Now Samuel's mother and dad both worked at the Universities bone collection and forensics
department,and Samuel himself was planning to enter the University's Forensic Anthropology
as his course study major when he returned in 2 months.
He knew his mom loved getting photos on delightfully grisly ancient
monuments about human and other animal bones and skeletons.
So the next morning the Sun arose,and no one in the World being the
wiser about a shockwave that had passed through and bounced about on the surface of the Earth
during the night,
Samuel got up extra early that morning and went to the
tia-seraph bas relief monument stone that sat perched
on the plinth of a mid 19th century fountain.
Samuel didn't know anything about Mesopotamian plains monsters,
but he knew a image of a
gryphon-dragon-jackal like creature vomiting out the headless and limbless skeletonized torso
of a human out of its snouty maw was just what the doctor would order
for his mother.
The 19th century plate attached to the fountain explained that way back when
passing travellors would occasionally come apon the headless and limbless skeletal torsos
of the victims of some murderous plains bands making sure no one could identify their
victims and that their victims couldn't get up in the afterlife
and haunt their murderors.
The human imagination had supplied the answer.
There was a winged plains monster called the tia-seraph which
flew about coughing up skeletal torsos
and depending on the tale teller either it was the once
human tia-seraph violently expelling its humanity from itself
or just what
tia-seraphs did in their
unnatural daily nightly flights.
The inscription explained that this particular
bas relief showed human in the process of transforming into
a tia[seraph .
So Samuel took the picture,noticed a fragment of the monument stone,the part showing a human toe with a tia-seraph's talon pushing
out of it,
had broken loose and lay precariously near the edge of the plinth,ready to drop in the fountain below it