Rejected Moon — Season 2, Episode 53: The Fifteenth Door

Rejected Moon.

"I know," he said.

"I want to anyway.

I think if I stop now, I'll find a reason not to start again for another three years, and I don't think I actually have three years left to give this particular fear before it costs someone." Corveth stayed with us through the following winter, his careful scholarship proving invaluable as we prepared for the 15th door, the one the ledger had told us was buried twice, once by the founders and once more a century later by a second generation of keepers who'd found the grave weakening and simply dug it deeper rather than seek help.

"That second burial concerns me more than the first," Corveth admitted, poring over his brittle old pages by the haven's fire.

"The founders, whatever else you think of them, at least understood what they were doing in their own terrible way.

A second generation of keepers panicking a century later, digging deeper without understanding the true shape of what they were reburying, that kind of frightened improvisation tends to leave things considerably more tangled than the original, more careful cruelty ever did." We found the 15th grave in early spring, in a mountain pass so narrow and treacherous that Kael insisted on scouting the final approach alone before he'd let the rest of the company follow, plain and unfired and entirely unwilling, even now, even married, to let me walk into unknown danger without at least one careful pass of his own eyes first.

"It's stable," he reported back.

"But Corveth is right to worry.

There's some kind of secondary structure built over the original grave, stonework, deliberately reinforced, maybe 100 years after the first burial.

Whoever added it wasn't gentle about it." The girl beneath the doubled grave, when we finally reached her, bore the particular exhaustion of someone who had survived not one burial, but two, the original founder's cruelty, and then a century later, a fresh trauma of feeling the ground above her suddenly inexplicably grow heavier, darker, more absolute, with no explanation offered for why her captivity had just gotten worse.

"I thought I'd done something wrong," she told us once she could speak, her voice carrying a particular bewildered grief none of the previous 14 had quite matched.

"One day the dark was simply dark, the way it had always been, and then, without warning, it got heavier, colder.

I spent 200 years believing I'd somehow failed at the one thing I was supposed to do, hold still, hold quiet, and that the deepening dark was my punishment for some flaw in my own holding." Her name, we learned, was Yold, and untangling the particular knot of her captivity, not merely freeing her from the ground, but helping her understand that the second burial had never been her fault, had never been a punishment, had simply been frightened people making a frightened mistake a century after the first frightened mistake, took the better part of that whole spring.