Chapter 1: The Mysterious Stranger

Lightning flashed from the gray clouds. It was raining cats and dogs and the dirty road the small town of Vinci was situated on, quickly turned into a swamp. Wind came up and shook shrubs and trees.

"Why don’t you close the shutters, Leonardo?"

"Because I want to watch."

"But it will rain into the room, if it gets worse!"

"Come to the window and look out, Carlo."

"I don’t know ..."

"If we're lucky, we will see how a tree is cut. Just like last summer, do you remember?"

Ten-year-old Carlo remembered very well.

His friend Leonardo, of the same age, was sitting at the open window and looking outside with fascination.

Actually, he had been occupied with trying to dissect a dead bird, which he had found in the woods yesterday. But the storm was more interesting than looking inside a bird. Leonardo had a good view of the surroundings from the room in which he lived in his grandfather’s house. It was upstairs and when sitting on the window-sill he could overlook the village to the nearby hills. In the last year a storm occurred which was extremely worse. At that time, Carlo was visiting his friend Leonardo, too, when suddenly it began to rain and to storm heavily. They had been sitting at the window and looking how the lightning was attracted by an ancient tree on one of the hills outside the village. Since then, the tree was split and Leonardo had been captured by a fascination for lightning and thunderstorms that thrilled him again and again whenever it began to rumble in the sky.

Carlo remembered well how Leonardo had wanted to examine the splitted tree the day after the storm. The boys had discovered traces of fire, but that was about all they had found.

Leonardo’s words of that time still sounded in Carlo’s ears."The flash has a much greater force than a man with an ax – just imagine how long a person would have to use an ax to split a tree! It must be a giant, otherwise he could never split the tree like this: from top to bottom! Therefore, I think that the flash has the power of a giant!"

Carlo sighed and joined Leonardo at the window. Meanwhile, he got used to the fact that his friend was full of crazy ideas and always wanted to know all about everything. Even if Carlo thought that sometimes, he didn’t need to know anything. What was the sense, for example, of learning everything about the inside of a dead bird?

The fresh air that blew in now made Carlo breathe easier. In Leonardo’s room, it always smelled rather sharp, because he liked to dissect dead animals in order to find out how they were structured inside.

Mostly, however, he forgot to remove the leftovers, so that always some putrid odor of decay hung in the air.

"What could you achieve if you had the power of li