Mankind sits in the cold until someone steals the fire down from the sky and hides it where it can travel. In Apollodorus's Library — a Greek mythography of the 1st or 2nd century CE — "Prometheus moulded men out of water and" earth, and then, unknown to Zeus, gave them fire "which" "he had hidden in a stalk of fennel": the dry-pithed reed that carries a coal for miles without going out. The theft is answered with a theft of the body. Zeus had Prometheus nailed to Mount Caucasus, where each day an eagle "devoured the lobes of his liver", which grew again by night — "the penalty that Prometheus" "paid for the theft of fire" until Hercules released him.

The Kalevala (Finnish oral song, compiled 1835–1849) tells the loss from the other side, as a robbery mankind suffers rather than commits. The witch Louhi "stole the fire from Northland", along with sun and moon, until "Darkness ruled in Kalevala" and the cold sat in every cabin. Then the sky-god answers not by stealing back but by striking anew: "Lightning Ukko struck in darkness / From the edges of his fire-sword", and "When a little fire had kindled" he cradled the fresh spark in a box of gold and silver for a maiden to rock into a second sun. Where the Greek fire is smuggled out of heaven in a hollow reed, the Finnish fire is simply re-forged from lightning when the old flame is lost.

Both songs know that fire does not stay given. It has to be carried in something — a fennel-stalk, a silver box — and paid for with a liver or a stolen sun. The Greek and Finnish witnesses are both wired to served text; the wider company of fire-theft tellings — Hindu, Hawaiian, and Tongan among them — waits beyond, still unwired. Is fire in these stories a gift, or only a loan the sky keeps trying to recall?