The thunder rocked the earth like the footsteps of an approaching giant. The lightning split trees and their falling gave a shrill sense of the spread of the giant's feet with each incautious step. Raikin knew the forces of nature were merely conspiring to paint false pictures in his head, but on Hitara, one could never be entirely sure. 

The rain beat down on the roof of a hovel that no one in their right mind would have retreated into in such weather. It would surely provide all the protection of a paper house in a firestorm. But its appearances were designed to be deceiving. Almadra, Raikin's caretaker, did not want anyone drawn to the place for any reason. Like an Egyptian tomb booby-trapped to keep out looters, the mighty house of Pilmadrin could repel the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And still her creaking floorboards and overhead timbers would live on to play ever-more off-key tunes as they flexed and folded before the stormiest of weather.  

Raikin drew endless joy from testing the house's relentless creativity for expressing its ill-temper against all intruders. He'd don some costume, and get into character, thinking the thoughts of an interloper, pretending to be an assassin, or a common thief trying to break into Pilmadrin, and unleash the worst of the house upon himself. Any without Raikin's gift for navigating booby-trapped interiors would have died long ago. Strange the things he drew warmth and comfort from, especially on nights like this where nature would have happily done him in without the meddlesome Pilmadrin wizardry to keep him from harm.  

The pelting rain beaded against Pilmadrin's windows and, in so doing, formed faces staring in at him. Raikin's unbridled curiosity overcame his spiking fear. He literally ran from face to face to pass his hands over them, caressing their every feature. To him, they were more beautiful than haunting, though the eeriness of the countenances couldn't be denied.  

Still, there were such emotional tonal variations in every face, each visage larger than his five foot six frame. They were extensive enough that he wouldn't miss any of the subtle nuances in their faces. He screamed in anguish as they dissolved, washed away by the changing patterns of wind and rain. His mourning for their loss was interrupted only by the advent of new faces taking shape.  

He was most curious as to their underpinnings. 

Many of the spirits of Hitara were long-dead wizards and other kinds of magical folk; many more, noble warriors and brave knights and, most common of all, legions of darkened souls from the underworld. They had a habit of showing up when things got interesting, and might catch a glimpse of a living being passing over to the other side. Though he knew they sometimes appeared for other reasons, as well-such as at the major turning points in the lives of historically significant people. Hm, I should be so unlucky, or so lucky, as the case may be.  

Tonight, the foul weather alone might provide such opportunity for these spirits to arise from their slumber. More often, overheated battles provided spectator sport for these dear departed spirits that filled the battlefields like spectators in Roman coliseums of old.  

Raikin had been extensively schooled in the history of Earth-the planet mankind had migrated from so many hundreds of years ago, on a forced exodus, thanks to a prematurely exploding sun. The lore and culture from that time remained of infinite value to a people who were thrown to the stars by fate. That indoctrination, taken with his relatively short life on Hitara of fourteen years, meant he understood things often in the context of Earth-allusions rather than real life experiences here on Hitara, far less other inhabited worlds he had not yet had the chance to visit. 

The leaking rafters overhead, quietly saturating the rough-hewn woods of the floorboards beneath his feet, were causing the weathered wood to swell, and now new faces were arising. They did not take kindly to his running willy-nilly over them, having not yet taken notice of their presence, still entranced by the rain-drawn faces in the windows.  

"Achew!" one of the faces in the floorboards sneezed, blowing Raikin off his feet and throwing him back against their primitively hewn dining room table and chairs.  

Raikin landed with such force that he splintered one of the chairs. The enchanted sepal wood did not take kindly to the affront. The wooden fragments quickly reassembled themselves into a Hades-hound, snapping at Raikin - more mouth and teeth than torso and legs. It was convincing enough, though tracing only the thinnest of outlines in physical form. 

"Okay! Okay! Don't get mad at me! I didn't go flying into you on my own recognizance. Why don't you go take his head off!"  

The hound followed Raikin's finger to the face the size of a throw rug on the floor preparing to sneeze yet again, and barreled after it. Its claws carved slivers out of the wooden floorboards and, in so doing, invoked another face to materialize on the floor.  

The sneezer retreated strategically back into the floor, disappearing from sight. The hound, only partly assuaged, went back to being a chair, finding its spot at the table. It loudly creaked back into shape with a combination of sounds meant to convey its resounding ill-temper hadn't gone away so much as subsided briefly.  

Raikin was reasonably certain from the faces in the floorboards that they were visiting ghouls, some of them dignitaries perhaps, claiming a front row seat by occasion of their VIP status. Only they would have enough power to seep through the caretaker's protective spells.  

But the ones on the windows might have a more sinister reason for being than he had initially imagined. Could they have been conjured by some wizard's spell to give him eyes on Raikin? And if so, was the storm part of the wizard's assault on him, or perhaps on Almadra?  

Almadra wasn't just his caretaker, after all. She was a sorceress of the highest order, and had no shortage of enemies in this land where every wizard was bucking for title of top dog. And the only way to earn that moniker was to take out the greatest of them all.  

Or were the faces conjured by the storm of different origins entirely? Hitara had no shortage of enchanted life forms left over from aborted spells by apprentice wizards who didn't know how to undo the hideous acts of creation.  

As part of this menagerie of strange creatures, there were many that were natural phenomena. These faces, for instance, could be water monsters that never entirely vaporized in Hitara's moist perpetually humid tropical atmosphere, though perhaps "monsters" was a bit unfair. Maybe they were slime molds once but, in the mind-field of so much magic, had evolved. Maybe they were strange chemical brews that, cooked up in the caldrons of volcanic stews, had become floating pools of peptides, amino acids and other precursors of life that, finding their way into some unschooled wizard's spell, now found themselves with more sentience than they knew what to do with.  

Any of these explanations would account for the sad and pained faces, the strange meditative countenances on some. What else did they have to do but sit around and ponder the fate of all living things, theirs included? They couldn't do much but ride out the winds and storms, using them to transport them across Hitara, where they got a poor man's tour of the world. In between storms, they likely took perpetual notice of the goings on of their patch of forest, acting as historians and living memories for those patches of creation.  

Raikin had meant to investigate these creatures more, if only to find out what could be done about their sorry fates. But alas, surviving the harsh world of Hitara had kept him too busy for that kind of fieldwork. That, and the wizardress Almadra set his itinerary, keeping his day filled with activities she deemed in his best interest for his rapid ascension to - of all things - philosopher king of a sprawling trans-galactic empire of sentient lifeforms some referred to simply as The Menagerie. 

That was his birthright, or so he was told. It would be left to him to guide life's explosive expansion throughout the heavens. He alone contained enough consciousness to wrangle this groundswell of life-created by pioneering bioengineers like Frakas, Nefaru, and so many others-before it turned vicious, destroying everything in its path, or before it turned on itself.  

There wasn't a second to lose as far as Almadra was concerned, for the challenges facing him out there would be well beyond what confronted him on Hitara. This was just a place for him to learn the arts of magic and await the day when men would come to take him away to save the universe from itself.  

Lovely, he thought. He didn't believe any of it. Just some children's story to keep his hopes up that there might be some point to surviving one day to the next on Hitara, which was challenging enough. Who would want to leave this hellhole for a worse one?  

To save all life, really? If Hitara was any guide, "all life" was doing quite well on its own. He could stand to learn a few more lessons from life itself, all right - like how to stay alive. He couldn't imagine a day when those tables would be turned. 

Raikin noticed the water dripping onto the front door's hinges. He traced the suspicious droplets to a face on the ceiling arising from perspiration, condensing out of the high humidity and water-saturated overhead beams. The face's tears were splashing the door.  

The hinges were smoldering, the acid content in the water evidently designed to dissolve Pilmadrin's formidable entrance. The smoke rising from the rapidly oxidizing metal made jeering faces at him, laughing condescendingly. 

Seconds later, the door that a charging bull-elephant couldn't unhinge suddenly exploded open. And in the doorway materialized something Raikin guessed was not going to be the most congenial of house guests.