Goda's Slave (Lesbian, Dystopia, LGBT Fantasy)

Chapter 34: The Spiral Staircase

The truck retreated through the trees. They had already broken through the night before, so the trail was smoother on the way back, and Kanna found that she was less surprised whenever a flickering branch scraped the side of her arm. She could see the trees ahead of time in the growing light, and they seemed more familiar now, like they were offering a friendly tap to see her off.

When the truck reached the main road, the sky was yellow-red like the core of the Samma Flower, and it was too bright out in the open, so Kanna bent down and rested her face in Goda's lap to avoid the glare. She closed her eyes; she felt the wind coming down around them like a gushing stream, and it felt sharp against her skin, and it felt painful, but the way it flowed seemed to insulate them both from the rest of the world.

Kanna tried to forget where they were going. She took a deep breath of the giant's scent, which she still found both comforting and disturbing. It always stoked a little bit of fear in her. She could swear she had known its flavor all her life.

"How many months have we been traveling together?" Kanna asked over the rumble of the engine.

"About a week."

"No. No, that's...." Kanna racked her brain to try to remember how long it had actually been, because the days had smudged together in her mind—some parts colorful, and some parts gray, but all smeared from the same stroke of a brush, so it was hard to tell when one day ended and another began.

But she knew that it had to have been much longer than a week, even though some of the days felt like she had lived them more than once.

She decided that Goda was lying.

"When people are able to swallow large amounts of Flower and survive it," Goda said, as if she were responding to something that Kanna hadn't said aloud, "they'll often experience time differently. They won't be able to tell how many hours or minutes have gone by. Some of them will wander around in the streets like time doesn't exist to them at all—so in a sense, they temporarily live closer to the truth."

"The truth?"

"Yes, you're lying to yourself. There is no earlier or later. It's always now. You yourself told me this in the wilderness."

Kanna huffed. "I have memories that span much further back than right this second. I made them in the past. I'm remembering them now."

"You made those memories now. You made them by thinking them. Nothing happened before this. You're making it up. There's no way to remember something or even look at something outside of yourself without also making it up. It's an act of creation. It's an act of sex that you're always having with reality, but then you convince yourself that you're pure and celibate like a priestess, or that you're just a powerless bystander who is only watching."

The wind rushed past Kanna's ears and muffled the words, but she still heard them. Finally, she opened her eyes. She stared hard at Goda's hand on the speed lever. She found that she didn't know what to say because there was nothing she could really point to that either proved or disproved any of Goda's nonsense. It was like the whole thing was designed to bypass her logic. She turned her head up to look at the giant. "What, so you're trying to tell me this is all just my imagination?"

"Yes. You have a poor imagination, though," Goda replied, looking down at Kanna with a teasing smirk, her face framed by the golden sky. "You'll want to work on that after I leave you. God thinks you're bad at sex."

Kanna pressed her hand to Goda's thigh and dug her fingers into the warmth of the fabric and the skin underneath. She didn't know how to even begin to respond to such a bizarre insult. Instead, she turned her gaze towards the windshield, which showed her the colossal human structures that they were quickly approaching.