Forgotten - A Skulduggery Pleasant Fanfic (COMPLETE)

12

"Bloody hell,"  Erin whispered, "She's with Tanith."
"What's wrong with that?  It's even numbers...if Allara decides to fight."  Jay Wilde replied, shrugging.
"Are you an idiot?"  She slapped him on the arm, "That's Tanith Low.  She fought in that war in Ireland." 
"What war in Ireland?  When did this happen?"  Jay asked.  Erin stared at him incredulously.
"You..."  She was lost for words.
"I mean, I didn't have parents or school to teach me anything."  He replied, a hint of bitterness in his voice.  Erin fell silent.
"Look, Madison, if what you're saying is true, I'll follow your lead.  But you better be truthful, because I'm not hanging around too much longer."  Jay sighed.
"Yeah, I get it."  Erin slunk back through the backyard of the random's house the two had been spying on Allara from.  She quietly thanked her parents for forcing her to take a name for herself years ago.  Madison Blaize had seemed like a good name at the time, but she had grown to hate it. 
Ah well, she was stuck with it.
Because she had taken a name, though, Jay's words didn't work as well as they would have on bystanders or sorcerers who hadn't taken a name yet.  In fact, the two had spent so much time in close proximity to each other that he had almost no effect on her whatsoever. 
She went to scratch an itch that had popped up on her face but her hands sunk into burnt flesh as she tried to reach it, and she gagged, wiping her hand on her shirt.
Why had Allara, the girl who had tried to murder her friends because she got a little scared, get the good side of life? Why did she get to learn magic from a professional? Magic had been in Erin's family for generations.  Her parents had taught her, and her entire household used it on a daily basis.  And yet, Allara, who had only just found out that magic existed, was learning it from a famous war veteran.
Erin could barely show her face in public without getting stares and rude comments, worried men and women asking if she needed to go to the hospital and the murmured comments which she heard, no matter how quietly they were whispered.
Yet Allara could wander the world without a second glance.  She lived a perfectly normal life, a life that Erin had missed out on.
But she wasn't about to sit in a corner and feel sorry for herself. That just wasn't her way. She wanted revenge. Revenge for the life she never got. And the first part of that revenge? Eliminating the person who had caused this. Removing Allara Khalor from the picture.

Allara opened her eyes slowly, biting her lip in concentration. She wanted to see what she had done, but was too scared to witness another failure.
The pile of books was hovering halfway between the dining table and the ceiling, wavering slightly but mostly still, suspended in perfect balance.
Allara swallowed the excitement threatening to break her concentration and moved the books, lowering and raising them, spinning them so the spines of the books faced her, before placing them gently back down on the table again.
"Congratulations,"  Tanith walked into Allara's line of sight and picked up one of the books, inspecting it, "it's not wrecked."  She smiled warmly at Allara, who returned with one of her own grins.
"Have I mastered magic yet?"  She asked excitedly.
"Al, it's gonna take years to get good at magic.  I'm ninety seven years old, and I still do dumb things sometimes."  Tanith placed the book down.
Allara stared at her.
"You're ninety seven?" She asked incredulously.
"Of course! How do you think I know what I know?" Tanith raised an eyebrow.
"But..you look twenty." Allara scrunched her eyebrows, staring at Tanith. There was nothing to show that she was ninety seven.
"Yeah, that's the thing about magic.  It slows down your ageing."  Tanith shrugged, acting like this information was no big deal.
"Seriously?"  Allara asked.
"Why would I lie about something like that?" Tanith replied.
"But how does that even work? Like, biologically?"
"I've never done science."
"Does that mean that I'll forever look sixteen?"  Allara immediately went to thinking about every single thing that was wrong with how she looked, from the acne on her face to that one toe that was oddly stumped, mortified.
"You age slower after your Surge, but you don't have to worry about that for ages."  Tanith replied, but that only made Allara stress more.  What happened if she had her Surge now?  What even was a Surge?  How does it work?  Would she still be the same, confident but terrified girl that she was now?  Would she have a nerd in the movies moment where they take off her glasses and pull her ponytail out?  How was she going to explain her lack of ageing to her friends?
Allara clutched the bottom of her shirt and stared at the table intensely, her eyes almost bulging out of her head as she dug deeper into the recesses of her mind, pulling up more questions and less answers.
How would she be able to live a normal life?
A hand on her shoulder made her jump, and she spun to see Tanith, looking at her oddly.
"You alright?"  She asked.
"Existential crisis.  Not okay."  Allara managed to breathe out after a moment.
"It's difficult to get your head around,"  Tanith replied, "But you'll get used to it after a while."
Allara only nodded in agreement, still shocked by the revelation.

"Keep practising that. The more you work on it, the easier it will get." Tanith stepped out to the backyard to talk to Fearless, who was doing some gardening. According to him, gardening was his happy place. When he was knee deep in wormy, dark dirt was when he was happiest.
Allara looked at the pile of books, held her hand out, and tried to imagine the air as little blocks, ones which needed to click together to form a path to the books and form a shelf to hold them up by.
In some ways, magic was really interesting.
In others, it made no goddamned sense.