Omg you guys, almost exactly seven years after the sighting I finally found out what it was!! I am so pleasured to have finally cracked this riddle. I showed a friend the photo and they mentioned Quetzal Coatl, the winged serpent sun god of the Aztecs… I thought hmm, winged serpent sounds legit so I looked into it. According to Aztec legend, Ometecutli, “Lord of Duality,” and Omecihuatl, “Lady of Duality,” initially created all life and produced four sons, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli and Tonatiuh, who represented different cardinal directions and who were associated with different colors. These sons became very powerful, ruling gods.
Tezcatlipoca was the Aztec god of night and all material things. He carried a magic mirror that gave off smoke and killed enemies, and so he was called “god of smoking mirror.” He was god of the north. As lord of the world and the natural forces, he was the opponent of the spiritual Quetzalcoatl, and sometimes appeared as a tempter, urging men to evil. Punishing evil and rewarding goodness, he tested men’s minds with temptations, rather than trying to lead them into wickedness. He was also god of beauty and war, the lord of heroes and lovely girls. He once seduced the goddess of flowers, Xochiquetzal, wife of the god Xochipilli, because such a lovely goddess was a good match for him, being a handsome war-like god. Yet he appeared most frequently as a magician, a shape shifter and a god of mysterious powers.
And a couple of days after discovering this, I had a psychic reading wherein the woman told me I possess a lot of jaguar and eagle energy, for those of you who are into totems… so I looked up jaguar totems and found this
“In Aztec society, the warrior class was symbolized by depictions of JAGUARS and EAGLES eating human hearts. The special god of the warriors, Tezcatlipoca, was often pictured as a jaguar. The Toltecs associated the jaguar with rain and thunder (which was called his “voice”). His yellow skin represented the Sun; during eclipses they said that the jaguar swallowed the Sun. However, the Toltecs believed that the Sun God became a jaguar when he went underground at night. On rare occasions, a pure black jaguar will be seen. These black cats are sometimes called panthers by the natives. Jaguars are fiercely independent, cunning, and distrustful of humans. Like leopards, the jaguar will hunt single humans or dogs, which it especially hates.”