More dyne stuff, the houses of fire and ice. (Patreon)

You couldn't live more than three days in Dyne without the stuff, Keyla reflected as she ate at a cafe more than a thousand feet above the ground, watching the hobb cooking her meal taking food out of a cryodyne cooled box and throwing on to a grill heated by pyrodyne.  There simply wasn't a way to bring in enough food without preserving it, storing it, and then safely cooking it without burning half the city down.

A lot of outsiders complained about pyrodyne.  Flame fluid.  The Arson's lover.  The Red Demon of War.  Sure, way back in the day, pyrodyne's chief use was as a siege weapon, but even then knights and lords would warm themselves on iron plates heated by a slow drip of the stuff.  Easier to carry around that than wagons and wagons of wood.  The great Winter War had only been possible with tanks of dyne.

The hissing of her meal's flesh cooking on the plate reminded Keyla of the risk though, but one had to remember that if it wasn't Dyne, the hobb would have been using coal or wood.  Bad as dyne's air was, and it was pretty bad, even in the Low city, it was only made worse by combustion.  And trying to haul it up to mid city, or even High city, was simply unthinkable.  The aerodyne lifts had better things to do than haul buckets of coal up a mile.

She took a drink of her cryodyne cooled beverage.  That too was a luxury.  From the preservation in the cooled trains that brought food from all over the world, to the cooling of the high spires in the grip of summer, without cryodyne there were places that would just melt.  Some people had even taken to soaking cloth in the stuff, and then creating cooler cotton.  Far too expensive for the commons, or even the midcity folk.  No, that they sold off to Aran or Ossia, where it was worth more than it's weight in gold.

"Food," the hobb announced, sliding a platter over to her.  She took it and inhaled the savory spices.  Grilled Lyonessian lamb, Croman peppers, Irrynian garlic, crushed Cuprinian spices, and Ambernathian apples.  It didn't get much better than this.  All thanks to dyne.

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House Pyros, the Red House of Devastation.

House Pyros, once House Pyrosis, was once the alchemist Pyros, a vagabond with an unsettling habit of starting fires for fun.  Pyros loved fire.  Loved watching things combust before him, and regarded flame as the most sublime form of magic.  Formally a 'cast off son' of a noble house, he had proper education coupled with the freedom to wander.  When he heard tales of an island in Ferria where people created ever burning flame, he had to go for himself and see.

House Pyros likes to brag that it's the 'first house'.  Pyros was the first of the dyne alchemists.  He was also the first to convert the dangerous raw dyne into a stable, predictable pyrodyne.  On the Dynepact, house Pyros is the second signatory, right after the First Dynelord.  And it was Pyrodyne that made dyne famous.  After all, House Pyros is the only dynehouse that advertised via volcano.  In 320 DP, House Pyros attempted to transport a vial of pure pyrodyne to Irrynia to set up a satellite dynehouse.  Easier to transport concentrated dyne than ships full of diluted dyne.  However, a mishap in the City of Ashenport had the misfortune of opening the sealed container.  The Dyne melted the palace, then the ground beneath the palace.  Within a week, a mountain a thousand feet tall stood where the drops had fallen.  Within a year, half the city was buried.  A decade later, nothing remained but the colossal Mt. Pyros spewing fire and lava for every ship sailing by.

House Pyros is one of the most successful dynehouses with the philosophy of 'Everything burns'.  That's not just a pyromanical slogan.  It's a recognition that even bad things present opportunities and with enough fuel and oxidizer, you can get rid of anything.  Their house is represented by the mythical salamander, which not only thrives in heat, but spreads fire wherever it goes.  It's also emblematic of a beast whose tail can be cut off, only to grow back anew.

That's because house Pyros has the misfortune of being the dynehouse that disaster hits more than any other.  The house complex and refineries have burned to the ground repeatedly, due to mishandling of pyrodyne and the hazardous manufacture of the substance.  When there is backlash against dyne outside the city, Pyros is usually the first house raided to prevent the pyrodyne from being used to burn down the community.  It receives the bulk of criticism as to the abuses of dyne and the indolentry of wealth.

But today, House Pyros thrives.  The destruction of their refineries has allowed the house to build newer, more efficient, and even safer facilities.  Their spire, the Candle, is also one of the newest and most impressive structures in the city, topped with the ever burning flame.  Pyros is also one of the most beloved houses in the city itself, due to the house's philanthropy.  Pyrodyne is responsible for some of the worst calamities of war and accident, and the house recognizes they have an obligation to use some of their great wealth to repair that loss.  House Pyros spends, and spends well.

When the Dynelord tried to cut back on raw dyne, he accepted the cutbacks.  House Pyros was more than ready to convert to non-dyne centered forms of wealth generation.  Though the Treaty of Dyne forbids it, House Pyros has gotten around that by becoming partners in a multitude of mercantile investments all across the world.  The house also experiments with using diluted pyrodyne to create natural fuel sources that burn hotter or more completely.

By far, pyrodyne's greatest use isn't in burning, but heating.  Pyrodyne heaters, ovens, and stoves are cleaner and safer than open fireplaces, cast iron stoves, and primitive cookboxes.  The heater is little more than a dyne reservoir on a hollow metal pipe or space.  As the pyrodyne is fed into it, it heats the metal, and the pyrodyne vanishes.  This creates a vaccum that draws fresh pyrodyne into the heater.  Contrary to popular belief, uncorrupted pyrodyne doesn't burn when exposed to air.  It causes whatever it comes in contact with to combust.  Many an idiot has lost a finger touching a sample of the ruby red fluid.

Pyrodyne is also one of the few dyne sources that is regularly added to food.  Pyrodyne wash is added to drinks to warm them back to edible states.  Sadly, dynewash tends to make food soggy and unappetizing, so its use on food is less  common.  While pyrodyne wash is hot, it seldom reaches burning temperatures.  This has led some to soak winter clothes in it, so that the cloth will emit its own heat during cold months.  House Pyros gives treated baby blankets to families in Hradeth, Lyonesse, and Croma, where young children are at risk of exposure.

The current ruler of house Pyros is Joran Pyros.  The red headed, orange eyed, goatee sporting gentleman is often identified by his flaming top hat.  He has a wife and two mistresses, and hides none of this from anyone.  Joran is cocky and sees himself as the smartest man in the room, especially if he isn't.  He's also one of the most welcoming and unbiased employers.  If everything burns equally in pyrodyne, why discriminate.  Many have pointed out that a number of women in the house are all beautiful and unmarried, but that is simply because Joran enjoys having sex with them.  Frequently.  Often with his wife participating.

His devil may care attitude, however, hides the deep anxiety he feels knowing the truth about the origins of raw dyne.  He doesn't know how long it will last at current rates of extraction, and seeks solace in pretending the problems don't exist.  He distracts himself with womanizing and spectacle because its easier than dealing with the death of the Dynelord and the treatment of his surviving children.

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"Inevitable" is the slogan of house Cryos, the house of ice.  Once called house Cyosis, the name changed over time.  House Cryos has the annoyance of being compared to house Pyros all the time, and being second best at best.  Where house Pyros is flashy and bombastic, house Cryos is slow, methodical, and quiet.  It is represented by the Crocodile, which waits patiently for prey to come its way until it strikes.

Like Pyros, house Cryos got its start in Ossia.  However, unlike Pyros's wandering pyromaniac, Alver Cyosis was a level headed academic studying etheric and thaumaturgical forces.  Not a wizard.  Gads, no.  Instead, Cyosis studied how magic operated in detail.  He wanted to know why and how it worked far more than what he could do with it.  Thus, while Pyrosis literally tripped over the discovery of creating pyrodyne, it was Cryosis that discovered how to make and refine actual dyne itself.  However, by the time he did, more than a half dozen 'houses' had stumbled across their own versions of dyne.

Cryodyne's first application, un-ironically, was as fire suppression.  Cryodyne wash could be used to extinguish fires set deliberately or accidentally.  It, however, found a surprising second use in quarrying.  Holes would be drilled in slabs of stone, filled with water, and then flash frozen with cryodyne.  The ice would expand and pop the stone free, then melt away.  Much of the boom in stone building over the last two centuries was only possible because of this use.

It has also had some interesting applications in war.  One of the most infamous was freezing a river in summer, allowing an army to cross without a ford.  Another was turning a hillside slope into a sheet of ice.  While not as flashy as Pyrodyne, many military strategists see cryodyne as an invaluable resource.

In modern times, however, Cryodyne sees far more use in refrigeration.  While food can be preserved indefinitely with necrodyne, an insulated box with tubes could keep food cold with little risk of 'side effects'.  Cryodyne wash can also be added to chill a beverage when needed.  It's also added to cloth to create a permanently chilled fabric that is popular in warm climates.

House Cryos is nicknamed 'The Icebox', the 'Iceberg', or 'The Grim House.'  House Cryos's refineries are some of the oldest, with creaking pipes and infrastructure buried under layers and layers of frost.  It's spire is a virtual tenement from bottom to top, and those unfortunate enough to live there are there until they find housing somewhere else.  Much of the spire lacks so much as decent plumbing, and many simply avoid it altogether.  It is home, however, to the meat packing and storage for half the city.

The house leader is Jeanervine Cryos, a woman every bit as cold and analytical as her ancient ancestor.  Though many would regard her as beautiful, with her pale blue hair and striking blue eyes behind glasses, Jeanervine has no time or interest in fashion or appearances.  She maintains the house's finances with the tenacity of a glacier, wasting nothing.  By many accounts, house Cryos may be the wealthiest of the dyne houses in terms of raw wealth, but it hoards the money in its vaults and refuses to put it to any external use.  Many fear that if house Cryos were ever crossed or damaged, it could wreck economic havoc by simply liquidating its frozen assets and flooding the market with dynemarks.

The house has been approached multiple times by aspirant bankers.  She meets with them in a room carved entirely of ice to hear their proposals, while they're in their smallclothes and she's bundled up in furs.    She has two dozen frozen solid with a sign reading 'pending offers'.  Thus far, she hasn't had a single one that's lasted more than a few minutes.

Local gossip loves to speculate on sexual liaisons between Janos and Jeanervine.  It's evenly split between those that think sex would warm Jeanervine's heart and those who expect Janos's pecker would freeze right off.  Jeanervine has bigger concerns: making sure that Cryos has a large enough stockpile of cryodyne and wealth for when dyne eventually runs out.  Cryos might not has been the first dynehouse, but Jeanervine is determined to make it the last one standing.