The water rises when human blood enters it — and gives back what it takes. In both, a serpentine water-power is roused specifically by the pollution of its waters with blood and the dead; it surges over its banks, engulfs the transgressors' bodies, and then returns them (Scamander casts the corpses out onto land and hides the living unharmed; Yurlunggur vomits the swallowed sisters back whole). The flood is examination and expulsion, not appetite: neither keeps a single body.
Scamander protests 'My fair waters are now filled with corpses... I am choked with dead,' then rises in flood against Achilles: 'These he cast out on to the land, bellowing like a bull the while, but the living he saved alive, hiding them in his mighty eddies' — and after Hephaestus's fire, subsides into his channel.
The elder sister's blood runs into the waterhole where Yurlunggur, the rainbow serpent, lies; the serpent rises with a flood, swallows the sisters and their children — and afterward regurgitates them, the swallowing-and-return becoming the charter of ceremony.
Iliad XXI passage verified verbatim in Butler's translation; the Yurlunggur swallow-regurgitate sequence is documented in Warner's 1937 ethnography (the standard primary record) and summarized with the same sequence in current references.
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
The first age ends not with a death but with a withdrawal, and the withdrawal leaves the same two marks: (1) the world is visibly poorer · Hesiod's hidden 'means of life,' the Euahlayi's vanished flowers and honey; and (2) the withdrawn presence still watches from concealment · golden-age spirits 'clothed in mist' keeping watch, Byamee's three branded trees standing as an untouchable claim on the emptied earth.
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.
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.
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.