Pyronika — The First Flame

Before there were schemata, there were two ways of touching the world. This is the first of them.

Pyronika is not a tradition, a lineage or an order. It is the raw grammar of fire as the Great Spirit of Fire holds it — the manipulation of energy itself, and the older of the two poles from which every other schema in the world descends.

Energy is fungible. It does not matter greatly what is burned; what matters is how much, how fast, and where it is aimed. A working of Pyronika concentrates rather than distributes, and the effect it has on the world around it is out of all proportion to the effort of raising it.

And it moves through the living. Fire in Kworgale is not an impersonal force that happens near people — it is a force that expresses itself through sapient and biological things, which is why it feels, to those who carry it, less like a tool than like a temperament.

"Ice is what the world is made of. Fire is what the world does."

• Energy, concentrated. Pyronika gathers rather than spreads. Its characteristic effect is a single overwhelming output at one point, and it is the reason a lone fire-wielder can decide a battle that a hundred spears could not.
• Fungible sources. One fuel is much like another. Where the ice-side of the world must go to where the substance is, fire can be raised from whatever is at hand — which is why fire-peoples spread and ice-peoples entrench.
• Enormous environmental leverage. A small working done well changes weather, ground and structure far beyond its own scale.
• Carried in the living. It is drawn and shaped through biological and sapient beings, and it answers to will, appetite and conviction rather than to procedure.

• It is not owned. No practitioner holds Pyronika. They borrow from something vastly larger that is presently in pain, and every draw is a draw on her.
• It costs the wielder. Fire expresses itself through the body it moves through. Prolonged use marks that body, and the marks are not always reversible.
• It cannot make. Energy does what it does to matter that already exists. Fire alone builds nothing and holds nothing; without the cold side of the world there is no structure for it to act upon.
• It was corrupted. The Spirit at the source of this schema was wounded by the Ancient Devil, and what came out of that wound — Demon Fire — still shares the same root. Every fire-practitioner in the world is drawing from a well that has something in it.