# Firing **Firing** is the craft of turning raw [arkivit](page:57385) into brick capable of entering a [lineage](page:57229). Kilnmasters control not its strength, but the material’s future responsiveness. Properly fired brick remembers nothing yet, but can in time take on the measure of a particular House. ## The First Fire and the Second Fire Arkivit is fired twice. The first fire makes the brick strong; the second, cooler and longer, leaves it able to receive a neighbouring rhythm. Between the two fires, the blanks lie in an open circle for a day, and the master changes their places so that none retains a permanent neighbour. A mistake in the second fire produces a beautiful, ringing brick that cannot enter a lineage. Such batches were long sold as good building material, until the House of Three Cornices acquired an entire mute wing. After that, sound bricks were marked with two notches facing each other. ### Why the Two Fires Differ The first firing is judged by shape, cracks and strength. The second is judged more cautiously: a ringing brick may be excellent masonry yet fail the tests for future responsiveness. Kiln workers therefore keep the results in separate columns rather than giving a batch one simple grade. The two notches used after the Three Cornices failure mark tested suitability, not a guarantee that a House will ever awaken. ## Kilnmasters Beyond the City Limits Kilns are built near the grey quarries, far from stable lineages. The masters work in pairs: one tends the heat, while the other watches the pauses between changes in the material. Pairs remain together for years, but rarely live under the same roof—it is thought that sharing a House would make their observations too similar. Kilnmasters mark a batch with a sign, not a master’s name. If the brick later responds incorrectly, the sign is used to reconstruct the kiln, the weather, and the second participant. In this way, responsibility remains shared and does not become the glory of a single craftsperson. ### Work Shared Between Two Masters One kiln worker attends the fuel and draught; the other notes intervals, surface changes and the sequence of moving the blanks. Neither observation is sufficient on its own. A batch record can name two participants even when a single workshop mark appears on the bricks. Apprentices sometimes joke that a kiln has two masters so each can blame the other's fire; the record is kept precisely to make such blame less useful. ### The Two Hands of Eren and Vaska Kiln workers near the grey quarries still speak of **Eren and Vaska**, two names attached to a disputed method of keeping firing records. In the story, Eren watched the fuel while Vaska kept a separate tally of the pauses between changes in the clay. When a batch failed, neither account could explain it alone; read together, the two exposed a shutter opened before the second firing had settled. No dated batch record bearing both names is known, and some masters treat them as names for two duties rather than two historical people. The tale survives because a failed brick can be attributed to a workshop, but the work of noticing failure must be shared. ## Proper Firing Firing proceeds slowly—in the cycle’s prose, “for two nights the kiln waits, for one night it breathes, and everyone waits.” The quality of the firing is thought to affect not strength, but *how readily* the brick will later enter another lineage and begin to hold. Overfired brick is “hard but deaf”; underfired brick “answers at the wrong time.” Both kinds of flawed brick go into ordinary construction, paving, or retaining walls, but not into a House. For [arkivit vessels](page:57709), kilnmasters prepare separate, small blanks: they must be properly fired and retain a brief responsiveness, although they will never enter masonry. ## Place in the World Firing is one of those rare subjects in which [collators](page:57757) and [correctors](page:57763) do not intervene at all: it is commonly said that “a reader does not enter a working kiln.” Five lines about this in *Norven Above the Archive* became one of the most frequently quoted passages in the entire cycle. In the later texts, this becomes a more general image: “a kiln is anything that cannot be corrected later.” --- ## Links here - [Arkivit](page:57385) - [Ash Beneath the Garbitus](page:57668) - [Kakhenor](page:8224) --- [All pages](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again/the-house-of-the-inner-wind/en/index.md)