal. Bones protrude from the animal, lesions mar its skin, its eyes hollow and lifeless. Though the stench is foul, it doesn't match the level of decay on the deer. Pushing back the threat of bile climbing his throat, he pulls away from the tree and back to Yara. "Looks like the tree got whatever the deer got," he mentions quietly, a sliver of fear and uncertainty clouding his vermillion gaze. "I'll sen' my bird to inform the Warlord. Meantime, we shoul' get away an' head back," his tone is serious now as he takes one more look back to the dead tree and the deer laying at its base.

Would this spread to the pack?