Finally I started reading Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis!!!! I never thought I would have a crush on Amel until I read about him being human.
I think Lestat does love Amel in his spirit form —crazy and childish—, but If he had known him when he was human, intelligent and handsome, i think Lestat would love him even more.
What do I think about Amel… I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I find the idea of him in the earlier books and his role in the vampire origin story fascinating on a spiritual and physiological level, a cosmic accident being the reason for vampires is still, to my mind, a very unique take on that. I liked his interactions with mortals before he fused with Akasha, and I liked the idea of him as an intellectually dormant substance that bound all the vampires together.
^Later, when Amel became conscious, I also was intrigued by the concept of him riding along with one specific vampire but able to run around the web of them on visits. I wrote two fics post-PL in which Lestat deals with this.
A Brief Reprieve–After the events of Prince Lestat, Lestat reflects on certain aspects of his new spirit animal, snuggled up lovingly with Armand by a fire in winter. Slightly AU in that they are snuggled up together lovingly by a fire in winter!
Bad Connection–Daniel and Lestat are out on the town when Amel decides to join them. He is very much a painful third wheel, and Daniel has to help Lestat through the attack.
On the other hand, I struggle to buy Amel’s backstory according to PL&PLROA, and I didn’t personally need him to be more special than he already was, being a spirit and indefinable, with nebulous origins, that was fine for me. But more power to the ppl who liked his backstory!
I’ve only seen a few pieces of Amel fanart, but it exists! I’m about to reblog one but check my #Amel tag for the rest.
Anyone else have Amel fanart? Tag me or send the link over 😀
I’m not sure if this is as debatable of a topic as she claims it is, but I thought this was interesting for those who have read, or are reading, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. @i-want-my-iwtv
I don’t really need to cut this or do a spoiler alert, since AR is now telling us this isn’t the definitive answer for what Memnoch is, but I’ll do a cut just in case.
From PLROA, Lestat’s POV:
^I didn’t know this was even a debate, but Magnus says this pretty definitively, he even claims to have escaped Memnoch’s realm. So… should be interesting to see what AR does with Memnoch. I almost feel like she’s hanging onto him to spite everyone who gave Memnoch the Devil bad reviews way back when, but for whatever reason, I think she may be setting him up as a major player in the next book: (Is this Kapetria narrating? I think so…)
my storytelling final! or, that week i almost went blind cross-hatching!
it’s a couple weeks old at this point, but i’m still proud of it (all that cross-hatching…) even though looking back at it now i can see a ton of flaws or things i just could’ve done better. maybe i’ll redo it one day.
the page colors are kind of wonky because they’re photographs; i didn’t have a scanner big enough for the pages.
I’m gonna read this book w/ a classy adult beverage within arm’s reach. But I have to say, after reading the excerpt, it could actually be a fun read. We don’t have to accept it as canon, just a fun read nonetheless. AU fanfic.
My prediction, based on discussions outside of tumblr, is that it will be Amel narrating the story of Atlantis to Lestat for 75% of the book and then Lestat adventuring and finding the place itself for 25% of the book. WE SHALL SEE.
Hit the jump for the excerpt (which is linked above but I wanted to put it here under a cut for some kind of greedy collector reason idk TODAY IS A RED LETTER DAY.)
Proem
In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. It was a chorus as mighty as the wind and the waves, all those voices of the dying. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken.
I woke, in the dark, unable to leave the coffin in the vault in which I slept for fear that the setting sun would burn the young ones.
I held the root now of the great vampire vine on which I was once only another exotic blossom. And if I were cut, or bruised or burned, all the other vampires on the vine would know the pain.
Would the root itself suffer? The root thinks and feels and speaks when he wants to speak. And the root has always suffered. Only gradually had I come to realize it — how profound was the suffering of the root.
Without moving my lips, I asked him: “Amel, what was that city? Where did the dream come from?”
He gave me no answer. But I knew he was there. I could feel the warm pressure on the back of my neck that always meant he was there. He had not gone off along the many branches of the great vine to dream with another.
I saw the dying city again. I could have sworn I heard his voice crying out as the city was broken open.
“Amel, what does this mean? What is this city?”
We would lie together in the dark for an hour like this. Only then would it be safe for me to throw back the coffin lid and walk out of the crypt to see a sky beyond the windows full of safe and tiny stars. I have never taken much comfort from the stars, even though I’ve called us the children of the moon and the stars.
We are the vampires of the world, and I’ve called us many such names.
“Amel, answer me.”
Scent of satin, old wood. I like seasoned and venerable things, coffins padded for the sleep of the dead. And the close warm air around me. Why shouldn’t a vampire love such things? This is my marble vault, my place, my candles. This is the crypt beneath my castle, my home.
I thought I heard him sigh.
“Then you did see it, you did dream it too.”
“I don’t dream when you do!” he answered. He was cross. “I am not confined here while you sleep. I go where I want to go.” Was this true?
But he had seen it, and now I saw the city flashing bright again in the very midst of its destruction. Suddenly it was more terrible than I could bear. It was as if I saw the myriad souls of the dead released from their bodies rising in a vapor.
He was seeing it. I knew he was. And he had seen it when I dreamed of it.
After a while, he gave me the truth. I’d come to know the tone of his secret voice when he admitted the truth.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t know what it means.” His sigh again. “I don’t want to see it.”
The next night and the night after he was to say the same thing.
And when I look back on those dreams I wonder how long we might have gone on without ever knowing any of it.
Would we have been better off if we had never discovered the meaning of what we saw?
Would it have mattered?
Everything has changed for us, and yet nothing has changed at all, and the stars beyond the windows of my castle on the hill confide nothing. But then the stars never do, do they? It’s the doom of beings to read patterns in the stars, to give them names, to cherish their slowly shifting positions and clusters. But the stars never say a word.
He was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know. But the dream had struck a chord of fear in his heart. And the more I dreamed of that city falling into the sea, the more I was certain I heard his weeping.
In dreams and waking hours he and I were bound as no two others. I loved him and he loved me. And I knew then as I know now that love is the only defense we ever have against the cold meaninglessness around us — the Savage Garden with its cries and songs, and the sea, the eternal sea, ready as ever to swallow all the towers ever created by human beings to reach Heaven. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, says the Apostle. “And the greatest of these is love….”
I believed it and I believe in the old commandment of the poet-saint who wrote hundreds of years after the Apostle: “Love and do what you will.”
I gave the vampire’s fear of sunlight a physiological explanation that had to do with the physiological laws that govern a spirit world or a cosmology. The spirit that has taken them over and made them inhuman is too sensitive to sunlight. It can’t thrive in sunlight — it’s simply paralyzed by sunlight, and weakened — and it can’t enliven their flesh. Therefore, the flesh starts to burn, because the flesh is dead anyway. The dark gift of immortality has different effects on different people. That they respond in different ways. Some people are emboldened, and some people are weakened. Some people are crippled by it, and destroyed by it. Other people are made into monsters by it. But the fundamental thing that happens with Louis is that it doesn’t change him. He is a guilt-ridden adult, living in grief over his dead brother, and he becomes a guilt-ridden vampire, living in grief over the fact that he has to take life in order to live. Perhaps it’s a lesson to Lestat that the basic personality doesn’t always change.
about this.
I-want-my-IWTV 