Wizard School · October 2026

Fire and water

Pyromancy and hydromancy are the first two schools a new Wizard School teaches. They are also the two that go wrong most often. Each is built on a single sigil, ember for fire and tide for water, with signs added to shape it.

Ember

a teacher's pyreball rolls off across the grounds carrying a stack of wood

Kindle is a bare ember: heat, at a spot. The heat is pulled out of the ground around it, which means a kindling in deep winter has less to work with. Draw the same ember backwards (widdershins) and you get Frost, which takes heat away and pushes it into the ground.

Hearth is an ember with bind and swell. Bind fastens it to a piece of furniture so it stays put and warms the room for days, and it never heats the room past comfortable. Chill is Hearth backwards, for a hot kitchen or a cold store. These two are the ones the headmaster orders, by placing a sigil on a room.

Add bolt and the ember flies and hits one thing: Fire Lance. Add burst and swell in a double ring and it's an Explosion, which has force as well as heat and takes walls down.

The pyreball in the GIF isn't in the curriculum. It's an ember with two lift signs and a reversed draw. Lift makes the fire float and stay, and anything floating lifts whatever is underneath it. Reversed draw sends it rolling away from whoever cast it. So off it goes across the grounds with a stack of wood riding on top, warming everything it passes until the ley field under it runs dry. I never wrote a pyreball. It's what those three signs do when you put them on an ember.

a wooden hut full of spirits; one careless spark

Fire is also what a botched cast turns into. A glyph that goes wrong lets its energy out as heat. The first take of that pyreball scene set the wood alight before anything had left the ground.

Tide

a teacher calls down a deluge; the water pours down the stairwell into the dungeon

Conjure Water is a bare tide, and the water has to come from somewhere. It's gathered from lakes, puddles and the damp in the air nearby, so a hydromancer locked in a dry stone cell has almost nothing to work with.

Douse scatters the water and is what firefighters use. Deluge pulls water in from all around and scatters it in a double ring. That's the flood in the GIF. Water in Wizard School is simulated: it pools, runs downhill, pours down stairwells and drowns whoever happens to be in the cellar.

Rain Call is a tide with rain and a bloom sigil nested inside it, which gives water over a wide patch and a bit of growth with it. Teachers cast it over the fields in dry weather without being asked.

a student charms young potato plants, then a teacher calls rain over the field

--scene garden: Growth Charm, then Rain Call.

Air against fire

a teacher draws the air out of a common room; the fire gutters and the students gasp

Smother is a gale sigil drawn backwards. A gale moves air and Smother takes it away. A fire with no air goes out, and so do the students standing round it if they don't reach the door in time. It only works indoors, where there's a room to empty. Firefighters pick between Douse, Frost, Deluge and Smother depending on how big the fire is and where it's burning.