>Unlike Y2K, for example, the exact date of the "turn of the Cycle" was >almost certainly unknown, and I'm still not entirely convinced that >Zerika's reign qualifies as the cycle turning; perhaps it is just a >continuation of the previous Phoenix reign. Assuming that Paarfi knows wherefrom he speaks, the Gods were the first to acknowledge that the Cycle had NOT turned. That is, it was still the reign of the Phoenix regardless of the death of the Phoenix Emperor. The "space on the wheel" allocated to Phoenix wasn't larger than any others. The wheel of the Cycle just took longer than normal to turn over. >When Vlad sees the physical Cycle in Taltos, his remarks do not seem >to indicate any mechanism by which two Phoenix reigns could occur >back-to-back on the physical Cycle itself. Technically, there weren't two Phoenix reigns. According to the Cycle, there was never a period between Tortaalik and Zerika when it was NOT the reign of the Phoenix. There were two Emperors, but only one House ascendent. Remember that the Cycle drives the Empire, not vice-versa. From it's point of view, the change between the Great Cycles was of no consequence whatsoever. It simply went about its business of marking the current reigning House and causing whatever metaphysical side effects become attendent on the current position of the meter. The death and rebirth of the Empire that accompanied the transition between Great Cycles was of no more moment to the Cycle than the transition between 11:59pm 1999-12-31 and 00:00am 2000-01-01 would have been to your personal alarm clock if the Y2K bug had been real and civilization as we know it had collapsed at that moment. Ask the Easterners or a cat centaur about the Great Cycle and they'd give you a blank look. Ask an Elde Islander about it and he'd shrug. The only people it matters to are citizens of the Dragaeran Empire because they are the ones affected by it. This includes the unusual circumstance of there being two sequential Phoenix emperors instead of the more usual single Phoenix emperor. It's a consequence of the Empire's dependence upon the Cycle. That is, you can possibly draw conclusions about events in the Empire based on the condition of the Cycle, but you can't really draw conclusions about the Cycle based upon events in the Empire. The influence is strictly one-way.