fluttering your lashes like ashes and embers

Once, magic was something Alastor was required to practice. Something that came from outside of him, for which his body was a conduit. (This was not the say that the human body was not innately holy on its own - it must be, to conduct power beyond itself.) When he was saddled with this, with being ordinary, there was an ache that came with the completion of his spells, a feeling of letting go, of being unable to do (or go) farther. After a point, the success of what you'd sown was up to the power of something much greater than you were, by far. That never fully sat right with Alastor.

Of course, he denied it, when he was living. It would have been sacrilege not to, and more importantly, it would have been disrespectful to his mother, who did her best to teach him everything she knew, and the best to instill in him a proper reverence for the earth and for every living person who walked its paths before him. He never told her, never revealed the truth of how he felt, because what would it do, besides hurt her? In some way, perhaps, this was why Alastor eventually took his fate into his own hands.

Because the type of magic that relied on something else to bring it to its conclusion was not enough.

It was nothing like Alastor's magic now, that was for sure. This came from inside himself, seeped from his very pores, was now embedded in every cell of his body, in a way it never was, when he lived. It was as if life, itself, had been traded for raw force. This, the instant conjuration of something so benign, so nothing, at the end of the day, as a few tomato plants, was infinitely more to him than any working he'd ever been a part of in life.

His eyes narrowed, and his fingers tightened, his grip on the air strangling the ether pressed between his fingers, while Lotte sank to the ground and bit into the tomato. In the moonlight (now visible and silver, cutting and cold, in this dust-less bubble around them) highlighted its color and tinted it the ruddy-black of blood, in the dark. If not for the seeds sliding haphazardly down one side of Lotte's chin, caught in the elbow of her soiled dress, it might have been too easy to imagine it was a heart she sated herself on, arterial blood that dripped down her chin and stained her pale throat.

Alastor cleared his, one loose fist coming up to his mouth, to cough politely. "Hm," he said, "if that's what you wish. I think you're onto something, about Eve. They won't tell us a thing about her, either!"

He shrugged - he wasn't truly convinced Eve was ever a person who existed, anyway. If she was, wouldn't she be down in Hell, too, with all the other fools who were only doing what God asked them to? If she was, he'd never met her. His fingers, pointed now like a pistol, flicked out from his body, and in their wake, two of the tomato plants folded over on themselves, disappeared under the earth for a moment, and with another flick of his wrist, reappeared - this time as strawberry plants.

These plants popped up in kind, extending a few more feet down the yard, until there was an equal number of each type of plant. "How's that?" he asked, watching her keenly, waiting for that new burst of juice to wet her face.