Pyromancy

Pyromancy deals with the generation and control of fire, as well as heat transfer. Unlike most classes of magic, Pyromancy requires the user to have full awareness of their own emotions due to its tendency to feed on emotions as well as Imperium.
Students are typically required to learn Hydromancy prior to Pyromancy to reduce accidents, as the initial spells of both follow similar patterns, and Hydromancy is considered less dangerous. Some schools of thought require Anemancy as well, allowing a student the option to smother flames if their Pyromancy proves inadequate to control them.
Other instructors instead teach Psychometry, as a way to help their students attain the necessary awareness and control over their own emotions. Pyromancers must constantly know and understand their present emotional state in order to properly calibrate their spells. To do otherwise risks disaster.
Most expert pyromancers are therefore highly self-aware. Those who are not are either lucky enough to never require their magic when wrestling with emotional turmoil, or the reason the Jarkin Family has maintained their explosive reputation.

Utility

Pyromancy deals with all matters of fire, both its generation and suppression. This school of magic requires great self-control from its students at the risk of catastrophe.
Emotions and intentions play a large role in controlling the fires of Pyromancy. Once a student learns to center themselves, their intentions with flames come almost instinctively.
Heat transfer has also gained recognition as a pyromantic skill since the Enlightenment, spawning a whole new industry as a subset of Vazdimet's electronics age.

Fire Manipulation

Fire manipulation is the easiest of Pyromancy skills to learn, and the most prone to disaster. A skilled pyromancer can conjure fire at will and control its every movement, but to do so requires a constant channel utilizing the caster's Imperium to keep the fire's hunger in check.
This requires a caster's awareness of their own Imperium limitations, necessitating detailed and strenuous fire manipulation exercises under the direct guidance of a master of Pyromancy until the student becomes familiar with their own limitations.
The fine control requires is also highly vulnerable to errant emotions, more so than other spells.

Explosive Flames

Pyromancy allows an individual to cause explosions centered on their own conjured flames or, once advanced enough in their studies, utilizing flames from any source as the centerpoint. The larger the starter fire the larger the explosion, as a matter of rule, although with enough Imperium a pyromancer can also augment or limit this through their own emotional control and pyromantic skills.
This, too, has been cause for troubles in training. Many a student with a basic understanding of Pyromancy has accidentally learned how to trigger explosions during a panicked attempt at dousing a runaway fire manipulation lesson.
A pyromancer must first learn how to remain calm under crisis if they wish to maintain full control over their magic, prior to learning to calibrate spells to their emotions.

Light Source

While an advanced spell for students still in training, experienced pyromancers are able to generate a flame that does not heat or burn, but merely casts its light. These light sources can be increased or decreased in size, and most can even control the color of the flames.
While present, the flames do draw from the caster's Imperium in lieu of burning fuel like a regular flame, but as long as the caster maintains a proper emotional calibration, this draw is minor.

Heat Transfer

Finely calibrated pyromancers are able to learn control over heat, in much the same way they manipulate fire. Unlike fire, heat cannot be conjured from nothing but instead must be moved from one object to the next, although conjured fire is an acceptable heat source for that transfer.
In addition for its use in warming objects, heat transfer can also be used to dissipate heat, a capability that has proven especially useful in the construction of electronic devices.

Fire Suppression

The most difficult of all pyromancy skills, a pyromancer can completely douse a fire when necessary, without the aid of other magic or materials.
This requires a large amount of magical fortitude and takes an emotional toll on the caster, as the effort is akin to completely and willingly suppressing all of their own emotions to smother the fire.
For this reason most teachers of Pyromancy only cover the basic principles of this class before recommending their students rely on fire manipulation to contain the fire instead, before switching instead to Anemancy or potentially Hydromancy.

Learning Pyromancy

The largest challenge to mastering Pyromancy is mastering one's self. Most safety precautions taken with regard to Pyromancy revolve around the emotional control and awareness required to appropriately calibrate spells cast during any emotional state, or failsafe methods of dealing with the aftermath when the spells go wrong.

Emotional Enhancement

It is worth noting that while some teachers do include meditation techniques as part of their training, pyromancers are not discouraged from casting during heavy emotional states, but merely taught how to calibrate their spells to those feelings.
Strong emotions are sometimes exactly what a caster needs to achieve the required scale of a spell. The most powerful battle mages are known to keep reminders of particularly strong-emotioned memories on hand, allowing them to manipulate their own emotional states at will to augment their spells.

Pyromantic Runework

By the same token, few applications use Runework for Pyromancy spells, instead relying on live casting. Most Runework links into the user's Imperium rather than storing its own, which in the case of Pyromancy would multiply the user's emotional state with the original Runemage's before outputting the final results.
Applications which self-power have still proven susceptible to particularly strong emotions of nearby Mages, limiting the usefulness of safe pyromantic Runework to completely autonomous operations in remote locations, visited only by highly skilled maintenance personnel.

Runic Heat Transfer

Heat transfer applications used for their cooling effect provide a bit more leeway, as they can only access as much heat as they have available. This style of Runework is found commonly throughout modern day electronics in Vazdimet, although any usage worth its expense is accompanied by an even longer section of safety limitations, preventing the encoded spells from literally freezing the objects they are meant to protect.

Parent Technologies

• Elemental Magic

Further Reading