Larry had saved his last sacks of seed for one thing: the harvest festival that once kept Thornwick's fields free of rot. His grandfather swore the old planting rites made every field bloom clean. For twenty years no one had held it. Larry meant to bring it back this season. That plan died the moment he opened the storehouse door. Pale vines filled the room. They had crawled through the floor overnight, thin and white, twisted around his grain sacks like fingers. Every sack he grabbed leaked seed onto the dirt. The vines had bitten straight through the cloth. He counted six sacks ruined. Two more strained under tightening coils. Those two held enough seed to plant the festival fields. If the vines finished, the festival was finished too. Larry reached for his knife, then stopped. He had seen these vines before, out past the old fields. Cut them wrong and they burst, spraying pale dust that took root wherever it landed. One slice could seed his whole storehouse. He needed to strip them without breaking a single stem. He remembered the strange plant his grandfather had kept by the door. A squat black stump crowned with rainbow flowers. Each bloom had a curling mouth lined with teeth. His grandfather called it a garden's best friend and fed it creeping weeds. Larry had thought it a decoration. Now he hauled the heavy pot inside and set it against the choked sacks. The rainbow mouths woke fast. They smelled the pale vines and lunged. One flower clamped a coil and dragged it loose. Another chewed through a strand near the floor. The vines whipped and tightened, but the biting blooms held. No stems snapped. No dust rose. The plant swallowed each vine whole, teeth first. Larry worked beside it. He guided loose vines toward the hungry mouths and pulled his two full sacks clear. The rainbow blooms stripped the storehouse bare in an hour. When the last pale strand vanished down a flower's throat, Larry sank against the wall, laughing loud enough to shake the rafters. Two sacks. Barely enough, but enough. Then he saw the black stump. Its trunk had swelled thick as a barrel. New rainbow buds pushed from the wood, and its roots had cracked the storehouse floorboards, reaching for more. The plant had eaten the strangler vines. Now it was hungry, and it was growing toward his saved seed.