> > 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. > > 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. Wait a second. I seem to recall that Tortaalik tells Khaavren at the beginning of FHYA (Ah, here it is, via book search, which I had to wrestle with a bit to find, but...) in Chapter the Sixth: "... by those learned in history that Emperors of my House will become, toward the end of their Reign, weak-willed, or addled, or silly, or power-mad, or that we will neglect the Empire, giving..." So, by this, Tortaalik seems to imply that _every_ Phoenix emperor/empress will individually go through a rise & decline. I am also of the impression that when Sethra talks about how she doesn't feel that the cycle has turned, that she is correct: Tortaalik's and Zerika's reigns are in the same Phoenix reign, though that reign is both the end of one cycle & great cycle and the beginning of another. It seems to me that Great Cycles wouldn't merge nicely if you had discreet endings of Phoenix reigns and discreet beginnings of another. That is, instead of having a single Phoenix on The Great Cycle (you know, the big wheel at the PotD?), you'd have to have 2: one beginning and one ending. Since there appears (from the description in _Taltos_) that there is only one, then each Phoenix emperor/empress is both the beginning and end of a cycle. And the order of the poem would then be correct, and your "one decadent and ending in ruin, one reborn and rising to glory" is exactly backwards from what it should be. Since we don't know what happens to end Zerika's reign, we don't know for sure that she is going to become decadent, but I think it's probably fated to be that way, unless she just abdicates before that. But I doubt that will happen, simply because why would the Cycle work like that? -- Matthew S. Klahn Software Architect, CodeTek Studios, Inc. http://www.codetek.com