The Grief of a mother

The radio kept repeating the same phrase: seal the breach, mark the dead.

Cait turned the volume down until the words were only vibration through her glove. The Setdef commander’s voice was thin through static, already resigned. They’d written Hana off the moment they’d traced the raiders’ signal into a Mawfield hollow just like so many others.

“Cait,” Rourke had said, hand on her shoulder like a weight. “You go in there, you don’t come out. You know what those fields do.”

She’d told him to fuck off.

Now she stood at the ridge above the old mining town, suit hissing as the filters came online. The air was heavy—always near a mawfield Hollow, the slow pull of despair trying to level everything down to stillness.

Below her, the valley was quiet. Rusted cranes leaned over slag piles turned white with ash. The entry wound of the Hollow was where the old pit had collapsed—smooth stone ringed with frost even though it was late spring. The raiders’ truck was still smoking by the rift, doors open, blood trailing down like someone had tried to climb out and changed their mind halfway.

Cait checked the pulse tracker on her wrist. A faint green blip pulsed—irregular, but there. Hana’s comm-bracelet was still transmitting. The signal flickered once, twice, then steadied at forty beats per minute.

She stepped forward into the rift.

The first meters were easy—dry dust, bits of old bone, no nagging feeling. Then the gravity shifted. Her visor dimmed as the Hollow’s static brushed against her thoughts. Every sound flattened.

She jabbed the blood-filter injector into her thigh. It burned like hot spice. The display on her HUD glowed with a pale amber sigil: VITAL SIGNS STABLE – SPIRITUAL CONTAMINATION: LOW.

Her breath came thin. She whispered to herself because silence in a Mawfield Hollow felt like surrender.
“Keep walking. She’s alive. Keep walking.”

The Hollow responded, soft as breath against her ear:
She’s gone, give up, you can rest now with her forever.

Cait ignored it.

The path descended through slag tunnels, the walls rippling faintly as if underwater. Sometimes she saw motion in the corner of her visor—a man half-buried in the ash, a child sitting against a wall, skin folded like paper. The dead here watched, waiting for people to join the mass.

Each one she passed slowed her pulse a little. That was the Mawfield’s trick. It didn’t feed by sending monsters—it fed by convincing you to stop fighting.

The tracker beeped again and with it Cait’s will to fight—closer now, beneath her feet she heard metal shift. She dropped to one knee, brushed away layers of soot until metal gleamed: a hatch, half-welded shut. She forced it open with her multitool, the sound sharp enough to make her teeth ache.

The hatch dropped into a chamber reeking of metal and disinfectant. Someone had tried to make camp—cots, ration tins, med-packs stripped of injectors all the stuff that was stolen. The raiders were busy surviving.
Three of them hunched near a flickering lamp, helmets off, sky gray but alert. Tubes from their suits fed into improvised filters. They looked up when she entered—rifles raised.

“Setdef,” one hissed.

Cait leveled her weapon. “Where’s the girl?”

Silence. Then the oldest of them nodded toward a side tunnel. “She’s alive. For now. Hollow likes her. For some reason has given us a break” he giggles

He smiled—lips split, eyes raw. “We keep her calm, it keeps us breathing. The maw needs souls”

Cait stepped forward. “You touch her again, you die.”

The raider shrugged. “Already dying. Cause of people like you and new kingslend not allowing all to eat”

She left them there with a huff. None followed.

The tunnel narrowed, the light turning amber from the Hollow’s inner glow. Air thickened until it felt like wading through syrup. Her visor pulsed warnings: Cognitive decay risk 38%. She muted it.

The chamber at the end was wide, ringed with stone figures. Not statues—people calcified mid-breath. At the center, on a nest of cloth and wire, lay Hana.

Her clothing torn, face pale beneath the flicker of the lamp someone had set beside her. Tubes from a raider med-kit ran to her arm, dripping faint blue. She was breathing, eyes open—but wrong. Too steady. No recognition, no fear.

Cait dropped beside her. The pulse tracker locked instantly: heartbeat present, faint.
She whispered, “Hana. It’s me.”

Nothing. Hana’s gaze slid past her, fixed on something behind. The Hollow pulsed in sync with her chest, each breath tugging the air, each exhale whispering stay here, rest, fighting is pointless.

Cait unclipped the med-tube, snapped her spare injector into place. The hiss filled the room; Hana’s skin shivered under the dose. For a heartbeat Cait thought it worked—her daughter’s eyes blinked faster, color rising. But when they met hers again, they didn’t brighten.

They studied her, like she was the one that shouldn’t be here.

“Can you stand?” Cait asked.

Hana moved, mechanical, sitting upright with effort. She didn’t answer. Cait gritted her teeth, slung the girl’s arm over her shoulder. “We’re going home.”

As they turned, the walls shifted, forming faces—half-familiar, half-strangers—all whispering the same thing: She’s safer here. You’ll bring her pain.

Cait pushed forward, ignoring the tremor crawling up her limbs. The injector burned in her veins, barely holding the despair back. Hana followed, steps dragging in perfect rhythm with the heartbeat echoing through the stone.

They passed the raiders’ camp again. One man called after her: “Don’t drag it out. It will kill us.”

She didn’t look back.

By the time they reached the pit’s slope, her suit alarms screamed. Radiation. Contamination. She disabled every warning. The sky above was still gray, real air shimmering beyond the Hollow’s haze.

Cait lifted Hana onto the slope. The girl climbed, movements smooth but detached. When Cait finally broke through the rift, she collapsed onto the cold ground, gasping air as she tossed off her broken mask.

The Hollow still glowed—slow. It would take years for Setdef to burn it down. As much as Cait wish they all just leave earth

Cait crawled to Hana, cradling her head. The girl blinked against the daylight, eyes a pale reflection of the light from below—faint silver veined with violet. No recognition. No warmth.

“Hana?” Cait whispered.

The girl tilted her head, curious. There was a pause long enough to make Cait hope.

Then Hana smiled, small and unsure, and asked,
“…who are you?”

The pulse tracker on Cait’s wrist spiked.

Cait looked past her daughter to the Hollow.

She reached for the radio, hand trembling. Rourke’s voice crackled through static: “Cait—status? Are you still alive, is that your signal or do we have a breach?”

Cait watched Hana’s eyes, saw nothing of home in them.

She keyed the transmitter.
“Target secured, It's me” she said. Her voice shaky.

And as the rescue drone’s spotlight swept across the ash

The radio keys up again “by the goddess it really you and you saved hana, da-... Cait.. get away from her, we are moving in I saw her’s eyes” as the rescue drone moves in closer and the sound of other SetDef moving in, and an ambulance.