A man walks with his dog in the park, by the outskirts of the park there is a wood. During the day, the dog will fetch balls thrown into the trees. During the night, however, she won't retrieve the ball from the woods, even if it's only beyond a few foot of the treeline. This led to him trying to get the dog to walk into the woods after his lead. She would follow him when close behind, as deep as he would go, yet even after doing this, it didn't make her comfortable enough to go by herself. He would go back and throw the ball, but to no avail, she would not go into the woods without him. This time, he tried something different. "What if I went into the darker area, beyond where she could see me, and called out to her?", he thought that would be the first step to breaking that boundary of fear, knowing he was in the dark would lead to her maybe finding it not a place to be fearful. He walked into the woods, past the treeline, until the light mistook his silhouette. The moon was fairly large, and bright, so his figure shrank as much as it faded away. She sighed, and whimpered, she was only even more scared, now almost visibly shaking with anxiety. Her fears for herself now for him, a short while beyond the shallower dark. He called her name. Her eyes widened, was it a call for help? Her eyes outstretched throughout the night, until dawn came, and the woodland grasped an incandescent glow. She paced, then ran, precisely towards where she lost sight of him. She couldn't find him anywhere.
She did find something, however. Two shoes, and a hoody. He was wearing such the night before. They smelled different to his, and yet they looked different too. Even to the mind of a dog, this sparked a certain but unplaceable jitter. The smell of these new but worn clothes, and of her master, seemed to have come from and gone to the same direction. Except she could smell his actual shoes had been thrown a good ten metres in another place, she could even see the outline of them rising amid the mud and sticks from where the smell came. She could smell something different, too, within it's radius. She could hear something breathing as-well. Perhaps behind the tree by which they were thrown… Or maybe placed. Two seconds were too long a moment of ponderance. She ran heavily but with a lightness towards the entwined scent instead. She was running perhaps 40 seconds before the scent was split again. This time it smelled of his chest and arms. She stopped and looked towards this new misdirection. But 5 metres this time, or less, was his t-shirt, not even worn by but placed upon and wrapped around a crude pile of humanoid sticks. As she was running, before she turned to see this inanimate abomination, she couldn't decide if it was her own legs snapping the sticks a good few moments behind her, or if it were her own lungs creating heavy pants from the same place the sticks were breaking. How oddly paranoid were the thoughts that it was the same breathing she heard from behind the tree, if those breaths were there at all, odder still was the fact the panting was still there, out of sync from her own. She now sprinted, instead of ran, towards the mingled smell of her master, and something as fearsome as it was unbeknownst.