THE PEOPLE OF FIRE

Fire is madness. Fire wants only to burn, burn hotter and brighter and spread and consume everything it touches, but even as it burns it consumes itself, gobbling the fuel it needs until it dies amid the ashes. Fire wants to melt rock and metal, scorch and blister flesh, turn rivers to mud and steam and forests to embers and dust. Fire is destruction, fire is self-destruction.

The nature of Fire is reflected in its Elementals and its People. While the elements were at war Fire was as likely to turn on itself as to unite against the other legions - there would be times when walls of yellow-white flame would sweep across the Motherworld at the speed of sound, but then shatter into a hundred fronts and flame-spouts that would turn on each other for whatever scraps of fuel were available before they burnt out. The first People to enter their Court were there as slaves and fodder and nothing more, and the succeeding generations only became equal with the Fire by rising, waging war on them and wrenching their powers out of them. There was never an adoption, never friendship or the partnership of equals that the other People enjoyed as they embraced their own elements. And so the Fire still live, at constant war with all the other elements and at war against the element that they have taken into themselves, an element so voracious and destructive that it preys on their own bodies and minds every day.

Physique
Like all of the Motherworld’s folk the Fire have a tight bond with their element, and it lives in them and grows to define them. The Fire live in a state of constant, restless fever: their bodies are far hotter than any normal human, and an ordinary Fire can live quite comfortably with a body temperature that makes their skin and breath uncomfortably hot to another’s touch. The constant heat of their bodies does not debilitate them and the Fire never sweat - their bodies are so dry that should they be cut their blood will run as a thick reddish ooze rather than a fluid.

The Fire loathe water and find drinking distasteful at best and revolting at worst, in a way that other societies might look on vomiting or defecation: something to be endured, but only in private and not to be dwelt on or discussed. They take some small solace in the fact that their bodies need very little water: most Fire will live easily on a single small swallow of water a day or less, and the greatest Fire Elementalists have transcended the need for drink at all. By contrast the Fire must eat voraciously, gobbling large amounts of meat jerky and hard salty bread, and an important part of their fortified cities are the food pens where raw meat and produce is dried and cured to the point where the Fire can stomach it.

The Fire are still almost always hungry, for like their element as they eat and grow this simply magnifies their need for fuel. This shows in their appearance: the Fire are scrawny and sharp-boned, with thin limbs which often belie a frightening strength and tenacity - even the biggest and most heavyset Fire tend to have a gangling, gantrylike build rather than the bulk and brawn of the larger Earth or Water. Their faces are intense and angular, their eyes dark and fevered and their teeth powerful and often bared. Their skins are quite fair in the younger Fire, and their hair usually dark, but this reverses itself over the course of their lives so that older Fire will have skins darkened by the heat of their own bodies and the fires with which they surround themselves, while their hair is bleached pale by the pitiless sun of their desert homes. In addition, many Fire ritually scorch themselves and scar their skins with brands to further the process - this is part of many formal Fire rituals and certain brands and burn-marks are used as badges of rank or office.

Fire bear their children quickly and cleanly - although pregnancy and birth are more draining for Fire women than for those of other People, Fire births are almost always rapid and simple and the birth rate among the Fire is high. The bodies of Fire children grow rapidly, developing strength, speed and co-ordination frighteningly fast, but their intellects grow more slowly. By the age of four or five Fire children are fast runners, adroit climbers and can stalk one another and fight hard among themselves with teeth and nails, but are still only just beginning to learn speech, discipline and their place in the Fire legions. Fire voices tend to be dry and croaking; their language is full of harsh consonants like the crackle of flames or menacing hisses like the spit of embers and ashes.

Culture and temperament
Fire is madness, and that madness permeates the minds of the Fire just as unnatural heat fills their bodies. The natural state of any one of the Fire is a restless, edgy energy of both body and mind. They can bring great zeal and aggression to anything they undertake, but they must also work hard to maintain their concentration. Without iron self-discipline or strict supervision the Fire will fritter their great energies away in the throes of one all-consuming impulse after another, leaving a trail of just-begun ventures behind them. Even when a Fire is utterly devoted to the work at hand, whether that is forging a weapon, scouting a path or fighting in battle, there is still always the maddening itch in their minds that distracts them, making them want to cast about for something else that will fill up their attention. Like their element the Fire are never fulfilled, never at rest, never happy: the closest they can come is a moment of wolfish satisfaction at having beaten down the obstacles that were in their way, for the Fire insist on seeing everything they do as a battle and a contest and can be quick to turn their savage tempers on one another.

It was this fractious temperament that kept the Fire so divided against themselves during their subjugation by the Court of Fire, and the slaves only ended their long ordeal and turned the tables on the Elementals when their secret leaders began imposing a fierce discipline and focus on their secret cells of rebels, harnessing the energy that they had formerly spent on unfocused struggle and rivalries with one another. Taming their own nature let the Fire rise up and turn the tables on their masters, and they learned the lesson well: ever since the Fire have lived in a brutal dictatorship designed to keep the excesses of their own nature tightly under heel. A Fire settlement is more like a military camp or prison colony than a free city: its populace is controlled by a strict routine, enforced by an iron hierarchy of overseers and controllers and with digressions and breaches of orders treated harshly indeed. The Fire do not chafe under such rule, and do not even perceive it as tyranny: although there are rebels and malcontents the Fire understand and embrace their harsh society because it liberates them from their own savage and self-destructive temperaments and allows them to band together and accomplish things that would be beyond them if they tried another People’s idea of “freedom”.

From a young age the Fire are rigorously tested and examined to see which part of society they will be best suited for. When a child is able to pass a battery of physical and mental tests it is taken from its family and assigned to a crèche for the beginning of its training in whatever part of Fire society has been chosen for it. This training always includes rigorous sets of mental exercises designed to help the young Fire master their own temperament and be able to focus on tasks long enough to complete them, and it is this ability which determines more than anything else the fortunes of the Fire People. The less discipline a Fire needs to be imposed from above, the more they will be trusted and the higher they will rise: the most senior Fire are those who have shown they can preserve the most ruthless self-control independently of any outside master. These are the Fire who rule over others in turn, although even they must vent their true nature every so often and power is shared by a complex system to make sure that there is always a reliable man or woman at the top. The ability to keep oneself in check and under control even without the disciplining of an overseer shows a strength of character that the Fire hold in awe and those who are able to harness and focus their energies will quickly rise through the ranks.

The Fire’s greatest weakness is in planning and foresight. While they are formidable in battle and efficient and driven at running their society and industry, the Fire temperament does not lend itself to contemplation and thinking ahead and so in war Fire often behave as their namesake Element does, exploding outward in a wave of conquest that might seem unstoppable but teetering and burning out rapidly once their drive runs out of territory or resources. Stopping and waiting are torture for the Fire temperament and so Fire leaders must often make snap decisions with little time to consider: time taken to weigh up actions and analyse a situation is time in which those under their command can become restive and unstable and think of turning on one another or on their leader, and once a group of Fire begin to get out of hand in this way the results can be catastrophic - their fury can often not be stopped by any means other than their wholesale destruction.

Society
The harsh discipline under which every Fire labours is designed to provide an outlet for their energies that is not self-destructive. Accordingly the Fire have one of the busiest societies of all the People, and a Fire settlement will buzz with constant activity as the overseers make sure that every Fire is kept occupied and supervised. The need to keep every pair of hands busy has meant that the Fire are the only People to use large-scale manual labour instead of machinery or captive Elementals: though the Fire have as much of a grasp of technology as any on the Motherworld they apply it largely to weapons and war machines.

Even on a quick glance the cities and settlements of the Fire are grim and Spartan places. They are built as close as the Fire can get to venerated places of flame and heat: volcanoes, baking deserts and badlands, and such supernatural features as Elemental flame-spouts or magma-mines, places where pockets of pure elemental Fire energy have settled or been conjured by a great Master at some time in history. Most such cities are at the Motherworld’s northern landmass, forming a ring around the eternally burning northern pole, but there are notable exceptions: after many years of bitter warfare against the Water the city of Hahro-Kass now sits in great river estuary whose wet silt has been dried to dust, surrounded by great walls of water where the sheer blazing power of the city’s Elementalists keep the ocean driven back. Dzaitchak, the training camp that has produced many of the most infamously savage Furnace Kin generals, is built down the length of a great shaft driven into the base of a mountain in the icy south. It is warmed by streams of lava bled from the stone and by chained Elementals, and is under constant siege by Earthworm raiding teams and by the strange creatures of the snows.

More usually the Fire build their cities in the open, on flat expanses of basalt or hardpan. Their cities are heavily fortified, surrounded by thick walls, bristling with gun-towers and arch-like buttresses to fend off skyborne assaults from the Air, and built over thick layers of heated rock and defensive tunnels to ward off any tunnelling attack by the Earth. Fire cities take much laborious work to build: stones must be scourged by an Elemental Master to blast all the life and power of Earth out of them, reduced to dead inanimate rock before they are hauled and lifted into place by hand. Nonetheless such activity is valuable for keeping the Fire hard at work and nearly every city has at least one major building work under way at any one time. Within the walls the city is a dense maze of barracks, dormitories, gymnasia and training halls, armouries, and the squat bunkers where the senior Fire live and make their plans and reports. In every Fire settlement the dominant feature will always be a great furnace, radiating shimmering heat from the pure unquenchable Elemental fire that the Elemental Masters keep burning within it. This will always be the focal point for the community, the meeting place for its Masters, and the keep to which the Fire will withdraw if attackers were to establish a foothold inside the walls. Religion is not known on the Motherworld, but these great furnace-fortresses are arguably the closest thing any of the Peoples have to a temple.

The need for control means that the Fire have developed a tight and intricate system of laws and hierarchies, each level of rank policing those below under the watchful eyes of those above. Laws are strictly enforced and penalties for infractions are severe, with generally only the most trifling offences allowing for a second chance. The Fire simply cannot take the chance that an offender will continue to spread lawlessness and instability, and so nearly every crime against the Fire regime is punishable by death or exile. The wastes around Fire cities are a thing of almost superstitious dread to the other Peoples and to and even to many Fire, for they are inhabited by crazed savages scraping to survive in exile, their minds burned away by heat and shame and replaced with a bestial will to survive: the Parchers. There are tales of exiles returning from the wastes stronger and more powerful than before, their self-control purified by their ordeal, to face down the Scorched Enforcers and retake their places among the Fire, but such has not happened for generations and as the Fire line up along the city walls on punishment days to watch one exile each hour walk out of the gate and away into the desert they know the doomed convict stumbling away from the gate will be either set on by the Parchers or will become one themselves.

This harsh rule of law is administered by the Scorched Enforcers, the order of lawmakers and enforcers that rules over the Fire’s civil life. The lower ranks of the Enforcers become the basic overseers and guards of the Fire cities, making sure those around them carry out their work and remain focused and orderly. The Hellfires, the tougher veterans of the Enforcers, act as garrison commanders and judges. They preside over executions and banishments, but are expected to be able to teach and inspire those around them to suppress their savage natures as well as simply ruling by fear. The greatest of them are the Scorched Enforcers themselves, terrifying leaders who hold their cities together with an iron grip.

The Enforcers will often fight for the Fire on the battle-lines, too, but the main military caste of the Fire are the Inferno Bringers. These make up the standing army of the Fire, constantly skirmishing along the borders of the Fire domains or driving wars of conquest deep into the territories of the other Peoples. The Inferno Bringers themselves are the greatest lords of the Fire armies, a closed elite of generals and champions; the mass of the army are the Fire Warriors, drawn from the masses in the Fire cities and kept and drilled in great compounds or marched into the desert for exercises and parades. The Inferno Bringers tend to remain separate from the other Fire and there is often rivalry between the Inferno champions and those of the Scorched Enforcers over who should command the Fire in particular ventures.

Just as the Fire’s furnace buildings are the closest thing to temples among the Peoples, the Furnace Kin are arguably the closest thing the Motherworld has to a religious order. The Furnace Kin are those in whom the magic of the old Court of Fire runs the most strongly, and the Fire have been careful to arrange for the Furnace Kin bloodlines to be protected from either dilution or inbreeding. A largely hereditary caste in a society normally dominated by rigorously-assessed merit, the Furnace Kin spend most of their time in meditation, contemplation of the venerated flames, and in constant trials and exercises aimed at developing their mastery of their Elemental arts. Often they will be called on to carry out public executions, destroy an old or condemned building, or blast open the ground where the Fire need to build - this is the Fire’s way of driving home the power of their element to their citizens and giving the Furnace Kin crucial opportunities to use their abilities without holding back. They are far too valuable to risk in sparring or duels against one another, since among the Fire these can never be counted on to stay at a non-lethal level.

War-making
The Fire are almost constantly at war: at figurative war with themselves and literal war with the other Peoples. They do not fight to defend like the Earth, and they dislike the smash-and-grab raiding of the Air: their objective is conquest and subjugation and their lives are geared to this in a way that no other Element can match. On the other hand, for such a warlike people the Fire are often curiously inefficient in war, often abandoning strategically wise approaches in favour of reckless rushes at the enemy. Two things hold the Fire back from achieving lasting greatness in generalship, and they both stem from the impetuous aggression that boils through their temperament.

The first is simple: when on the field and within sight of their enemies the Fire often simply cannot resist the temptation to surge forward to try and engulf the enemy in flames, and their commanders might as well try to order back a forest-fire on a dry summer day as command an orderly advance. Even the most rigidly self-disciplined Fire will have their resolve sorely tested by the tensions and passions of battle, and when the fight is joined there are almost none among the Fire who can resist for long the urge to launch themselves forward, weapons in hand, and make the field a hell of flame and corpses. The other Peoples are crafty in using this against them: the Earth and Water will lure them into traps or fire-lanes, the Air will draw them out in a futile charge then dance away on the breeze while reinforcements crash into the Fire’s flank or rear. It is no mean compliment to the ferocity and ability of the Fire’s soldiery that such a disadvantage commonly allows the other Peoples simply to hold their own against an onrushing Fire assault, with brute force able to blunt many enemy stratagems.

There is a second factor behind the lack of sophistication in Fire’s armies, which draws on the first: despite the constant training and drilling of the Inferno Bringers the Fire armies have relatively few leaders with actual battle experience and very little accumulated military lore or expertise. The reason is simple: very few Fire commanders ever come back. The Fire instinct is always to attack, attack, attack, until the enemy is burned away or the Fire army itself has been expended; even those leaders who conquer a new territory and found a settlement will usually leave it in the hands of the Scorched Enforcers to consolidate and strengthen while they launch forward into enemy country again. So while the leaders of the other Peoples can learn from their mistakes as the great veterans hand on their knowledge, nearly every army that sets out through the gates of a Fire city will be highly-trained, with countless hours on the practice fields and shooting courses, but with little or no battle experience and only sparse reports and extrapolation to tell them what the coming fighting will actually hold. Even sparring and non-lethal practice battles are rare because of the difficulty the Fire have in controlling themselves.

The most visible sign of this is that Fire troopers often seem curiously stiff and over-regimented. Their weapons and armour are often oddly-designed and better suited to the precise movements of their drills than the frantic melee of battle, and their manoeuvres and fighting styles have a formal feel which is at odds with their hellbent temperament. The dichotomy often creates a strange impression in battle: one squad of Fire might lose control and rush screaming into the attack while beside them another rank drops into stylised parade-ground firing postures to support them. True veterans, marked by fluid economical movements and relatively clear heads, are rare and a force to be reckoned with: their experience combined with the natural aggression and powerful arsenal of Fire is a fearsome combination.

Such veterans come as often from the Scorched Enforcers as from the Inferno Bringers, and when the Inferno Bringers must look outside their own caste of lance-armed Fire infantry and acrobat-nimble Cinderella commandos. It is often the Enforcers who march out with them, bringing the same grim discipline and determination that they use to stamp out disorder within the Fire cities. When the Enforcers march to war they will first sweep through the badlands around their city for as many surviving Parchers as they can find, luring them out with water and goading them before the army in a screeching, staggering mob. When the enemy is in sight the Enforcers will toss the Parchers whatever weapons they can spare and push them into battle. Behind them will come the Hellfires, swords and hand Fireflames at the ready while the Scorched Enforcers bellow orders and imprecations at their troops and ready their giant executioners’ blades for the fight. The Furnace Kin are at their sides, the younger of them swinging their iron flails but the older, venerated Kin hanging back and unlimbering the Furnace Cannon to support their brethrens’ advance.

Of all the Elements Fire is the one that lends itself most to weapons and tools of destruction. With the help of the Furnace Kin the armourers of the Fire learn to trap and concentrate the distilled essence of their Element into containers engineered with exacting precision and reinforced with Elemental power. These containers become amulets for the magically-skilled Masters and Furnace Kin, or are built into mechanical weapons for the more common Fire soldiers. The smallest such weapons are the Fireflames and Firebrands, the one an ugly snouted thing that pours searing flame out into the air and the other a scimitar inscribed with channels and circuits along which streams of flickering heat can flow. The Hellmelters and their larger kin, the Vulcan and Mega-Hellmelters, breathe out a shimmering stream of such pure heat that its target turns to ash and slag without even having time to flame - it is said that the Furnace Kin trap and kill Elementals in secret furnace-abattoirs and steal their breath to fill the Hellmelter magazines. The mighty Furnace-Cannon and Incinerators are the most terrible of all, sending twisting spouts of flame the entire length of a battlefield to hunt out and obliterate enemies with horrifying power. By comparison with these the simple clubs and axes used by the mobs of insane Parchers seem almost benevolent.

Even the defensive equipment of the Fire reflects their desire to destroy: rather than using physically thick armour to turn away blows (as the Earth, for example, do so well) the Fire craft even their armour out of raw flame and rely on it to incinerate and destroy an attack before it can hurt them. The so-called “blokk” armour is simply a metal cage which binds a layer of protective fire about the body of the wearer, either funnelled in through sorcerous engines or using the body of a bound minor Elemental for more classically-minded warriors. Charms in the flame prevent the flames from damaging the armour’s owner but still the armour must often be shed soon after a battle before its flames can flare up out of control. The “mega-blokk” and “ultra-blokk” armours use thicker, more ornate and heavier cages to bind hotter and brighter fires, sometimes with a wickerwork pattern of red-hot wires between the heavier iron slats of the armour itself. Privileged Fire might graduate from such crude physical devices to Heat or Furnace Auras, a collar or charm that surrounds the wearer with swirling heat with no need for a heavy metal cage. The heat from such an aura can reduce an enemy blade or shot to slag or vapour and even shrivel the hands that swing the weapon down to blackened bone.

Even the destruction that the Fire visit on their enemies is often dwarfed by what the Furnace Kin and the elite Firestorm Lords will inflict on the lands they have conquered. If a Fire army is led by a strong enough commander who can stop it from simply rampaging onward after a victory, it will set about consolidating its hold over its territory before it moves on to fresh battles. When castes have combined for a war this is often where they will separate, the Inferno Bringers marching onward while the Scorched Enforcers round up their workers, confiscate their weapons and set them to work on the beginnings of a new encampment or the foundations for a new city wall. Meanwhile the Elemental Masters will be trying to reshape the land: forests will be incinerated, springs sealed and streams and rivers blasted dry. As the ground is turned to ash and dust the Masters will turn to making sure no other Element can re-establish a foothold: canals might bring in rivers of flame from deeper in the Fire country, pits will be dug from which fountains of magma can be raised, or the Masters might band together to plant white-hot coals in the ground from which they can raise an orchard of firespouts that will dance across the land like tornadoes and yield a crop of cinders and sparks. It is a great boon to the other Peoples that the Fire nearly always overextend their conquering wars, peter out and collapse, for a swift counterattack is often the only way to stop a land captured by the Fire from being lost forever.

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