Mira Polwick wanted to be a court mage, but tonight she was only a scribe who had cast the wrong spell. She stood in the top room of the ink-stained study tower, ink smeared on her nose and both sleeves. She had meant to copy a garden-growth charm onto fresh parchment. Instead she spoke it aloud by mistake. Now blue flowers were crawling up the wall. The flowers looked like roses, but wrong. Their stems bristled with green and red thorns. They spread across the stones fast, one bloom feeding the next. Where they touched her scrolls, the paper curled and rotted. Mira's whole future sat in those scrolls. If they burned or spoiled, she would never learn enough to leave this desk. She grabbed the scroll she had read from and searched for the counter-spell. Her hands shook. The flowers reached the lowest shelf and swallowed three scrolls whole. Mira spoke the unbinding words. Nothing stopped. The thorns climbed higher, and a new smell filled the room, sharp and green. Then she saw why the spell kept feeding. A little green worm wriggled at the center of the bloom. It had a long body and a hundred tiny legs. Every time it moved, more flowers opened. The growth charm had latched onto the nearest living thing, and the worm carried it wherever it crawled. Mira understood then. She could not unmake the spell. She could only cut off what fed it. She dropped the counter-spell scroll and reached for the worm instead. Thorns bit her fingers. She pulled her sleeve over her hand and grabbed again. The worm squirmed against her palm. Blooms burst open along her arm. She held on and carried it to the window. Below her the tower dropped away into dark. She could not throw a living thing to its death, spell or not. Instead she pressed the worm to the stone sill, away from every scroll. "Stay," she said, useless. The flowers around it kept growing, but now they grew only there, on bare stone, feeding on nothing else. The blooms on her desk stopped spreading. Cut off from the worm, they wilted and dried to brown crumbs. Mira swept them off her scrolls with her arm. Most pages were saved. Six were ruined past reading. She stood breathing hard, staring at the worm on the sill. It sat in a nest of blue flowers it would never stop making. She could not kill it, and she could not keep it here. And six of the scrolls she needed to become a mage were gone. She did not even know which spells they held. Mira wiped blood and ink on her ruined sleeve. Tomorrow she would have to face the mage who owned those scrolls and explain what she had lost.