"I already told you last night I don't mind sleeping with you," Cyrus told her. "Just understand that if you expect more than just sleeping, you will probably find yourself disappointed. Last night was an exceptional circumstance."

"Don't worry," Lyda told him. "I know you well enough to figure that out on my own."

"Alright," he said. "You can keep doing your thing, you don't have to go to bed when I do."

"Alright," she told him. "I think I'm going to wind down a little bit before bed, then."

Cyrus nodded, then made his way to his room, stripped, and climbed into bed, quickly falling asleep. When morning came, he woke to find himself spooning Lyda, one arm draped over her with his hand resting on a breast, his other hand under their pillows.

The position was strange, as he knew he couldn't be moved in his sleep or he would wake. How Lyda managed to put him like without rousing him baffled the young god.

Deciding not to think on it, Cyrus carefully extracted himself to avoid waking her, then pulled on a pair of sweatpants and made his way to the kitchen of the suite, where he began preparing breakfast. Pulling out his phone, he rolled his eyes. His brothers had figured out they could text him from within the time prison.

Allowing them that wasn't an easy feat by any means due to the nature of the time prison, and Cyrus wasn't sure why he had chosen to allow them to. He knew when he did it that it would only allow them a way to harass him, yet hemade the adjustments necessary to allow it anyway.

Figuring out that one adjustment had taken him three times as long as creating the time prison did. Rather than them actually sending a signal out of the time prison, the time prison would register specific signals, then recreate them and send them out. Nothing actually left the time prison that way. Instead, the time prison itself sent a signal upon receiving one.

when he made that adjustment, Cyrus also had to figure out how to avoid that being taken advantage of in ways other than to message him, especially as he knew his brothers would try to break out of it using any means they could find.

As it was, they had sent him over seven thousand texts begging to be let free and for forgiveness. Being trapped in the shop, with no one coming in, no one to talk with, and no one to sleep with would be pure torment for them. Especially as Cyrus knew their mother would not have trapped anyone else with them, meaning they were truly alone with just the three of them.

It wasn't up to him to let them out, and he wasn't going to ask their mother just because they were begging him for it. So he ignored the texts and prepared breakfast, offering Lyda some when she came out of the room.

"Thanks," she told him. "You were cozy."

"Did you move me?" He asked.

"No," she answered. "It took me around an hour to fall asleep. I was beside you, but not touching. I wasn't sure if you were trained to wake up upon being touched or something. I kept shifting around, though tried not to. At one point, you just turned onto your side and pulled me against you. I thought you'd woken up, but when that was all that had happened, I realized you were sleeping. You were so cozy, I fell asleep almost immediately."

"Strange," Cyrus muttered. "I don't usually move in my sleep."

"Stuff like that happens," Lyda told him. "So, Cyrus, do you really not do stuff for your birthday?"

"It's just the anniversary of when my father dumped me at an orphanage," he told her. "I don't find that special, and nor do I find having lived another year special. My brothers celebrate theirs, as that's how they are, but I don't celebrate mine. I hate it."

"Do your brothers ever do anything for it?" Lyda asked. "Yours, I mean."

"Of course they do," Cyrus snorted. "It's why I avoid being at the shop on it. I usually rent a room in a hotel in another part of the world to get away from them. Or delve deep into a Dungeon and stay there. While my brothers can get to me, they don't."

Mostly because the one and only time they attempted to force him to celebrate, he blew up on them. The kind of angry outburst that his brothers did their best to avoid. It went beyond what happened when they mockingly called him their father.

The outburst had surprised Cyrus himself, and he felt guilty over it, but with his brothers apologizing repeatedly over provoking it, he never did gather up the courage to apologize to them. That had been years before, on his thirteenth birthday. As he had become a teenager, they had wanted him to celebrate with him.

Instead, they made Cyrus realize how bad his anger could be. If he had to put a definite time to it, that incident would have been what caused him to start to shut himself down to other things, and his brothers stealing his first love years later finalized it.

"Sometimes," Lyda told Cyrus. "Celebrations aren't for the target, but for those who love them."

"I know," Cyrus sighed. "My brothers do the celebrations because they don't really know what to get me. They want to feel as if they're doing something to make my birthday special, especially knowing why I hate it. And it's only made me hate it more."

They ate the rest of their breakfast in silence, then Cyrus washed and dried the dishes. After he put them away, he moved to the couch and pulled out the stuff for Lyda to do her morning training with. He used his tablet as she trained, though he kept part of his attention on her.

"I was wondering," Lyda said as he sent the equipment back to his warehouse after her training concluded. "If were you planning on opening the presents?"

"I already know what's inside them," he said. "Well, except my brothers'. They performed a blocking enchantment on the wrapping paper to avoid me knowing what it was they got me. No one else bothered. Kylnar got me the limited edition version of a book that came out a few years ago, signed by the author, and a couple of other books. Mother got me a pair of metal chopsticks with dragon designs on the upper ends of them. Those are the more notable things they got me."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"And your father got you sex toys," Lyda said.

"Yeah."

"Why don't you open the presents from your brothers?" She asked. "Who knows? What they got may surprise you."

"I'd rather not," Cyrus grumbled, yet he gestured with his right hand and four gifts wrapped in green wrapping paper appeared in the coffee table. "But fine."

The first gift he opened was labeled as coming from Owen, and contained a collection of figurines only a couple of inches in height. Each one was made of plastic, though the colors on them had faded with time.

"What the heck?" Cyrus muttered. "How did he find twenty of these? I've only managed four with years of searching."

"What are those?" Lyda asked. "Another collection?"

"They come from before the Great Collapse, before magic came to Earth," he told her. "I'm not actually sure what they were used for, though Kylnar says they went with some video games. Mother wasn't kidding when she said she made them get me serious gifts. But there's no way Owen managed this in a short time. How long did she have them working on this?"

Setting that gift to the side, Cyrus opened up the gift from Max, which turned out to be a wand made of a dark brown wood with a slight green tinge to it.

"A wand?" Lyda asked in confusion. "No one uses wands to channel their magic."

"It's an artifact," Cyrus said as he examined the wand without touching it. "If I'm not mistaken, this wand is part of a collection that was thought lost. I have two of the wands from it. They weren't actually used for spells, just for showing off. But they belonged to a famous mage who's since been forgotten, which is what makes them valuable."

"Oh," she said. "Wow. Your brothers really did go serious, then."

"Yeah," Cyrus opened up the gift from Luke.

Inside of it was an entirely black, metallic sphere four inches in diameter. Lyda gave it a confused look, but Cyrus ignored that as he turned the gift over in his hands, running his fingers across it as he examined the object.

"Luke got you a metal ball?" Lyda finally broke the silence.

"Sort of," Cyrus answered. "It's a training ball that was in use about two centuries ago. Freshly-awakened mages would use their elemental magic on it to create various effects. It required being in the Advanced Tiers for their affinities, but was a pretty nifty tool that helped teach magical control."

He held his palm flat, the orb resting on it, then channeled air magic into the orb, causing it to float. Once it was hovering a few inches above his palm, Cyrus channeled fire magic into it. At first, the entire orb began to glow orange, then he changed the pattern of the flames, resulting in a pattern forming on the orb. When he canceled that spell, the orb returned to normal. Following that, he generated water and ran it over the orb, which then lost its solid form and began to shift, changing form where the water touched it.

Cyrus canceled that spell, and the orb returned to its original state.

"There are effects for the other elements as well," he said as the orb dropped back onto his palm. "But you get the idea. None of the orbs from back then survived, at least, as far as I thought. I was checking the orb with my magic to see how old it was. It looks like Luke forged and enchanted it. I'm guessing Kylnar taught him how to make them."

"Those seem useful," Lyda said. "Why did they go out of use?"

"If I remember what Kylnar said correctly," Cyrus set the orb back in the box it had come in. "It was invented by a small academy that spent too much money developing new items. As they were going bankrupt, they decided to make one last bid for money that would keep them afloat. The orbs had been developed shortly before that and hadn't been sent to market yet.

"During the creation of the item," Cyrus continued. "They accidentally blew up the academy. No one who knew about the orbs or what they could do survived, and most of the orbs were destroyed in the explosion. Of the few that were found, no one knew what they could do and just melted them down. Of course, they were put through a despeller first, just in case, but that was the end of the orbs."

"Well," Lyda said. "It seems like your brothers put some effort into these. I'm guessing your mother got on them a couple of years ago, if the things they gifted you were rare as you said."

"Probably," Cyrus nodded as he reached for the fourth gift. "This is from all four of them. That makes me nervous. Very, very nervous."

He contemplated simply incinerating it all at once, but decided to open it. Inside were two bottles of wine, a stuffed bear, and a lot of rocks. Cyrus sighed as Lyda gave it a confused look.

"They gave you a box of rocks?" She asked.

"Those aren't real rocks," Cyrus pulled one out and bit into it, then chewed as he showed her the inside of the rock. "Chocolate."

His brothers couldn't completely resist their pranks. Cyrus was pretty sure there were other 'tricks' under the rocks, but didn't want to bother finding out what they were. Instead, he closed the box, then sent all four gifts back to the warehouse.

"The wine is just grape juice," Cyrus told Lyda. "And the stuffed bear… that's just them being them. Well, that was less disastrous than I expected."

"I noticed," she smiled. "Do you regret opening those?"

"No," he answered. "But I still hate my birthday. I'd much prefer to return to the routine we have now, thank you."

"Okay," Lyda told him, then thought about something for a few moments. "I'm supposed to meet up with Jared for another painting today."

Cyrus knew immediately his expression betrayed his opinion of that, as Lyda winced at it.

"Don't stop because of me," Cyrus told her. "You know this ends after you reach the floating island. You're human, I'm not. I'm not going to put you through an even longer relationship."

"I know," she told him. "But it's clear you don't want me to do this, and we are together, even if temporarily. I'm going to respect your desire on this. It's not really acceptable in society to do some of the stuff I do while in a relationship."

"Does that mean," Cyrus hesitated. "Does that mean you'll stop whoring out for money? Because I've told you before I'll pay for what you need. That's part of our agreement during this trip."

"I know," she told him. "I feel as if I'm taking advantage of your generosity with that, Cyrus. But yes, I'm going to stop. I'll find another way to make money."

"Like helping me make potions I'm selling?" Cyrus asked, and Lyda stared in realization. "I've tried telling you before that I'm putting aside the money made from the potions you make. Well, minus the cost of the resources and vials, since those come from my money. You do have some funds from that, you know. You kept interrupting me, though."

"Right," Lyda said, face flushing. "Sorry, Cyrus. Anytime you started bringing up giving me money, you always worded it at the start in a way that made it sound like you were just giving me money. And as I said, I already feel as if I'm taking advantage of your generosity. Just accepting money from you feels wrong. I hadn't thought about the fact that you were selling successful potions of mine."

"I've thought about," Cyrus told her. "Just putting the money from it in your room. But then I thought you might not touch it because you kept telling me 'no'. So I decided against it."

"Yeah," Lyda said. "I wouldn't have used it. I'd have probably gotten upset with you."

"I'm glad I didn't, then," Cyrus told her as someone knocked on the door to the suite. "That's Jared. Are you really going to tell him you won't do the painting? It's not like every nude model is single."