Cinders and Ashes

A New Friend in the Forest

Cinders and Ashes

A/N: I actually updated this sooner than I thought. Probably because since I've been watching a lot of Disney movies since this quarantine thing began with my mom and youngest brother, I got pretty inspired. But I'm pretty sure after this chapter, I'm going to try to update some older stories on fanfiction.net and finish them. So like I said before, updates on this story won't be very frequent.

But I hope this can spark some more interest in it while you guys wait for some other stories of mine to be updated. Let's get on with Chapter 2. Roll it!

Chapter 2

A New Friend in the Forest

Where had the time gone by? It had been six years since Grand Duke Giovanni took in an orphaned Ash and moved into his country manor, along with his own two daughters: two lovely but vain young ladies named Serena and Miette. They both seemed to find Ash quite attractive when he was working at the Grand Duke's chateau a couple of months before, but he paid them and their subtle flirts no mind, finding them to be quite rude and conceited. But once they and their father had moved into his country manor home, Giovanni made some major changes to the normal routine that Ash was familiar with.

After dismissing the staff, he moved Ash and all his personal belongings and a few of his parents' into the cold, drafty attic in the only tower of the manor while his daughters took his own bedroom to share, and he made the young boy tend to his and his daughters' every need and want while they squandered the remainder of his father's wealth from his trade. Ash managed to make the attic a bit more comfortable for him, despite it being filled with old desks and gardening tools. At least it was the one place in the manor where he could hide away from his stepfamily.

The trinkets that belonged to his parents were all Ash had left of them. One of them, the most precious to him, was a wooden amulet that his father had carved for his mother for their anniversary years ago. The shield-shaped amulet could be broken into two pieces to become two separate amulets. There was an intricate design carved into it, and in the center of it was a heart, along with a little message carved on the back.

A few months before his mother had died, she gave it to him and told him to protect it and to one day give it to his own true love. At first, Ash found it to be a bit mushy, since he was only fourteen and romance was the furthest thing from his mind. But even now that he was a young adult man, and was basically treated as a slave, the thought of even finding true love seemed like a faraway fantasy. What good-hearted woman would want to be with a man like him; an orphan with practically nothing to give to her? Nonetheless, he kept his promise to his mother and cherished that wooden amulet greatly, keeping it out of reach from his stepfamily.

The gardening tools reminded him of his mother, and often, whenever Ash would get a quick break from his duties, he and his Pokémon friends, including his father's Arcanine and his mother's Mr. Mime would make the short trip to the field where his parents were buried side by side and tend to both the strong birch tree of his father, and the soft pink cherry tree of his mother, which had grown into a beautiful and healthy fruit tree right next to his father's birch, bearing many sweet and red cherries during harvest time and bringing forth gorgeous pale pink cherry blossoms in the springtime. He would even bring a basket full of the small red fruits back as a treat for himself and his friends before his stepfamily would devour them all, leaving nothing behind but the stems and pits.

However, despite this, Ash was left to do all of the work around the manor, the others never lifting up a finger. But they said that it was a good thing for the young man, for it distracted him from his grief, and they were all too happy to provide him with lots of "distraction." He would be up at the crack of dawn, prepare breakfast for everyone and feed the household Pokémon, and then spend the entire day working until the late hours of the night.