fluttering your lashes like ashes and embers

Oh but she was a heretic child, wasn't she? Of course she didn't pray. What would she pray to? If there was anyone up there listening, surely they wouldn't answer her. There was no church with a pew for her in it, no hymn that wouldn't turn to ash on her tongue.

No, Lotte didn't pray. She wanted things and she clawed and scraped them together from the earth and the air and made them into whatever she wished, whatever she could manage. The others here might have prayed to God, but it was Lotte that answered their prayers for the storms to spare them, for the illnesses to seep from their bones, for the land to yield what crops it could. A better witch might have been able to do more, but all there was was Lotte - for better or worse.

If God found his way to striking her down for her insolence one of these days, Lotte wouldn't cower then either, nor pray for mercy. She wasn't the one who owed some higher power an explanation for the state of things, or for the choices she'd made to survive this place. It was almost a shame she wasn't going to go to Heaven, now that she knew it existed, she had more than a few questions for whoever was in charge.

Alastor spun around and gestured back to the house, the pathetic, suffering tangle of branches that couldn't really count as a garden so much as a stationary tumbleweed.

"A garden?" Lotte laughed again, shoulders shaking as she trudged through the dirt toward the house, happy to show him. "I doubt there's a garden within a hundred miles of here. I don't waste what I can manage on myself, anyway, the crops get all my attention."

Around the back of the cabin were a few empty plant beds, where once a garden might have thrived, long dead and suffocated with sand.

"I wasn't always this bad with plants... but I don't know how to make something from nothing." Lotte put her hands on her waist, huffing a sigh. "Sometimes I wonder if it's just my own stubbornness. The magic's always been like that... if I don't want to do it, deep down, it won't come out."

She took another deep breath, savoring the smoothness of it and raised her hands up, spinning in place on her heel. No silt or sand hung in the air to rub her skin raw, but electricity still ripple in the air and it prickled and crackled around her fingers, danced in her hair. "I guess I'll find out. If it keeps getting worse, I'll either figure it out or we'll all starve!"

Her feet came to an abrupt stop, and her head gave a shake as she got her bearings back, before looking at Alastor, considering him curiously. "Is there anything you miss eating? Do you eat normal food or is it feasting on humans and all that nonsense preachers cry about?"