The motif is a birth with no womb behind it: life struck from spilled blood. The witness wired to this address is Apollodorus’s The Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), which tells how Earth, grieved for the children Sky had cast into Tartarus, arms her son Cronus with "an adamantine sickle". All the Titans but Ocean set upon their father; Cronus unmans Sky and "threw them into the sea", and from "the drops of the flowing blood" the Furies are born — "Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera", the avengers rising out of the very wound.

Beneath the narrative the served pages carry Frazer’s note on where, exactly, the blood fell. Apollodorus lets the severed parts drop into the sea and the avengers rise from the flowing blood; but the note observes that here Apollodorus "follows Hesiod", for whom the Furies sprang not from what was thrown into the water but from "the drops of his blood which fell on Earth" and quickened her. Two tellings of one mutilation, apart only in whether sea or soil received the blood — and in both, the gash is a womb.

The record files a Philippine witness too, among the Tinguian under Cole, but only this Greek text is wired to served pages today; the Tinguian birth-from-blood waits unread. This address carries the number given it by Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index keeps such kin together across hemispheres our shelf has only half-opened. When the first avengers are born from a father’s blood, is the tale describing vengeance, or giving it a lineage so that it might seem to have always been owed?