In examining the manifold incarnations of plant-life which make their home in these remote hills, I have happened upon a most fascinating phenomenon: the natural defenses wielded by the rat-angel flower (against predation by other plants, at that!), as well as the remaining weaknesses it continues to endure.
The rat-angel flower is known for its beautiful pink-and-grey petals, but of greater importance is its roots: its roots grow deep, up to twenty times the length of the stem, and are rich in nutrients such as nitrogen, potash, and the grace of God. The death of a single rat-angel is a veritable subterranean whalefall, able to catalyze an explosion in density and enthusiasm of nearby plant-lifeforms.
At some point, the grasses of these hills learned the secret bounty of the rat-angel. Over countless millennia, they evolved a poison capable of killing those ill-fated flowers, such that the roots of the poisoned may be provided to the earth at a faster rate than the long-lived and slowly-reproducing rat-angels would have allowed on their own.
As a countermeasure, over nearly as many millennia, the rat-angels devised an adaptation of their own: an antidote, produced in the flower's bud and trickling down the rest of the plant to coat itself in an aegis against the unrelenting grass-toxins. With this adaptation, the poisonous grasses were no longer a threat, and the rat-angels continued to bloom in their minuscule numbers, with a past made of severed futures and trapped in a world made of spectacular deaths masquerading as opportunity, but still beautiful and strong.
So very strong.
Recently, however, a new plant-form has taken the attention of the rat-angels: the guardian rose.
Guardian roses are a type of rose, a brilliant green with intermittent blue or red streaks. Their stems grow thorns wider and flatter than in other varieties of roses, becoming almost-blade-like in contour.
Guardian roses produce the same type of antidote as rat-angels. However, a critically important difference in that while it simply trickles down the edges or the rat-angel, the guardian rose emits it in the form of a fine mist over its surroundings.
Rat-angels detect the antidote from the guardian roses and, interpreting the presence of their critical survival mechanism as a symbol of safety, grow closer to the roses, allowing the two flowers to become entwined. Once they have sufficiently interlocked, the guardian rose uses its thorns to cut the rat-angel's stem off of its roots, killing its victim and initiating a massive release of nutrients.
The rat-angels doomed themselves by learning how to survive.