“Haaaaaaaaappy Biiiiiirthday dear Saaaaaaaaallyyy, happy birthday to youuuuuuu!” Sylph finished up her song. She had sung in three tones, wrong, loud and with enthusiasm. If the thunderstorm elemental had concentrated a bit more, she probably could have sounded quite beautiful. That was, however, like asking a tornado to only fly by and water the fields.

Regardless of any of that, John applauded, while he walked over to Salamander. “Happy birthday,” he half-mused in agreement, embracing his fire spirit. It was already way into the evening hours of Tuesday. Just yesterday, they had come out of the grinding session and today there was another birthday to celebrate. There were another three after this one, but that was a thought for then and now was now.

Salamander answered his hug in kind. The red of her breasts spilled against his naked chest with all of their supreme softness, harmless fire flickering between them. She was still taller than him, but less noticeably so than in older days. His right found the back of her head. Fingers parted the soft stubbles of buzzcut and the flickering flame, golden red contrasting with the darkness of the night. In turn, she grabbed his butt with a cheeky smile.

If she wanted to say something, she pushed it back and prioritized a kiss instead. John didn’t leave her much of a decision in that. Her red lips were already pulling him in and the moment of contact was the moment he lost control over his actions – at least for a few seconds. Faced with her heat, her body (soft in all the right places) and the passion with which she prolonged their kiss, he simply had to indulge. Her oily saliva tasted sweet and smoky, mixed with his to reach a viscosity that could be easily swallowed. An all-around odd sensation, but not unpleasant.

The magic filling her ran hot down his throat like a strong liquor. It was intoxicating, although not in the sense of a drunken haze. It poured fire into his veins. Their kiss continued, right up until Rave suddenly intermingled in their engagement. This didn’t end it, only made it so they were suddenly wrestling between three tongues.

It seemed that this was becoming their birthday ritual, as Undine, Sylph, Lydia, Eliza and all the rest of the harem one by one became part of the kiss. All were vying for Salamander’s attention, wanting her to feel the collective adoration members for the harem had for each other. At some point, weighed down by the tight ball of sexy curves surrounding them, Salamander and John fell down.

The sand was adequate enough to make their fall less of a painful interruption and more of playful inconvenience, before Salamander’s lips once more locked with his. Only for a short while, this time. They separated and laid on their backs, all of them, sprawled out in the fine, clean sand of the Guild Hall’s beach.

Salamander’s birthday had been pretty tame. Until well into the afternoon, they hadn’t even done anything out of the ordinary. John had worked, as had the rest of the harem that had anything to do, the elementals going after their individual tasks. This was all because the endflame elemental had insisted on organizing her own party.

Thus, when day started to shift into night, they all came together at the beach where Salamander, with the help of Gnome, had put up a stone formation that functioned as a large fireplace. Coals could simply be thrown in and removed as ashes via a drawer. Adding a metal grate on top was the only stop needed to make it a large grill.

Having enjoyed a large barbeque for the last two hours or so, the harem was therefore sated and pretty happy. The remains of the coals still glowed, the stone construction radiated heat and the harem lay on cold sand, the heat of the late August day already sapped away. They wore either only swimsuits or nothing. A state that made John more than a bit horny.

It only took the combination of hot pants (or something even smaller) and a cropped top to make the Lover’s Will mark plainly visible for anyone. As someone who loved to show off what he had, having his brand displayed to the world on the sexy bodies of his harem was scratching all of John’s possessive and prideful itches.

Looking up to the sky with a broad smile, John felt the coldness of Undine’s body on his left and the heat of Salamander’s on his right arm. The Lover’s Will mark was a wonderful addition to their bodies. The winding, dark blue lines integrated well next to the red ones that Undine already had. Albeit, the origin of the latter had come with a lot of pain. Where the brand didn’t fit quite as well was the fact that it was made of many, separated lines, while the Lorylim scars were one continuous network. A difference that John could only like to see.

For Salamander, the colours matched up almost perfectly, the mark being an almost black blue, but the curved lines were the complete opposite to the jaggedness of the already present marks. As it so happened, be it by fate, chance or design, the space the Lover’s Will mark had taken had been left unclaimed by those black lines. It was a tight fit, but it had the room it needed to sprawl out entirely.

Despite those previous body marks it all looked how it was supposed to. Past and present harmonized and John got to cuddle. Over twenty-five days had passed since the peace conference and since anything truly unexpected had happened. It was a period of peace. One that would eventually come to an end, John knew very well, be it by his own machinations, people attacking what he had built so far, or global events that he simply got caught up in.

It wouldn’t be this night though.

“Hey,” Salamander spoke up, “I do love you all, you know that?”

“Ja,” Rave answered swiftly. “Same, by the way. We say that a lot these days.”

John stretched audibly, raising his upper body out of the sand. “The advantage of simple times. Well, the birthday season doesn’t help.” He lied back down, although at a much different angle than before. His face pressed into Salamander’s tits. As always, they were doing quite a good job at convincing him that bigger was better. Well, to a degree. He still thought that E cups and upwards were way too large, but he had definitely warmed up to DD.

The fire that normally served as her bra vanished, leaving Salamander’s chest completely naked. In accordance with gravity, they slumped away from the centre. That was until John took hold of both of them and mashed them back together around his face. All the while, he was kissing the valley between her breasts.

“If you want to fucking go, we can fucking go,” Salamander said, causing John to look up. Her enjoyment and lust were written plain into the devilish grin on her face.

In the corner of John’s eye, he saw Scarlett rise to her feet and walk over to the table they had put up on the beach. “We have a lot of booze that can be drunk out of cleavages,” the Technomancer suggested. “Just saying, we might as well make those squishy things useful for something.”

“As great as that sounds, I have something else we should do first.” John’s hands were still kneading Salamander’s breasts while he spoke. It was just too much fun not to do it. “I have a gift for you.”

“Can I burn Sylph?” Salamander asked in a clearly joking tone.

“Hey! I am nice! Don’t burn the thunder-fairy-concubine!” the air spirit complained regardless. “I can give you big hugs and kisses! I will give you big hugs and kisses!” Sylph jumped at the red-skinned elemental and gave her a full body hug. At the same time, her pink lips showered Salamander’s cheek.

“Alright, alright, I won’t burn you!” Salamander laughed, thusly molested. “Just stop with all the fucking sweetness, it’s awful!”

“Audible gasp!” Sylph exclaimed. “There is no such thing as awful sweetness! There is only sweet and not sweet and sweet is always good and not sweet is sometimes good but mostly not!”

“That’s subjective.”

“No, it’s not!”

“You two can have your love-hate later,” John laughed and finally managed to take his hands off Salamander’s breasts. “My gift is up there.” He pointed to the centre of the island. Even across the five-hundred metres, seeing the massive Palace was rather easy. What he was pointing at was slightly up from the building itself.

“I think I can see where this is going,” Salamander said, following the angle of his finger. “And I absolutely love it!” She grabbed her summoner and jumped to her feet. “See you in a bit!” she shouted before suddenly flying off.

“I would have appreciated a warning!” John shouted against the wind. Well, not exactly wind, against the air resistance as they quickly rose upwards, that was the correct way to phrase it. He wasn’t flying in any particularly pleasant fashion, dangling from only one arm, being held by his endflame elemental.

“You will survive!” Salamander cackled. To get some more stability, she also grabbed John’s other arm. That made things considerably less uncomfortable for the Gamer. It still was far from his favourite flying position. Then again, he didn’t really have one of those. Every way of getting carried was awkward in some fashion.

If there was one silver-lining to this, it was the flight being pretty short for the speed Salamander could comfortably get up to. John didn’t have to tell her, mentally or out loud, where to go. The redhead had guessed correctly what he was up to or, if not that, she knew exactly where the gift he had planned to give her was supposed to be.

They landed on top of the raised arm of Lady Liberty. John was quite happy to have solid ground under his feet again and supported himself on the greenish-grey pillar that made up the lower part of the torch that the Statue of Liberty held. The upper part had been, since being replaced in the 1980s, of a shining gold. In the last night, John had it arranged that it was stealthily replaced once more.

The fire had the same general shape as before. Three large tongues of flame that seemed to flicker in the wind. The grade of detail was much higher, however, and the colour more of a red-amber than gold. More than that, it was no longer metal, but a giant block of crystal.

Salamander continued to hover around the new flame, inspecting it with curious gazes. “Is this your present?” she asked, once she had made a full round. “I’m missing something, aren’t I? What’s that material?”

“It’s called Timber-Stone,” John answered. “Not the most creative name of all time – especially because it’s actually a crystal – but… ah well, how about you try setting it on fire and I explain the rest afterwards?” That was an announcement Salamander didn’t need to hear twice.

“If you insist!” she shouted and flew back a few metres. John brought as much space between himself and the flame-shaped crystal as he could. Between her raised hands, Salamander conjured a ball of fire. It started at the size of a clenched fist but quickly swelled to that of a watermelon. Dark grey flickered around a golden core. The endflame that, as far as John knew, only Salamander possessed continued to heat up.

Unleashing her pyromania on the stone, Salamander shaped the energy into a beam. While the trajectory of it was straight, its outline had the unsteady flicker of all fire. There was a greater rhythm to it, a repetition in the steady flow of energy clashing with changing air resistance brought about by the unleashed heat. John was entranced by it for a second, then looked with worry over to the Timber-Stone.

Where Salamander’s attack collided with the crystal, the flame was absorbed. The amber colour intensified as the core of the crystal began to glow. Although he had researched its properties thoroughly before this, there was no telling whether it could actually survive a roasting by the endflame elemental. Getting a fire mage of Salamander’s calibre for testing was hard generally and had been, with John’s current reach and timeframe, impossible.

As the crystal’s light grew intense to the point of painful brightness, John got ready to tell Salamander to stop. That didn’t prove to be necessary as his fire spirit stopped all on her own once the majority of the crystal was consumed by intense white, only the outer borders retaining the original amber colour.

“Alright, so, what’s up with this thing?” Salamander asked, sitting down on the railing next to John. “Is it, like, a defensive material you put up so I can take my excess energy out and make the statue more impressive at night?”

“Partly right, I suppose,” John answered, looking at the stone with a raised eyebrow. “Timber-Stone is pretty useless as a defensive material because it needs to be used in pretty large slabs to work. You theoretically use it to cover giant golems or tanks or something, but there are materials that are more readily available and do it better. Particularly because Timber-Stone explodes if you overload it.”

“Good thing I didn’t do that then.” Salamander crossed her arms, balancing herself with only her feet (and the fact that she could fly). “Guess the explosion isn’t particularly impressive either?”

“Same principle applies, cheaper and better options available,” John said. “Anyway, the whole point of giving you this is…” He was about to explain what he was waiting to happen, when it finally did.

Slowly, at first, then ever quicker, the Timber-Stone began to give off the same fire it had absorbed. Grey and gold radiated off the amber-white crystal. John raised a hand at the fire and ran it through. It was a little warmer than the outside of a modern lightbulb.

“That’s the only proper use for these things,” John explained. “You can bombard them with fire and they will then leak it back out at a moderate heat level. It’s pretty impressive visually speaking.”

“And you decided to double gift me that as a self-serving act to show everyone an actual burning torch on top of Lady Liberty?” Salamander asked.

“Yes,” John freely admitted and slapped her right thigh. “Don’t you act like you don’t enjoy having your fire at the centre of the Guild Hall, burning for everyone to see.”