On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Joshua Kronengold wrote: > My guess would be that at the end of a Great Cycle, there are two > Phoenix reigns, one decadent and ending in ruin, one reborn and rising > to glory, wheras at the end of a -normal- cycle, a single Phoenix > reign will generally begin ascendant and rising to glory, but end > decadent, at which point war starts and the house of the Dragon takes > over. Vlad says as much (regarding normal cycles) at some point. > But while we have evidence for what a Great Cycle change looks like (with > an incredibly small sample size), we have no evidence for what a > normal Cycle changeover is like...except that Adron clearly -expected- > a Dragon reign to follow the Phoenix, lending credence to my theory > that the double phoenix thing only happens at the end of a Great > Cycle. There was a long and fruitful and mostly bloodless discussion of these issues not too long ago in the archives. I don't think there's any possible question about previous dual Phoenix reigns, as the issue would have been treated in the Paarfiad. What Adron expected or didn't expect is hard to say. I think I'd trust Aliera on this subject before I trusted Sethra.