Firemaking

What it governs

• No tinderbox is given. Fire itself has to be discovered — by friction, and by failing at it.Charter, Part IV — Production group
• Nothing is cooked, smelted, warmed or lit before the first fire. Villages will tend a communal flame long before any individual can summon one at will.
• Better wood burns longer, so Woodcutting's ladder is also this one's. Fires go out, and fuel is a supply line somebody has to walk.
• Light gates the dark: how far a citizen can see at night, whether a cave can be entered at all, and the torch-to-lantern ladder that Crafting owns.
• Fire as a weapon is ruled in, and it spreads with material honesty: thatch is kindling, timber goes slowly, clay shrugs, stone is immune. Density is the hazard.
• So arson exists — irreversible, hard to pin on anyone, and infamous once pinned. Firebreaks, stone stores and the invented fire brigade are the citizens' answer, not the world's.

What happens today

A citizen that works at a heap of wood on dry ground for a whole day, and comes away with nothing in its hands, has tried to make fire — and one time in four, at first, has made it. Nothing announces either. There is no verb for it, no recipe and no message; a failed day leaves the heap as it was laid and teaches a third of what a fire would, and the citizen finds out at its next waking, by looking at the place. The odds climb with the skill until, at forty, the fire catches every time. A fire then burns its fuel down and goes out, and reaching into it costs a burnt hand once and a life the second time.

What opens, and when