While they hadn't precisely snuck up on her (maybe she was a little too proud to admit such a thing), Arya had certainly not expected to see what she was seeing now.
She was back in the trees, looking out ahead to scout her next path; there'd been a few signs of Dalish, and sometimes she wondered if she were going in the wrong direction, just traveling in circles, getting turned around at intersections and forks in the road, but she knew her skills were better than that. Perhaps she could blame her misdirection more on her sudden relaxed standards now that she was in the woods - she could say she was enjoying the trees and brush a little too much, delighting in the atmosphere the foliage cultivated. So when she'd heard branches snapping, leaves rustling, and the curious lack of birdsong, she'd readied her bow but kept silent, feet perched just so to keep her balance while leaning back against the thick trunk of the tree. And they appeared. From a distance, in dark silhouettes, they'd looked like men, but there were so many of them; and then they'd suddenly been swarming around the tree she was in, though none had noticed her immediately. They were the stuff of nightmares, and she knew tales of them well enough - after a childhood spent in the Tevinter Imperium, she almost knew them by heart. She just never thought she'd see them in person. After all, hadn't they just been defeated not that long ago?
Holding her breath to keep silent, she was hoping they'd miss her completely and keep traveling where ever they were headed, running at whatever they'd found to tear to pieces, leaving her out of whatever destruction they were planning. But luck had never favored Arya Oros, not if her life was anything to go by, and a falling leaf onto the head of one of the smaller darkspawn caused it to look up and lock eyes with her. It shouted, a horrid sound coming from a mouth full of teeth that looked like needles, and pointed for its brethren to know what it had spotted. The rest had wasted no time in attempting to start climbing the tree, but Arya was having none of that; she'd loosed the arrow into the eye of the first darkspawn that touched the trunk, giving the others pause for a moment before two of the braver ones forged ahead with climbing up the tree. They went down as their brother had, fletching sticking out of eyes that looked like pools of oil or dull rocks. They gave her a few more kills before she finally thought to climb higher, moving out and away from the heavier branches so if one should sneak around her, she would still be out of range - and that was when she felt the first tremor, shaking the wood beneath her feet and fingertips. One of the bastards was using a longsword to chop into the tree, the rusted steel managing to take deep bites out of the wood.
Arya looked to another tree, trying to judge the distance it would be to jump and whether she'd make it - another tremor moved through the tree, shaking her concentration as she bent her knees. Others were joining in on the first darkspawn's plan. They were only offering one choice - jump, or die.