So… yeah. On that night, I was transported into a world humans know no way into and only one way out of. Some kind of plane between fiction and reality. The source of all duenkhy. It has no known geographical location, but it’s real. Many humans call it Duen.
The story goes, a human can only get in if they’re accompanied by a duenkhy who has welcomed them there. And a human can only stay for so long before Duen rejects them as an outsider and sends them back to be amongst humans, always without the memories of the time they spent in that mysterious place.
The exact reason why is unknown. Or forgotten. But the belief is that something like magic protects the place. There are a lot of old wives’ tales surrounding the whole thing.
Of course, even if you happen to meet a duenkhy who’s willing to invite you, it’s not that common for anyone to willingly want to throw away an unknowable amount of their life to a world they’ll leave without any memories of.
It’d be like choosing to enter a coma. You’ll be dead to the human world the entire time you’re gone, and you won’t bring anything back.
But I guess that doesn’t sound so bad to me. I badly needed a change of pace. I’m finally somewhere new where nobody knows me—I can start with a clean slate. No ghosts of the past to haunt me here, no strings attached. It’s terrifying, but it’s also the most immense relief I can imagine. I can finally choose who I want to be, make the impressions I want to make.
Even if it’s all just temporary… I want things to be different this time.
The Duenkhy 