No fire myth is about strength. Fire crosses the forbidden gap hidden inside something humble: a hollow fennel stalk in Greece, a woven bowl on a water spider’s back in Cherokee country, a smith’s bellows in Mali. The thieves are branded for it, black feathers, a burned-short bill, an eagle at the liver every night. And on two unconnected coasts of the Pacific the story closes the same way: fire deliberately deposited inside named trees and stones, where people still go to get it back. The smuggling is the constant. So is the price.
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 fire-theft story ends, in both traditions, with fire deliberately deposited INSIDE named species of wood (and stone), where it still waits · the myth is a filing system: it records which materials hold latent fire, and the fire-drill or strike-a-light is the act of withdrawing the deposit.
The fire raid permanently brands the body of the animal who dared it: black feathers, red eyes, a burned-short bill.
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.
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, water is fire's declared enemy and a hollow tree is fire's ark: fire survives the water-siege only because a tree holds it.
Where would you look next? Pin what strikes you and build your case on the board.