PART ONE: THE VOICE FROM BELOW

1

When Doo-Tana was a little girl, her best friend was the shadow who lived on the mountain. Pebusa was his name, and he was supposed to be the great god Glasomil's evil brother, only Pebusa hadn't seemed so evil to her—he seemed misunderstood, and lonely.

Like herself.

But why was she thinking of that? She was supposed to be working.

She lifted the bone-axe over her head and brought it down into the stone before her, chipping off a fifty-pound portion. She hopped back to avoid having her toes crushed. Doo-Tana gave the tool in her hands a reproachful look, wondering if a stone-axe would have been more precise and smashed off a smaller chunk. Now she'd have to break up this big piece to get the little pieces she'd wanted in the first place. She got to work on that mindlessness, couldn't help getting lost in her thoughts while she did so.

Her shadowy friend, Pebusa... He disappeared one night, the same night some people had died in her village. She'd told him the names of the people she thought had deserved to die, not really understanding death quite like she did now, and he'd done it. Doo-Tana felt as though she'd lost the bestest friend she'd ever had. But a part of her felt—though she couldn't quite explain it; it was just a feeling—that Pebusa had never really left Peburia; he was just different now, somehow. When she'd walk to the top of Mount Pebusa, hoping to see him there, she'd swear she felt him—invisible, yes, but still there nonetheless. And every time she'd see her own shadow extending beside when walking or running, she imagined he was in it, travelling alongside her wherever she went.

As Doo-Tana grew older, she'd make the pilgrimages up the mountain less and less, and she'd imagine Pebusa's shadowy form woven within her own more infrequently. But she never truly forgot, no. How could she? A constant reminder was the fact that nobody believed her when she'd tell them she had spoken to Pebusa, the great god of shadow. She was just a stupid little girl, and why would she want to speak to him, anyway, when she could instead lie about talking to the great god of light, Glasomil? They said it was more outrageous than tits on a bull—which didn't make much sense to her, as everyone knew about the titted bulls of Brmea.

But those were adults for you.

Oh no. She was an adult now, too, wasn't she? Twenty years old. Funny how quickly time passes when you age, she thought to herself. I only hope I don't become so cynical.

Coming out of her reverie, Doo-Tana sighed and wiped the sweat off her brow. Her gaze went to the mountaintop. Mount Pebusa. The name never changed, even after its namesake vanished.

She whistled for Slimy. The stegosaurus lumbered over, grunting and snorting, stopping here and there to nibble on some grass and flowers, and strip leaves from small trees. She whistled again and he grunted in response, shook his head, tore a branch off a tree, munched it down, then spread his back legs and lifted his spiked tail. He wiggled, wheezed, took a dump. With that finished, Slimy jogged over to her, awaiting his burden.

Doo-Tana dropped the stones into four dinosaur-leather cloths, then tied each into closed sacks, using the same cord to string together two of the sacks. She strung together the other two. She lugged them over to Slimy and placed each length of cord across the dinosaur's body, in between the rows of his kite-shaped plates, so he had two sacks hanging in balance on each side of his body. Then she walked with him to the drop-off site, which was basically a large pile of sacks, some of them split open.

The two repeated this routine a few more times, as did the other workers. It was hard work, but necessary. If the villages didn't get their stone, the people wouldn't be able to have fancy gadgets like stoneputers, and they'd have to rely on outdated tech. Doo-Tana swore she'd never regress back to a shitty boneputer. Those had been slow even when she was a kid.

The foreman yelled that the day was over, and Doo-Tana saw the Sun was going down across the vast, brown, peanut-butter sea, painting the sky all kinds of pretty pinks and purples. She stood watching it awhile, wondering if she'd ever find a man who liked to watch sunsets, too. It was sad—she'd never been with a man before, and she was twenty. Ancient. She didn't think she was ugly, either, but men didn't seem to pay much attention to her. And if they did, they would offer her money.

Slimy grunted behind her, his nostrils sniffing away at her ass.

"Hey!" she shouted, turning and waving her hands in his direction, trying to shoo him off.

He gave her an annoyed look and stalked off, no doubt in search of his girlfriend stegosaurus.

Sighing once again, Doo-Tana walked along the sandy coast, taking the long way home. She liked the scenic route, liked the view of the westering Sun as its light passed through the leaves, how it seemed to make the forest come alive and glow.

And there she was.

Lost in thoughts, beauty and memories, she hadn't realized it until she'd stumbled on it: This was the hallowed ground where Pebusa had apparently vanished. It was considered sacred among her people due to the cracked grey earth, which occupied a two-and-a-half-foot-wide, eight-foot-long plot. The surrounding jungle was green, vibrant. But here... It felt like death was in the air. No insects would buzz within that space.

Doo-Tana couldn't help but step closer. She felt drawn to the site. She thought she heard drums beating in her skull, thumping, pounding out a rattling rhythm to shake the dust off the soul.

Standing before the marker. Her people told stories about the shadow god himself being down there, that it was a grave for the god, dug by Glasomil himself.

An icy whisper: "Doo... Tana..."

Her eyes widened and she sprinted away to her home in the nearby village of Doo. She told herself she'd never set foot near the grave again.

2

The next morning brought on a mixture of relief and dread. Relief, because it was Doo-Tana's day off. Dread, because she remembered the strange voice that spoke her name the previous evening.

And she'd dreamed about it, too. An awful dream where a reanimated body emerged from the grave and chased her, repeating her name again and again, and there was nothing she could do to get away because she moved like she was in a pool of peanut butter. Eventually the monster caught her. Just as it went to sink its teeth into her arm, she'd woken up drenched with sweat. She'd been too fearful and anxious to fall back to sleep.

After getting up and performing menial chores to try and occupy her mind, Doo-Tana mentally kept going back to the dream, the grave and its voice. She couldn't fight her curiosity. Was Pebusa really down there? Was it maybe some kind of "channelling" zone, or something, and though he was free to roam outside of it, it was only there, where he'd apparently been buried, that he had the freedom to speak?

Or was it some other, hitherto-unknown phenomenon? Maybe a prank. Maybe some of the kids in town thought it would be fun to mess with her mind.

One thing's for certain, Doo-Tana realized as she finished hanging the wet loincloths so the bigger dinos could come and breathe-dry them, I have to go back there. Snoop around. Maybe the voice will speak to me again. Or maybe I can get to the bottom of what exactly that voice is.

Having an idea, she went into her hut and sat at the stoneputer, turned it on with a good kick. She waited for the rocks inside to finish colliding. When they settled, the glass screen flickered with images. It was amazing to think of how much more these machines could do than their—to coin a phrase—dinosaur ancestors, the boneputers. Those damn things just rumbled and click-clacked.

Doo-Tana brought up the Innernet, which was a kind of trap for information. She didn't know how it worked, but you could search things and the planet would provide you with whatever knowledge it had on the subject.

She typed in: VOICE OF THE DEAD

The rocks rattled around and the page loaded.

According to an ancient spiritual sect, a person could sometimes live on in spirit if they performed the appropriate rituals, which tended to involve sacrifice and blood. It wasn't uncommon for the spirit to commune with still-living loved ones.

Her heart leapt. Images flashed before her eyes. She remembered when she was a kid, and the story Mr. Pebusa—that's what she'd called him when they'd talk—had told her. In his version, though Pebusa deeply loved his brother, Glasomil was a flawed being, and so the god of light's creations were also flawed, prone to committing foul deeds. So Pebusa had set out to fashion his own creation, one that would be intensely good and noble, to be pitted against Glasomil's creatures and hopefully prevail, bringing about a just world. When she'd left him that night, after he'd finished telling his story and after those bad people had died, Pebusa had vanished.

Maybe he'd succeeded in his ritual.

And if so, she guessed he considered her a loved one, if the Innernet was correct.

Doo-Tana shut down the stoneputer and left the hut. She set out for the grave.

3

She stood at the grave, feeling a chill in the air, feeling the crackle of some kind of energy. "Hello? Is anyone there? Pebusa?"

A rustling from the bushes.

Doo-Tana grabbed a pointy rock, just in case. She didn't want to use it, but she'd beaten off plenty of drunken men who'd assumed she was a prostitute and wouldn't take "no" for an answer. So she would whack them upside the head and give them a "hell no, and if you don't get lost quickly, mister, I won't hesitate to spill the contents of your cranium across this here primitive landscape." That generally got the message across.

"Hello!" she said again, seeing the bushes shaking. She crept closer.

Suddenly a man jumped out, with frizzy black hair and what looked to be a cord stuck up his rear. She recognized him as Nikolas Tikolas. Blue-white lightning danced around the cord and he hopped around before taking off.

Just another nut.

"Doo... Tana..."

Doo-Tana spun to face the grave again. "Yes? Pebusa? It's me. It's Doo-Tana."

"Doo... Tana..."

She moved closer, so close she could sniff the decay of the dirt, so close she could hear a heart beating beneath the ground. She thought she saw the soil shift a little, like something was moving underneath, or like something was missing from within.

"Wouldn't do that if we were you," said an old, tired-sounding voice from behind.

Doo-Tana turned again and saw an elder, obviously blind, with his vacant stare through cloudy, pupilless white-blue eyes. He held a staff taller than he was, held it with both hands, practically hanging off it. He kept blinking and jerking his head this way and that, as if he had better hearing.

Or, Doo-Tana thought, as if he could hear the voice of the dead.

"Should get away from here, we think," he said.

"Why?" she asked. "Who are you? I've never seen you before."

"You wouldn't. We come from another village. But it is our duty to keep intruders away from this sacred site."

"Is Pebusa down there? Can you tell me that?"

His brow furrowed. "No. Not Pebusa." He thought for a second. "Like Pebusa, yes. We tend to his essence still, in the temple."

"I thought all of Pebusa's temples were destroyed," she said. Outright worship of the shadow god was illegal, she believed.

"Most, not all. Why do you seek Pebusa?" he asked.

"Because the grave calls my name. Because I knew him when I was a little girl. Spoke to him."

"You are Doo-Tana?" the elder asked her, his lips trembling.

Her heart skipped a beat. "How do you know my name?"

He bowed. "We apologize. You must come to the temple. You must prepare your mind." Turning, he added, "Follow."

PART TWO: SIX-FEET-UNDER BOYFRIEND

4

Hidden within the base of Mount Pebusa, the temple was actually a cave, and the elder—Pygmy, he said his name was—told her it was the birthing chamber from which Pebusa and Glasomil had been born.

"Wait," she said, moving to a natural vent in the cave's floor. She held her hand over it and could feel hot air. "I know this story. Pebusa told it to me when I was a little girl. This vent— It releases an entheogenic gas, doesn't it? This is where the two gods learned the secrets of the universe. This is where Pebusa later learned how he could create beings in his own image, like his brother Glasomil. Right?"

"Very good, Doo-Tana," Pygmy said. He shuffled over to a wall covered in art, which looked as though it had been painted with blood and the dust of crushed and dried insects. "Do you recognize anything here?"

Doo-Tana studied the image. It was an enormous snake eating its tail, and within the infinitely circular, autocannibalistic serpent was a woman lying side by side with a man. A ball of gold-white light hovered over the woman. An anthropomorphic mass of pure-black shadow hung over the man, like it was a projection of him.

"Well, that's Pebusa above the man, isn't it? It looks just like him. And the ball of light over the woman must be Glasomil."

"See anything else?"

She looked closer, but didn't see anything new.

"You are searching for forests within small twigs. You must take a step back to see something much larger."

Doo-Tana sighed, then took his words fairly literally and took a step back. Suddenly it all became clear. In faint paint, on each side of the circular snake, were massive letters. On the left was a D, and on the right was an O. With the circular snake in the middle, that spelled "DOO."

"What does it matter?" she asked. "You said I must prepare my mind, but is this your proof? Everyone in my village has a name that starts with 'Doo'—that's the name of our village!" Of course, she realized, she was ignoring the fact that the grave, supposedly containing someone "like Pebusa," said her name and not, say, Doo-Doodoo the septic-tank guy.

"We have more proof," Pygmy said, beckoning her to follow. He stopped at the altar, a pulpit of bones mortared together with chunky peanut butter. Using a gnarled finger, he pointed up at the bottom of the platform where stone tablets—containing stories of ages past—were kept.

Doo-Tana bent low and tilted her head to look underneath. "Oh my—"

"Do you see?"

"It says 'TANA.'"

"Do you understand why we thought the way we did?"

"Of course," she said. "Taken individually it can't mean much, but together it screams of more than a coincidence. But what does this mean? What am I to do?"

Pygmy the elder smiled, and she saw most of his teeth were missing. "You must experience the very fabrics that stitch together the universe, of course, Doo-Tana. You must breathe in the entheogen which emits from the spirit of planet Peburia itself."

5

It felt like she'd been snagged by the nostrils and the navel and tugged in two different directions. It felt like being ripped into two pieces. But perhaps most importantly it felt like staring into the heart of the universe and seeing something that was, paradoxically, infinitely loving and immeasurably cold. There was the sensation of being an intruder in a foreign land, but also of being a native son coming back home after much time abroad. Not to mention her throat was numb, and she worried she might bite off her own tongue.

There were colours, so many colours. Most of them had no name—they just were. But some were recognizable as being a part of the beauty of every life-form that ever would and ever had walked, flown, swam or crawled the planet. And all the colours were seen as one, which normally would be imagined as a black or a brown, but somehow was closer to white than anything. But even still, if one looked close enough, one could see any colour they looked for.

And the smells were overwhelming, the sounds overbearing. It was enough to make one's stomach churn and head want to burst. But that didn't happen. As there was also the uncanny effect of being soothed by a doting parent, of being cradled on a cloud, of being washed tenderly with a leaf wettened with warm water from the Isle of Ý.

Floating away, out of the world. Only to splash into the rocky peanut-butter core of the planet. But where it should have been rough, it was smooth. It flowed, but yet it was solid and still.

And a man emerged from the ground, falling in reverse. She came to greet him, ran into him, and they crashed together, swallowing each other up, disappearing into a blinding white flash of thick black smoke.

6

She puked after the psychedelic experience, which Pygmy said was completely normal as he held her hair and listened to her gag and expel whatever parasites and impurities she'd taken in over the course of her twenty years of existence. This was called "cleansing," but she thought it was more like torture. If she'd've known a temporary stay at the Hotel Doo-Hell was involved, she would've told the elder to fuck himself with his staff until he could see again.

When the retching seemed over and done with, he helped her outside for some air and grabbed her some things to make her feel better.

"But what am I meant to do?" she asked, feeling like she'd rather be dead. She ate fruit to get the acidic taste of vomit out of her mouth and to regain some energy. It felt nice on her partially corroded throat.

"What do you think? What does your heart feel?"

Doo-Tana drank from a stone bowl of liquid peanut butter and wiped her mouth before speaking. "That we were meant to join together, whoever that man was. I can't quite recall what he looked like. His face was fuzzy."

"He needs you to fashion one for him. What you desire, he will be."

"How?"

"Because Pebusa wills it."

Doo-Tana sighed. This was all too much to handle. But she supposed when gods were involved—even gods who'd supposedly been killed—miracles were natural and expected. "When do we begin?" she asked.

Pygmy bared his vacant gums. "You already have."

"How will I know what to do?"

"When you get there, you will know."

Sending her on her merry way, Doo-Tana—feeling not particularly confident—waved goodbye to Pygmy and ventured from the birthing chamber of the gods back to the grave.

There was that charge in the air again, so she went over to a shaking bush and told Nikolas Tikolas to scram. He shot her a bewildered look and tried to unplug himself, but she gave him a boot to the behind to get him running. She had no idea why the man chose that as his go-to masturbation bush.

Shaking her head, Doo-Tana turned and faced the grave. She recalled the transitory image of him—whoever he was—from the drug-induced vision, tried to replay it again and again in her mind's eye. Each time she replayed the vision more features became identifiable on the man.

He was enormous—over six feet, anyway, which was enormous by her standards. And he had very muscular arms, with veins swelling from places she hadn't thought possible. But there was a sensitive, feminine aspect to him, too, as his body was hairless; he was naked and tan and smooth. She saw his head in her mind, and he had long brown hair like a woman, but his skull was blank and featureless. Little by little, like a self-obsessed sculptor making an idol in his own image, she could see the specifics of his skull coming to fruition. He had a large forehead, and there were three protrusions on it, like they formed a triangle: one at the top near his hairline, in the middle; and two above each eyebrow. It made him look primitive in some ways, intelligent in other ways, but his hairlessness gave him a certain dignity lacking in the other men she'd known. Under those heavy, bulging brows were two large almond-shaped brown eyes set far back in their sockets. Brown like the colour of peanut butter, she noted, like the man was of Peburia itself. She'd never seen eyes like that: brown; people only had light-coloured eyes. His nose was strong, with little curvature, but not too straight, either. His nostrils flared but not too heavily. And his mouth had lips that were large and voluptuous and a pale pink, but not in a manner that made him seem girly. All of this was framed with the finest bone structure she'd ever seen, with cheekbones that seemed deadly and a chin that could certainly crack coconuts.

Doo-Tana couldn't help but feel some butterflies flutter around her belly when she imagined this man.

Her eyes shot open when the voice started back up again, calling her name louder than before, drawing her to it like she was in a trance. The heart beat from before thudded and pounded and beckoned. She distinctly heard the trumpet of an elephant playing a frantic sequence of notes low and high, like it was an insane creature crying out for an equally insane mate.

Standing in front of the grave, seeing the dead grey soil shift, watching white-spotted red mushrooms spring up like an animal had shit there just before a nightly rain. She bent down and snapped one by the stem. There were eyes in the spots, and they blinked at her. She placed the cap of the mushroom in her mouth and sucked on it a little, then bit down. Its juices flooded her system and her pupils exploded in size.

She expected for the man to spring from the earth, falling in reverse like in the vision, but that didn't happen.

Instead, Doo-Tana fell forwards and fell into the ground.

7

Contrary to where she expected to appear—underground, perhaps—Doo-Tana seemed to be walking through the sky. She looked down at the lush jungle landscape below and felt her gorge rise for a second. But oddly she also felt safe, like she had a blanket of bugs around her entire body, feeling them wriggle and crawl and squirm. And then there actually was a blanket of bugs on her. She didn't like that so she thought them away. In a blink: gone.

She continued walking across the world and saw the Sun setting. A tree, with its roots deep in a fluffy white cloud, hung over a table of bone. The man sat under it, watching the sunset dreamily with his head propped on his hand.

Doo-Tana sat across from him. "Hello," she said.

He glanced at her and his eyes were soulful like no other. Deep brown eyes—not deranged-looking like the icy-blue eyes she was accustomed to—but eyes that looked kind and caring, eyes that you could get lost in and wonder if they ever ended, or if they kept going on forever, taking you to worlds you could only dream of, making you smile and feel sexy all at once.

"Hello," the man replied, and his voice was low and manly. "I see you've come to visit me."

"I heard you calling me," she answered, drawn to him, wanting to know more about him, what made him tick.

He nodded. "I've been calling for a long time. I could see you, whenever you came near. You looked... Hmm, I don't know if you would be offended."

"No, go on," she told him. She grabbed his big hands in her little ones and stroked them with her thumbs.

"I was going to say: You looked beautiful to me," he said. His eyebrows bunched together and his large brown eyes seemed to glisten with tears as they looked back and forth between her own, as if he was searching her soul. "But you also looked sad. And lonely. And it made me feel helpless, because I wanted to comfort you—knew I was supposed to comfort you; knew in some way that was partly what I was made to do—but had no way of doing so."

Doo-Tana felt her heart beating hard and fast. This man seemed so sweet. She felt as though she could pour her heart out to him and he would take every drop of her and save it, nurture it, make it stronger. "W-Well," she said, trembling, "you can now... I'm Doo-Tana."

He paused for a few moments, as if thinking. "Mill-Tunn," he said at last. "Shall we walk? Before you have to leave?"

She stood with him, smiling, loving the feel of his hand. "I'm not going anywhere, but sure."

As they walked over the planet, they talked. Mill-Tunn seemed very knowledgeable about some things but incredibly naive—almost childishly so—about others. He was outdated on technology, for one. He was unaware of stone's replacing of bone, and thought it strange.

"Why work with things that weren't ever alive?" he asked when she'd told him that. "When you use tools that once lived, you impart some of their life on the work you're doing. Their essence continues to live on within your creations. Isn't that the most respectable way to create?"

Doo-Tana could have swooned from such a romantic way of looking at something as loveless as a tool.

They held hands over Mount Pebusa and spent the whole time gazing into each other's eyes, and it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever experienced in her life. At first it was odd, maybe even a bit awkward, but after a while, after fighting the urge to look away out of shame or insecurity, after continuing to gaze, tears filled her eyes. She saw they filled his, too, and together their tears spilled down their cheeks and she felt herself moistening down below as her heart thudded in her head and filled her whole body with warmth.

"You have to go now," Mill-Tunn said sadly, tracing his gentle fingers along her arms, tickling her.

"I don't want to go," she told him, because she did not. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

"It's okay. We won't be apart very long. Because you visited me."

"I don't understand," she said, but he was already fading—or she was—and she realized she stood in the jungle, beside the grave. Her hands were empty and there weren't any mushrooms in sight.

Oh, it's not fair, she thought, tears forming again but for a different reason entirely. I find the perfect man and he's not even alive. A six-feet-under boyfriend. Just my luck.

Doo-Tana sat down beside the grave and thought about the beauty she'd just experienced with that man. Mill-Tunn. She loved his name, didn't know where it came from, but she liked it all the same. She almost had a heart attack when Mill-Tunn's fist punched through the soil, his fingers feeling the air for the first time, as if reaching for her.

She entwined her fingers within his own and helped pull him out of the ground. s