Â鶹Éç

Far, far away, in the very midst of the jungle of Amazon in South America, amidst the ruins of the Inca civilization there rocked a rocking chair. It was an old and quite unsafe looking rocking chair, and yet it rocked on without a creak. An equally ancient cauldron beside it was emitting a steady stream of blue stars. And on further observation, with all the senses, one could detect the faint stirrings of a snore that seemed to be coming from the rocking-chair. It was a peaceful scene.
Suddenly, the cauldron erupted in a loud explosion of red flame, which sent squirrels scurrying for cover and snakes slithering under rocks. All at once the jungle erupted in a cacophony of alarm calls of the humongous variety of organisms that thrived there. Not to mention the inaudible warnings of the autotrophic type that, you would never believe it, have a more complex society than human beings. If a human being could hear the zillions of plant voices skimming through the air per second, the poor thing would surely lose its brain from overwork. But we can get to that later if we want to get to that at all. Right now we are interested in the cauldron that had shown this slight change in activity after over a hundred years. A man jumped out of the chair. Or rather, I should say, a shadow, for the man was mostly transparent and his feet barely touched the ground. He was old, old and older still. His beard had long fallen off due to the sheer tiredness of its chin muscles. His eyes were so sunken into their sockets that you could barely detect their mischievous - allow me to use this word for I will soon justify it - their mischievous glimmer. His see-through skin had something of the appearance of an intensely dried apple except, of course; it was not all that opaque. This shadow-of-a-man had not stirred from his resting place for eons. So, naturally, he stumbled. He caught himself just in time with the aid of the cauldron's edge and then peered into it, totally nonchalant of the angry red inferno that raged inside it. He seemed to have perceived something extremely sad for he sighed and his wrinkles deepened.
"Ah, that girl, ah... she is going to be my undoing. She was, I must admit, my first and most fatal mistake... ah, ah..." he closed his eyes for a minute and leaned onto the cauldron, his lips moving constantly, muttering in an incomprehensible lexis. And then, slowly, he started to fade away. It was a very slow process and was made almost undetectable by the sheer transparency of his body - one could not perceive whether a part had disappeared or whether one was only seeing through it. But at last, the mutterings stopped. His mouth disappeared. The fire in the cauldron disappeared. There was nothing left but the rocking chair, still at its work from all the momentum it had gained over the years. The snakes slowly slithered out from under the rocks and resumed their search for the squirrels.