What if Eclipse from AP was a naga? And this took place in the deep jungle of the amazon, where photographer y/n is trying to take pictures of the wildlife?
I'm vibrating at the speed of sound over this ask while also nudging my naga au
Naga Eclipse from AP would have the tail of a Green Anaconda, with an olive green scaly color dotted with black, framed by burning-like flares of orange along the length of his slithery body. He's also decorated with orange-yellow striping on either side of his long, slipper form. His upper half is scaley with a lithe deadliness to his musculature and decorated by frills surrounding his head with brighter orange-yellow colors, almost hypnotic in their gradient hues. One eye is deep emerald green, and one is midnight blue.
Lucky you—you're out on a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to explore a jungle closed off to the public, funded by Fazco, and occupied by two researchers who will be your bunkmates for the next few weeks. You're itching to take photos of the large river, including swamps, marshes and streams, and whatever wildlife is out there.
The few locals you did meet before you left to hike the rest of the way to what would be your new, isolated home warned you of a dangerous snake—a large, mythical beast. You take note of the local folklore. You understand the truth is hidden in there somewhere, and you are well aware of the dangers and diseases you could be met with in such a harsh environment, but you're determined.
It doesn't take long for you to feel eyes watching you when you first venture out by yourself. You take beautiful pictures of freshwater fish, big and beautiful, unlike any you have ever seen. Of course, you have hundreds of snapshots of the local flora, the trees, the floating meadows, the thick vines that drape each branch and hang thickly about the ground. You almost forget that you eerily don't feel alone.
But you swear something moves in the water—the ripples stop as soon as you look. The stillness is suddenly stiff, lifeless. Even the birds have stopped chirping.
You lower your camera and carefully put it away. A trickle of fear slips into your heart. You turn away from the river's edge only to be met by a low hiss and a creature, unlike anything you witnessed in your travels, spooling itself neatly out of the water, blocking your path to the base. An incredible creature with long arms and a great, serpentine tail that seems to stretch for yards and yards. You can hardly breathe in his presence—he's otherworldly with his frills and scales and fangs.
His eyes contain a mesmerizing shine as if staring into a fire as it burns or watching the ocean as it laps up against the beach, drawing your attention, demanding you don't look away. You couldn't anyway. Half-frozen, you struggle to keep from collapsing. He beckons with a sharp talon. He hisses softly for you to come closer, mouse. He wants to see you. You try to beg no without revealing how terribly you tremble. He doesn't let you go. He insists. His eyes flash with an allure. You almost step close when he murmurs that you need to be good.
But then your sense of survival kicks adrenaline into your heart, and you turn to run—
He strikes faster than your eyes can follow. Two loops of his green and orange tail surrounded you in an instant. You're dragged to the ground, your arms pinned under his mass, and the back of your head cradled by his large palm as powerful muscles squeeze you in the slightest—a gentle rebuke for thinking you could get away. You're hyper-aware of the terrifying bulk of muscles as you lie trapped in his coils. One strong twist and your eyes could pop out of your skull, and every bone protecting your heart and lungs would crumble to shards. You gasp. An urge to kick your legs and struggle erupts in your panic; a sinking feeling tells you it would only make things worse.
He coos over you, hissing and humming in an ancient song of the jungle you have no name for. When you whimper, he shushes you and strokes your cheek. He tells you how lovely you'll be. When you talk back to him, somehow finding your tongue amid your horror, you find out his name. Eclipse. He moves you more upright, resting you on his tail so you're not petrified by how vulnerable you feel lying down, but he never loosens his scaly bindings. He hovers over you. You gaze into his stunning frills of yellow-orange and wonder how a being like him came to exist. He studies you as you study him. He grins at how you shiver when he traces your collarbone with a sharp fingertip.
You remind yourself that you can still breathe. He hasn't crushed you—yet—but you don't like how wide his smile is. Sometimes, his jaw stretches a little too long as if dislocating from his skull, ready to devour you. His eyes gleam with a ravenousness as scales twist around you, holding you close enough to smell the slick green water he had been in and deep musk.
He tells you that he'll see you again very soon—away from other humans, lest you bring him a fine gift for a meal. You can only flex your fingers, silently pleading in your heart that he won't unhook his jaw and eat you alive.
Then, he unravels himself from your limbs. But before he lets you go entirely, he leans in close, his serpentine tongue flickering close to your neck and by your hair, tasting the air around you as you muster all your strength to not scream. He inhales deeply, pleased, before he murmurs, "Sweet mouse. You are mine. Say it."
You don't understand, but you echo his command, and when he taps your chin once in what might have been a loving gesture, you force your jelly legs to solidify before you run and run, all the way back to base. You slam the door to your room behind you. You touch your ribs, your arms, still caught in the heavy sensation of his loops as if he were upon you right now.
The stories are true—there is a giant snake in this jungle, and he wants you. You're afraid to discover if Eclipse's intrigue with you is only an exotic way to satisfy his hunger.
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Gosh I just love how Jon and Mel are paralleled in how they choose to ignore truths in relation to visions and prophecy because it’s a very interesting collision of two separate arcs: Jon’s - the deconstructed hidden prince/chosen one - and Mel’s - the deconstructed prophetess/wizard.
Like both are given the same information (i.e., that Jon may be the reincarnation of a legendary fiery-sword wielding hero) and both choose to deny the truth in this information because of one reason or the other: Jon has the tendency to ignore all the magical aspects in his life, mostly because he doesn’t want to be a super special magic boy, and Mel has already decided that the hero in question is some balding, middle-aged weirdo. But there exists a commonality between them since neither one knows of Jon’s true parentage, and so both think he’s just some random guy.
It’s very funny because we learn that Mel has been seeing visions of Jon every time she looks into her flames.
The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow. His long face floated before her, limned in tongues of red and orange, appearing and disappearing again, a shadow half-seen behind a fluttering curtain. Now he was a man, now a wolf, now a man again.
And we know that it’s been happening quite frequently because she gets another vision of Jon (in her POV chapter) and goes “oh god not him again!”
“What do you see, my lady?” the boy asked, softly.
Skulls. A thousand skulls, and the bastard boy again. Jon Snow.
So poor Mel is a little frustrated because she’s not looking for Jon. She’s looking for Stannis because she believes that he is Azor Ahai.
Yet now she could not even seem to find her king. I pray for a glimpse of Azor Ahai, and R’hllor shows me only Snow.
So she looks for Azor Ahai and only sees Jon Snow, but she never once thinks “hmm it’s super frustrating to keep seeing this weird emo teen but maybe there’s something deeper to it. Like there has to be a reason why I see him in place of my king, right?” And then she talks to Jon in a later chapter and confirms that she is seeing him whenever she looks for Mance or Stannis, as per my previous post, and both of them come out of that conversation being the very definition of “no thoughts, head empty ”. They’re just not going to think about it; and both end up focusing on other aspects of the visions and not the larger theme.
And then there’s this conversation between Jon and Val (in Jon VIII, ADWD) that honestly encapsulates the sheer comedy of a powerful wizard who is sent by destiny to go find this magical prince and missing him, and how the magical prince in question gets really frustrated with the wizard because he thinks that the wizard’s visions are dumb and useless.
In this conversation, Val suggests that Mel may know about Jon switching Dalla’s and Gilly’s babies because of what she sees in her fires.
“And keep [Gilly’s baby] away from the red woman. She knows who he is. She sees things in her fires.”
Val is essentially suggesting that Mel is attuned to the truth because of her prophetic insight. But Jon doesn’t think so.
Arya, he thought, hoping it was so. “Ashes and cinders.”
He hopes Mel can see the truth of Arya’s whereabouts, but what he actually thinks is different. He dismisses Mel’s supposed truth as mere “ashes and cinders”. And it’s so funny because this is a huge miscommunication. Jon is no doubt thinking of Mel seeing “only snow” (we learn from a later chapter that this is the answer Mel always gives) but it seems so silly so he twists that into “ashes and cinders”.
But the problem starts with Mel, honestly. She isn’t able to understand that the king she finds in her fires is Jon Snow and so when she relays the information back to him, she does it in such a vague manner, so Jon thinks she means literal snow (like frozen water, that snow). Except Mel means Jon Snow. She sees Jon Snow in her fires but refuses to ponder further on why she should see him in place of Stannis.
There is such hilarity in a wizard going on a great quest to find a prophesied prince and failing because she at some point found this other guy and convinced herself that he was the prophesied hero all along, even though he didn’t fit at all. So when she is ultimately led to the prince she’s looking for, she mistakes him for some random guy even when her visions actually tell her, “No Mel, wait! This is your guy!! This is your king! Hello?!”
But then, even if she somehow got clued in on said random guy being the prophesied prince, it’s a little too late because he’s already mistrustful of her anyway and doesn’t take her seriously. So he ironically asks her, “have you seen the king in your fires?” And she says, “I’m seeing you when I search for the king”. And literally neither one of them goes, “hey wait a minute?!”
And you know what’s even more frustrating? Some completely unrelated person somehow manages to get to the truth of the matter! (Sort of…). Val somehow manages to understand that what Mel sees is true. In fact, Val is even more correct than she realizes because when Jon dismisses Mel’s visions as “ashes and cinders”, Val counters that with:
“Kings and dragons.”
Oh!
So, according to Val, not only can Mel see the truth, but she can also see the truth of who is a king and/or a dragon.
The king Mel sees is also a dragon, as he is one of the last surviving Targaryens in the world. Where Jon dismisses Mel’s visions, Val somehow takes the narrative’s voice here and goes “oh it’s not just Snow she sees, she also sees that he is a king and a dragon”.
As if this wasn’t comedic enough, Jon gets a vision towards the end of the book that literally connects the dots.
Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire. Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze. “Snow,” an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders. Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist. As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She was gone as quick as she’d appeared.
- Jon XII, ADWD
He dreams of himself as the fire-sword wielding hero Mel has been so crazy about, and then he wakes up to his pet bird calling him “KING” basically affirming everything Mel has been seeing throughout the entire book. And he does the most Jon Snow thing imaginable. He completely ignores it! We get zero commentary to this, same as we got zero commentary from him then Mel said that she saw him every time she tried to look for Mance or Stannis.
Really, both the chosen one and the great wizard are failing quite miserably. They get information much in the same way (Jon gets a prophetic dream, and Mel gets her prophetic visions) but they both decide to ignore whatever they’re seeing. The chosen one is annoyed that the wizard’s visions are useless, the wizard is annoyed that the totally-normal-boy-who’s-definitely-not-the-chosen-one-not-like-Stannis-is-anyway isn’t listening to her, and poor Val is off to the side going “hey, doesn’t anyone else think its important that Mel really does see kings and dragons?!!”
And honestly, Mel’s inability to get it even when the answer is right in front of her becomes even funnier when we take this exchange into account:
[…] all of them seemed surprised to hear Maester Aemon murmur, “It is the war for the dawn you speak of, my lady. But where is the prince that was promised?”
“He stands before you,” Melisandre declared, “though you do not have the eyes to see. Stannis Baratheon is Azor Ahai come again, the warrior of fire. In him the prophecies are fulfilled. The red comet blazed across the sky to herald his coming, and he bears Lightbringer, the red sword of heroes.”
- Samwell IV, ASOS
I- 😭
Mel accuses Maester Aemon of being too blind to see the truth, not knowing that the narrative has damned her as well. Unlike Aemon, she has actually set her eyes on the promised prince but she’s the one who has been too blind to see.
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hello people of tumblr, it would mean the world to me if you helped me out in voting my favourite bisexual nerd into winning this one singing competition that might have taken over my life. it is a very simple process, it is free of charge and you can vote once a day tho it's fine if you only vote once, it will make me immensely happy nevertheless <3
so, the steps are as follows:
download the 'ot 2023' app from the app store
2. if you are from a hispanic country you shouldn't have any problem with this. if you are from any other part of the world, you need a vpn to access the app.
3. register with your email or whatever means is easier for you. don't worry, it's free of charge and they don't send you spam emails or anything; i've had it since the beginning of the contest and i haven't received any. it is simply a way to track how many users are in the app i guess.
4. go to the heart in the bottom left (circled below)
5. click on paul thin and confirm your decision of voting him as a winner by clicking on the tick. his heart should be purple then. this is free of charge, you don't have to worry about the money.
6. repeat if you want it next day until next monday :)
also, just to see who you are voting for, here are some of his best performances from the first half of the contest (due to how the program is structured, the second half performances are not available in youtube yet)
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