The sky power answers the fire-theft not with death but with a permanent alteration of the thief's body — and in both cases the wound is generative rather than terminal: the liver regrows nightly forever; the shattered limbs become the joints every human needs to work, kneel, and forge. The punishment is the gift's price paid in flesh, and the flesh keeps the receipt.
Zeus 'bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew as much again everyway' — the thief's punishment is written into his body and renews itself perpetually.
The ancestral smith steals a piece of the sun from the Nommo's celestial smithy in his bellows; the Nommo's thunderbolt sends him sliding down the rainbow, and the collision with the earth 'broke the ancestor's flexible limbs into human joints' — the punishment becomes the anatomy of all mankind.
Hesiod verified verbatim (PG #348). Dogon detail attested in Griaule's Ogotemmêli account (the smith's descent with the granary) as summarized in van Beek's Current Anthropology 1991 review ('Its collision with the earth broke the ancestor's flexible limbs into human joints'); the theft-in-the-bellows and rainbow descent independently confirmed in secondary retellings crediting Griaule. Griaule is under copyright — paraphrase only in the archive layer.
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
Fire is never taken by force; it crosses the forbidden gap concealed in a tiny carried container · a hollow stalk, a woven thimble-bowl · after strength has failed.
Both traditions name a single non-human intermediary who fetches fire DOWN from heaven for mortals, and both hide the fire inside a plant in transit: latent in the araṇi wood until rubbed out; smoldering in the fennel pith until delivered.
In both traditions repopulation after the flood is not biological but liturgical: the survivor's post-landing sacrifice is the literal manufacturing step for the next humanity.
The water rises when human blood enters it · and gives back what it takes.