The Curse

Chapter 1: Curiosity Kills

It began as an annoyance, nothing more than a nagging tickle at the back of my mind. I was sitting at my desk corner, the soft glow of the lamp casting shadows across the piles of books and papers that surrounded me. The evening had draped my small, cluttered study in a cloak of quiet, save for the gentle tapping of the rain against the window pane. I should have been immersed in my studying, but this... itch... it demanded my attention with an insistence I found unsettling.

At first, I tried to ignore it, burying myself deeper into the chemical equations sprawled before me. Yet, the sensation grew, growing into the physical to stir something within me I couldn't quite name. It was as though the very fabric of my being was being pulled, thread by thread, towards a truth I had yet to uncover.

I stood up, pacing the room in an attempt to rid myself of the feeling. The floorboards creaked underfoot, a familiar sound in my otherwise silent home. It was then, in a moment of frustration, that I caught my reflection in the window. The person staring back at me, with furrowed brow, eyes alight with a curious blend of fear and fascination, hair a matted mess shaped into what was once a nice neat bun, was both foreign and intimately known.

"This is ridiculous," I muttered to myself, turning away from the window and the reflection of a woman seemingly on the brink of unraveling. Yet, as I spoke, the air in the room shifted, charged with an energy that whispered of ancient magic and secrets long buried. The itch was no longer just an itch; it was a call, a summons that beckoned me to delve deeper into the unknown.

I approached the bookshelf, my fingers brushing against the spines of books filled with everything from physics to computer engineering for dummies until they paused on a volume that seemed to hum to me. The book was old, its cover leather-bound and embossed with symbols that danced before my eyes, compelling in their complexity.

As I opened the book, the pages fluttered as if caught in a breeze, stopping on a passage that seemed to glow faintly in the dim light. The words, written in an elegant script, spoke of a curse, one that was nearly impossible to break, it read,

'Those who eyes look upon the text,

Consuming the words of thee,

Forever paralyzed,

sentenced to slowly sink,

into a never ending paradox,

dream like no one has before,

escape not,

forever floating,

I welcome thee,

To the curse of me.'

The realization hit me with the force of a thunderclap. I had been drawn to someone's April fools joke. I laugh to myself as I disregard the book. Just as I had thought I had actually begun to lose it. Here I am sitting and studying for eight hours straight and towards the end I have convinced myself I cursed myself by reading some idiots writing in pen in some old book in the library. This tells me I should probably call it a night.

And so, with the rain as my solemn witness, I stepped into the night, walking back to my car to drive home to my apartment, although laughable, the itch still in the back of my mind.