One moment the creature was thundering behind him, the ground shaking with its ponderous foot falls. The next, silence. Deadly silence. The human dared to look behind him through his fingers. The living jaw, which was red when he had first seen, was now grey. Grey and unmoving. Almost without thinking, the human immediately began untangling himself from the animate briar, cursing as it cut into the flesh of his hands. But he was free, and he shuffled backwards on the forest floor, always facing the creature that had almost ended his life.