With a small flourish you spread out your cloak and jump, grabbing onto a nearby tree's protruding branch. The wet bark bites into your palms, rain streams down your face as you push your muscles to climb, faster and higher, racing against the sound of splintering wood that grows nearer.

You reach the tree top just as the beast comes into view. It's a serpent, unlike any you've seen before. Instead of scales, its skin is made of bark and wood, jagged and layered, with branches sharp enough to be spears protruding from its spinal column. Its teeth are a series of razor sharp wooden spikes.

This thing isn't mundane—you know that right away. The acrid scent of crushed ferns and rotten wood wafts up from below. You go through the possibilities: a Forest spirit in physical form, a Fae animating the wild, or perhaps a daemon in its own right.

Perched atop a thick tree branch, you unsling your bow and draw an arrow, the familiar movement calms you down. You keep both bow and arrow beneath your cloak so as not to get them wet until the last moment.

You hold your breath and wait for the beast to present its face. Whole swaths of underbrush are crushed and cleared underneath its body as it searches for you.

When it doesn't find you, the destruction below falls silent. Slowly it slithers to the base of your tree, its wooden flesh scraping against the trunk, pausing for a moment before looking up. That's all you need—half a second to knock your arrow and another to throw back your cloak and shoot, straight for the eyes, the tried and true weakness of anything moving.

Best of 1. Roll your Doom: 1d6