"Scott Schultz" <scott at cjhunter.com> Sent by: dragaera-bounces at dragaera.info 03/13/06 10:12 AM To <dragaera at dragaera.info> cc Subject Multiple emporers in a reign, revisited >Roughly a year ago, during a discussion of the nature of the Reborn Phoenix >and its relationship to the Throne, there was a question raised as to >whether a House's reign is always a single individual or if there can be >multiple emporers of the same House. > >Reading semi-randomly through _The Phoenix Guards_ this morning, I ran >across this: >=== >The Imperial Palace was begun shortly before the reign of Emperor Jamiss I, >and the earliest version was completed toward the end of his reign, which >encompassed, in its nine hundred years, the entirety of the reign of the >House of the Vallista in the First Cycle. >=== > >There doesn't seem to be any reason to mention that Jamiss' reign >"encompassed... the entirety of the reign of the House of the Vallista..." >unless it's to distinguish it from other periods in which one emperor's >reign did NOT encompass the entire reign of his House. To me, this statement appears to be about the /palace construction/ taking the entirety of the first Vallista reign, not Jamiss' custodianship of the Orb. So far as I can tell, the only example of "one reign--two emperors" is the Tortaalik->Zerika IV example, but this is muddied by it being the end/beginning of a Great Cycle. I have a feeling this plays directly into Steve's statement about the order of the cycle poem being "emphatically not a crack" on the Cracks and Shards page... There may be some things you could take out of that scene where Kana meets with the members of the other houses that might be telling, but I don't think the above example really says anything useful either way on this point. Majikjon