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phaethon belongs to me, fathom; id appreciate not using/editing this character (unless you're fixing spelling/adding and/or removing categories)





and the ground's not cold

and if the ground's not cold, everything is gonna burn

we'll all take turns,

i'll get mine too. ~pixies, monkey gone to heaven

code coming as soon as i learn how to code whole pages

introduction
the first recorded flight around the pyrrhian continent took 40 days, was largely flown into the wind, and it was done by a sandwing who had no experience in short or long distance racing, and really just wanted to brag about being the first dragon to do it. it was, needless to say, far from what really could be done, and a skywing, after a few months of practice, beat this time by flying the perimeter of pyrrhia (the opposite way) in 26 days.

skywings who did have a history of racing long distances eventually took to the challenge, and this time would be whittled down to incredible speeds that would take years of training.

and then earth and sun and moon aligned, and under a solar eclipse was born

phaethon
a faded newspaper discarded on the ground, advertising The First Race Around Pyrrhia, was discovered by a young skywing, who, formerly directionless, instantly decided that long distance flying was his calling. his father, a jeweler, helped his son follow this dream, and weeks later, phaethon found himself at the race’s start.

of course, he was an observer, as he was still a dragonet, but witnessing the beginning of the race cemented his dream to one day be a contender. he spent the next two years training even harder, and luckily, The Fourth Race Around Pyrrhia started just after his seventh birthday, allowing him to join in.

five days in, suffering from sleep deprivation in a harsh storm, phaethon had to make an impromptu landing in the bay of a thousand scales, which involved him hitting the sand face first. if groups of volunteer seawings had not been stationed to the bay, in order to prevent crash landings such as phaethon’s, enforce the rules, and discourage racers from drinking unfiltered ocean water, phaethon probably would have died- a fate that met five contestants. the first place finisher ended up doing two whole days worse than last year’s race, and the next year, precautions were taken so that the contestants would not be flying through storms.

phaethon finished well in this race, finished third in the next, and, in The Seventh Race Around Pyrrhia, was caught in a sandstorm over the kingdom of sand and was forced to spend several hours grounded. in The Eighth Race Around Pyrrhia, a storm ended his race prematurely for the third time, losing him in the claws of the clouds mountains.

for the ninth and tenth, phaethon took a break to exclusively study wind patterns and dragon wing anatomy, and in The Eleventh Race Around Pyrrhia, finished first and smashed the record of eleven days for fastest flight around the pyrrhian perimeter, finishing in eight.

and then it got ludicrous. after finishing The Twelfth Race Around Pyrrhia in a week, he lost the thirteenth against a dragon who only took two pauses to sleep, instead of phaethon’s usual four. to every dragon on pyrrhia, this seemed like a fairly obvious tactic that phaethon had just not thought about, but phaethon took it as a challenge.

he spent the year before The Fourteenth Race Around Pyrrhia testing his personal limits- how long he could go without food, water, or sleeping while still maintaining a normal speed for him- and weeks before the race, he went to separate mathematicians and seers and asked how fast a dragon could possibly go. the answer he got was more or less the same, around four and a half days, and he finished The Fourteenth Race Around Pyrrhia in five and a half before retiring from them altogether. he’d realized he was a widely recognized figure- he could simply hire dragons to verify him flying the perimeter of the continent, instead of waiting for volunteers to do it every year.

before The Fifteenth Race Around Pyrrhia, he’d gotten his time down to a little over four and a half days, and, after taking a break to watch the fifteenth, set the record in three and a half days.

his next few attempts were mostly ravaged by storms, but, finally, he got it down to just barely over three days. this record would not be verified, nor any independent flights after The Fourteenth Race Around Pyrrhia. but phaethon wasn’t racing for clout, and his five and a half day record still stood.

phaethon became a reclusive figure, and was rarely seen on the ground. more often than not, he was in the air, either training, racing against his own record, or learning to sleep midair and catch and eat birds on the fly.

phaethon never made any public appearances, or asked dragons to verify his records, but dragons living on the coast still looked to the sky to see him, and came together to speculate his fastest record. it was said he could do it under two days. this was never verified, by officials or phaethon himself.

it was said that he could fly the perimeter of pyrrhia in under a day, and it was said that, when he’d gotten his closest to this feat, he was struck and killed by a lightning bolt. it was said that this was not chance, but some supernatural being, whatever that may be, killed him for daring to fly faster than the sun.

the races he’d once taken part in were cancelled a few years after phaethon’s death, when the majority of the contestants died in a storm over the bay of a thousand scales. it was said by the organizers that tragedies like this one were bound to happen if they continued, and that, ultimately, the contestants’ deaths were on their talons.

observers of the final race said that the storm was phaethon’s revenge.