Once, a man wandered a labyrinth which it pleased a tyrannical wizard to have constructed. Its many ways and baffling secrets, hidden doors and bewildering mist among them, prevented him from making progress, he thought, until he came to a location he never before had reached.
Two great doors, taller than giants and wider than wagons, were on the far end, and next to each was a sentinel in the shape of a man but steel in its construction, and the weapons they held were prodigious. When he approached, they spoke in this way.
"Traveler, your peril is great, for you must pass through one door and only one."
"But traveler, you may ask each of us a single question, and by that you may be guided, if you are wise."
"Be warned, traveler, that one of us will speak the truth, and as for the other, he, too, will speak the truth."
"Oh." The wanderer considered. "Then my question is, which door should I take?"
The left sentinel spoke. "I don't know."
The right sentinel spoke. "I have no idea."
The man considered what he had learned. "This is a rhetorical question, but this isn't much of a puzzle, is it?"
"Our master does not like puzzles."
"He always gets impatient and looks up the answer."
That was how the wanderer navigated the mystery of the two sentinels. How he escaped the labyrinth, however, is a different story.
"Did he take one of the weapons and smash his way out because the wizard forgot to order his guards not to let him do that?"
Shut up. Yes. Who said that? Shut up.
Finis
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