The Cycle is the recurring figure the world repeats in the sky, in writing and in conduct: nested periods from the planetary week to cosmological cycles of 3000 years, and an eternal return in which “the cycle goes back to zero” and those who pass through it remember nothing.
| Type | Concept |
| Spanish entry | Ciclo |
The nested cycles
Alpha is worth one, beta two: the names of the Greek and Hebrew letters add up to 365. From smallest to largest:
- the week of planetary days, of which only two are named: Saturday, “the day of Saturn”, called retrograde, and Sunday, “the day of Sol Invictus”;
- the Pleiades, which vanish for forty nights and forty days and “when the year is complete, begin to appear” again;
- the year of 365;
- the year and a day that closes a cycle of separation in Kumal;
- the thirteen years between certain time-travel events, which “pass quickly”;
- the cosmological cycles of 3000 years.
The civil cycle
On Sol Invictus’s day, a day of justice, the nine heads of the quarters are summoned. In Kumal, those who complete their year and a day “become like pillars of the community”. Paris, a chronal city, “needs to have something like cycles”: without them it falls into chaos or total crystallization.
Return and erasure
In the eternal return, the erasure is an operation of the world, not personal forgetting. Traveling chronomancers are trapped in missions that seem to end and send them back into the loop. One voice put it: “we are going from war to war”.
Open questions
- The names and stars of the other five weekdays.
- Whether the 3000-year cycle and the return to zero are one event; who performs the erasure; whether anyone remembers between cycles.
- Who administers Paris’s cycles.
- Any material support (table, clock, oriented stone) beyond watching the sky.
- Whether the cycle of wars belongs to the world or only to one gesta.