Welcome, friend.
I have a few paragraphs for you to read aloud.
Warning:
They’re dangerous paragraphs.
But you like challenges, don’t you? Imagine the satisfaction of being successful! Don’t even think about the risk of death.
Actually, you’re going to die anyway.
In ninety-one days.
Unless you successfully read aloud the following paragraphs without breaking one simple rule:
You cannot say: “I die”
The preamble was just to ensure you read far enough for the curse to take effect.
(You’re well past that point now.)
(wink)
Good luck!
Hereafter follow the accursed paragraphs:
/
Once upon a time, in a hole in the ground, there lived a gnome. He lived with his mother, who made garments. One day, the gnome saw that his poor mother was running behind on her order of tunics for the local prince. She had sewn the garments but not yet coloured them.
“How about I dye them?” the gnome asked his mother, who was happy for the help, and watched her son apply dyes all afternoon.
On another day, the gnome was walking the royal road alone when he happened upon a broken-down carriage. Inside sat a wizard. “Are you hungry?” the wizard asked. The gnome thought this a peculiar question, and answered that although he was getting hungry, he had brought food with him on his walk and planned to eat it later by himself. The wizard asked, “Why dine alone?” and as he said this, he cast a spell upon the gnome, who blacked out.
When the gnome awoke, he was back in his bed in his hole in the ground, and everything seemed as if it’d been a dream, yet when he looked in the mirror, the gnome noticed that he seemed as if he were high: dilated pupils, with red veins spidered across the dull whites of his eyes.
Perhaps he’d never met the wizard.
Perhaps…
But, I digress.
The effect wore off, and the gnome was fine.
He delivered the dyed tunics to the prince, who paid him, and offered him a job, to supply diamonds to the local jeweller, whose daughter was a shy diabetic with whom the prince had fallen in love. Although the gnome didn’t know it, the prince would often sit with quill in hand and cry—diaries filled, page after page, with ink and lovelorn tears.
But when the gnome had left the prince’s castle, the diamonds weighed heavily, greedily.
“What if I don’t deliver the diamonds at all?” thought the gnome.
And so he ran!
Alas, little did he know that the prince employed the wizard, and the wizard had a view into the gnome’s spellbound mind, and after he’d been caught, the wizard asked the gnome why he had decided to steal the diamonds.
The gnome could only stutter in reply (“I… I’d—I…”), for the wizard had tied his tongue into a swollen knot.
What do you think:
Sly?
Diabolical?
P.S. I’m sure you gave it a good try. Die soon!
/
The End