Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #109 - Eclipses

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Eclipses

Lunar and solar eclipses are a phenomenon which has fascinated and terrified humanity for thousands of years. It is only relatively recently (in historical terms) that we've understood what causes them and had the ability to predict them. Wildlife continues to be perturbed, however, with birds falling silent and cats and dogs becoming confused.

To ancient societies, eclipses were an unpredictable omen and usually a bad one, presaging the fall of kings and empires. Some canny leaders turned the omen around and claimed it prophesied the fall of an enemy. A good example is Sultan Mehmed II; a partial eclipse during the siege of Constantinople was used by him to predict victory.

Tell me about eclipses in your setting. Are they just an interesting scientific phenomenon, or do they show the power of the gods ? Are they a happy omen or an unhappy one ? Do the people of your setting understand the difference between lunar and solar eclipses ? If your setting has more than one moon around a world, do the eclipses of the moons have different meanings ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.