Ash&Anya 

ash-:

Recently, Asher had met someone….for the first time. Melinda. The girl he was arranged to get married to. He bit down on his lip hard as he made his way out of the huge castle. She wasn’t so pleased, Melinda wasn’t. They both never thought they’d actually meet each other one day. It wasn’t excepting. They hadn’t spoke in person yet…but Ash planned on it, he needed to.
Once he arrived at the gates, where Anya told him to meet her at, he looked around. Anya hadn’t made it yet. It was no big deal. He shoved his hands into his pockets and waited for the beautiful mermaid to arrive.  

It seemed as if time had ceased lately, the Palace frozen into some catatonic state that the inhabitants couldn’t quite shake. One would think such a lack of occurences would offer more assurance than anything else, but Anya was nothing if not difficult to please, and mixed with her endless need for worry? Well, the two were no good combination. As the war continued to rage on outside the castle walls, albeit silently and lacking the fervor it once upheld, she would not rest. How did those in charge, the higher powers of Amarar, expect their people to sit idly by while others got to prove their worth? Anya felt much like a sitting duck, just waiting to be poached. It was an all-consuming feeling that wasn’t in her favor. Needless to say, she’d do anything to escape it.

Thankfully enough, Ash was her perfect distraction, and certainly no one she would ever deny the company of. Ever since their earlier days, when things were far less complicated and heaps more fun, care-free even, he had been someone she heavily relied on, be it for entertainment or comfort. To this day, she found this more prominent than ever. Ash was prone to be out in the woods and the chaos of it all rather than inside with her, in safety, and it seized her with an incessant worry (not to mention boredom). To finally have him back here, back within fingertip’s reach, was enough to ease her mind and quell the building resistance to her entrapment (which, if she were being honest with herself, was primarily driven by fear), and any mere interaction would suffice.

With the agreement to meet just outside of the Palace’s gates (though they’d have to be careful not to venture too far, as they were hardly an unstoppable force in twos), Anya dressed, tied back her hair, and made her way down the halls and past the guards in haste, breathing a sigh of relief once she was in the clear. Her eyes, normally a dull brown, shone brightly at the sight of Ash, her heart practically leaping in her chest as she broke into a sprint (she’d gotten surprisingly good at this, given the amount of time she’d spent on land), jumping at him and throwing her arms around his neck. Her feelings for Ash had always gone unspoken, mostly because she hadn’t made much sense of them herself, but she was highly aware of the power of them, and was fairly certain she’d go to the end of the worlds to protect him if it came down to it. So, well, whatever that meant.

“Ash!” Her tone was light-hearted and her smile from ear-to-ear as she disentangled herself from him, bouncing further down the cobblestone path, veering slightly off-road and into the woodland areas, all the while expecting him to follow. “It’s wonderful to see you, you know? Well, a little bit, I suppose,” she teased, tossing him a glance over her shoulder before carrying on, her frame disappearing amongst the trees.