An Old Bird, Alone, Against Ravana

Two brothers made a bet about the sun.

And one of them spent the rest of his life on a mountain, because of how it ended.

The flight

Sampati and Jatayu were the sons of Aruna, the charioteer of the sun.

They were great birds, of the older order of living things. The Ramayana treats them as persons, not as animals. When they were young they decided to fly as high as they could go, toward the Suryamandala, the circle of the sun itself.

Jatayu was the younger and the faster and he went too high. The heat took hold of his wings and he began to burn.

And Sampati, who was above him, turned and came down over his brother and spread his own wings across him to take the sun instead.

Jatayu came out of it whole. Sampati's wings burned away entirely, and he fell, into the Vindhyas, where he lay, unable to fly, for what the epic counts in ages.