“We should only tell Gilda that we lost the fight,” Red said, after we'd patched our most serious wounds and started limping back to the room we'd claimed as our own.

I blinked at him dumbly for a few seconds in response, as I tried to fit the words into some kind of context. It only clicked after those few seconds had passed—if Gilda knew that Dash wasn't expecting an attack, and might even be busy with getting Tank out of the impromptu arena, she might want to attack right this second. Even if we weren't with her, Gilda might just run off to take advantage of the situation for herself.

So that meant lying to Gilda, implying that Dash was still too strong to fight with anything less than the three of us. Which did mean, though neither of us said as such, that we were starting to care about Dash's desires a bit more than Gilda's. Especially since Gilda might well be right; there was probably no better time to attack Dash than right now, when she wasn't expecting it. But the idea of actually doing so made something inside my chest tighten up and turn acrid, and I knew I couldn't.

So, I simply nodded in agreement. Gilda seemed to be losing her mind, while Dash was slightly more mentally stable. Red trusted Dash, and I trusted Red. Even though it meant lying to Gilda, who I still considered a friend after all we'd gone through.

With that settled, we continued back. We passed by two guards this time; one we managed to avoid by trailing behind him, and the other a mare that we couldn't avoid without reversing course. Thankfully, she only snarled at us, before continuing her patrol—she didn't attack us, and we were allowed to pass unchallenged otherwise.

Gilda was frantically rummaging through her bags when we opened the door, and she didn't notice we'd joined her in the room until we approached the dying embers of the fire. She pulled her beak out of her bag, holding a faded bit-pouch, and spat it out before glaring at us. “You're back.”

I nodded, and Red tugged at a bloody bandage around his barrel. “Eeyup. Didn't go well. Three of us might get her next time, though.”

“I will,” Gilda said with a snarl. “I'm gonna kill her next time. I know I will.”

“...Right.” Red tilted his head towards me. “Ya lookin' for something?”

Gilda had already returned to nearly tearing her bag apart in her search. “My jerky. I know I had more, I was rationing it. Caught it, killed it, dried it. It was in here. I had so much before, and I ate a little, but now it's all gone, and I know I had more!” By the time she was finished talking, she had worked herself up into a mad rant, and when she stopped speaking, the silence was distinctly uncomfortable.

Red and I looked at each other. I certainly didn't know that Gilda still had actual food. The last thing I'd eaten were those cursed fish, and I wasn't keen to repeat the experience. While it was possible that Red had raided Gilda's bags for food, that seemed exceptionally unlikely.

Maybe Gilda had eaten it all, without even realizing? Another symptom of Hollowing, which I'd managed to skip, perhaps? I took another look at her, to really take in her appearance now that she'd been awake and mobile for at least some time.

Gilda's fur was matted and stained with blood, but still seemed...”fluffy” didn't fit as well as it could have, but it was still full, in comparison to my own thin and colorless coat. Her body overall seemed like she was still relatively healthy, with strong muscles on unbroken bones, and her beak and claws still gleamed in the dim light. She was filthy, but she could probably still pass for a living gryphon just fine.

Except for her eyes, which I saw again as she pulled her head out of the bag to look across the scattered items she'd already pulled out to sift through. Her eyes were unmistakably Hollow embers, darting in her wet sockets, and burning brightly with a kind of feverish madness that I could feel, more than anything else. No pony, looking at her eyes, would think of her as anything but a Hollow—and a dangerous one, at that.

“If...if y-you're hungry—“

As soon as I said the word, Gilda's eyes locked onto my own, and I took an involuntary step back. “Holly, sister, I'm ravenous. Whatcha got?”

I motioned with a hoof back to the door, and glanced at Red. “The p-palace has to have a k-kitchen, right?” Red nodded slowly. “M-maybe there's some food st-still?”

“Pony food?” Gilda said with a snort. She started to turn away, then appeared to reconsider. “I...augh. Fine. Anything. I'm so damned hungry.”

She started to shove everything haphazardly back into her bags, and Red stepped closer to whisper to me, “Ah don't think there's gonna be much left.”

“We n-need firewood, too,” I whispered back. “And I d-don't feel safe l-leaving her here. D-don't think she'll st-stay. And I r-really don't wanna be alone w-with her.”

“I hear you whispering!” Gilda squawked. “Didn't damage my ears. Something about firewood. Fine.”

“Jes' didn't wanna bore you by talkin' bout which chairs we were gonna smash on the way back,” Red smoothly lied.

“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” she muttered, as she glanced around the room. “Where in Grover's name are my arrows? You take those?”

“Under the b-bed,” I answered, and Gilda rolled off the bed and onto the floor with a thump as she started to search. After a moment, she yanked her quiver back out so quickly that she flung a couple arrows across the room. One of the arrowheads caught my eye as it glittered on the old, moldering carpet—it was one of the ones made from some kind of blackened glass, or crystal. It looked volcanic, at a guess; I'd seen...

I paused. Where had I seen that before? It must have been one of those things that only existed in my mind as a fragment of memory from the pony I was originally. I lost myself in that thought for a few moments while Gilda collected her arrows.

It wasn't something I really knew at a glance, just a guess, and the more I thought about it, the more I doubted myself. It didn't feel like something I'd been studying in a library or a lab, so I didn't think I was a researcher or a geologist—that was more of an earth pony or unicorn thing, anyways. Maybe I'd seen it in a souvenir shop—

“Holly! We're going.” Gilda yanked me out of the memories, and they were gone again. But she'd already turned her eyes on Red. “Lead me to these mythical kitchens, ya big bastard.”

I fell in behind Gilda, while Red took the lead. I tried to remember more about my own history, but nothing I could do seemed like they could dredge them back up, not even the ghost of those memories. Eventually, I decided to try and see if I could compare Gilda's Hollowing to my own experiences. “G-Gilda?”

“What?” She snapped at me. The cockiness she'd had through our adventures seemed almost entirely gone now, replaced with an almost feral jumpiness. I already saw that she was cracking jokes much less, and she seemed like she was considering whether she should bite my head off—which might well have been likely at this point.

“How are you f-feeling?” It was a stupid question, but I mostly wanted to keep her talking.

“How am I—go rut yourself. I'm starving. Like a bottomless hole's opened in my guts. And all my muscles...” she paused, before she started clenching and unclenching her claws against the carpet, and did a similar exercise with her wings. “Sore. Everything's sore, and cold. Probably the starvation, because my body's eating itself to keep me alive. I've felt it before plenty of times.”

“B-before all this?” I asked, with genuine surprise. I had a few scattered memories, but I wasn't starving in any of them. That hunger hadn't made itself known until after my actual memories started, at the bookstore. Ponyville was when I started to really feel it, but it faded into all the other constant agonies that ate at my body as it was broken and rebuilt a dozen times over.

Gilda wasn't looking at me any more. She was watching the doorways, talking quietly as though expecting an ambush. “Way before. Back in...back in Gryphonstone. Growing up. I went hungry most nights. You ever been to Gryphonstone, Holly?”

I nodded, and then paused. I had? When?

Gilda didn't notice, or didn't care. “Even before this, it was awful land. Barren, up in the mountains, all rocks and gravel and bad dirt. There's a few fertile valleys, but most of it's cliffs and caves and fields of snow. Mostly we just held the land because no one else wanted it. Barely anything grows there, and most of the native vermin was hunted to extinction way before I was born. Usually had to cross the borders to catch your meat, and you had to cook it and eat it out there, because if you tried to haul back a carcass, then the town guards would take it from you. You'd have to buy it back in lumps from the butcher, and only the rich gryphons can afford that.

“It was a scat-hole of a country.” She was muttering mostly to herself now, getting lost in her own memories, and I listened closely. “Still. It was ours. Even if that was mostly because no one else wanted it. It was the damned crotch of the world. Smelled like it too, even when it was burning...” She trailed off, after that. Either she was lost in her memories, or she was desperately trying not to be. I didn't press further.

I almost thought we'd reach the dining room without incident, but we couldn't be so lucky. We ran into the same guardsmare from earlier, the one who had snarled at us, and apparently she had decided we weren't worth a second warning. As soon as her embered eyes fell onto Red, she drew a longsword and staggered towards us.

Red barely reacted; he simply sidestepped her clumsy swing, the momentum of which drew her towards Gilda, with her balance lost. I expected Gilda to nock an arrow as she drew her bow, but with the Hollow guard as close as she was, maybe there wasn't time. So instead, Gilda just slammed her fist, still grasping her bow tightly, into the mare's jaw. The longsword fell to the carpeted floor with a thump, and Gilda dropped her bow alongside it before she simply grabbed the top of the guard's helmet, then pulled her face-first into a nearby wall.

Both Red and I winced as the crashing sound of armor meeting marble, and her discarded helmet clattering down the hall, echoed through the palace. We watched the corridors—since it seemed as though Gilda could handle one guard by herself just fine, and we needed to be ready if more came to investigate the noise. But I couldn't help but keep one eye on the fight.

Gilda tried to draw her claws across the Hollow's throat to kill them quickly, but either the mare was Hollow enough that her blood wasn't required to keep moving, or she just didn't care that her black ichor was gushing out into the carpet. So Gilda moved to break her neck instead, and when a series of hollow pops and crunches caused the mare to lose control of her limbs, Gilda didn't stop. She just kept twisting, until the mare's head, still lazily trying to bite the gryphon hen's claws, had completed one full rotation all the way back around to the front.

At this, Gilda let out a shudder, and growled, “Ruttin' die already!” She kept twisting, and Red had noticed now, since no other guards seemed to be approaching. But before either of us could say anything, Gilda had shifted her grip, and there was a wet tearing sound as Gilda simply ripped the guard's head from her shoulders. The rest of the body slumped to the floor, still gushing black ichor from the savaged neck stump, while Gilda pitched the head at the wall for a second time, as hard as she could. This time, the sound of the impact was wet and meaty, and left another splatter of blood, but the Hollow guard seemed to be very dead now.

“Y' done?” Red asked, as he stepped backwards from the seeping ichor.

“Not until I've eaten something. Waste of our ruttin' time.” Gilda's claws were soaked in the dark fluid—not that she seemed to care. She grabbed the door lever and yanked it open, which left a dark smear on the metal, and I moved my leg to hold the door wide so Red could follow her in. I was the last one to enter the dining room, because I had to step around the stained carpet, and I still felt it squelch under my hinds as I passed through the doorway.

Aside from the dust covering everything, the room was pristine. The table was bare, with all the plates and cutlery relegated to a rolling serving cart left on one side of the room. Gilda snorted at the total lack of anything to eat, and briefly rummaged through the serving cart just in case. She didn't even seem to be interested in the cutlery, though I saw her examining them; they were decorated steel, and I think Gilda had been expecting silver. The plates were ceramic, with intricate designs painted across them, each one a unique work of art—I had no idea if Celestia had been given them as gifts, or if she had them commissioned, but every one of them was beautiful in a different way.

Gilda smashed one on the floor and threw another at the wall out of frustration, and she was moving towards the kitchen entrance before the broken shards had even settled across the tiles. Red and I followed behind, and it felt like we were trailing behind a wild tornado as it wrecked houses and farmland.

The kitchens were extensive, with multiple stoves and ovens around the edges of the room. Some seemed large enough that I could fit inside standing up—but I knew they must have been for massive cakes or other such baked goods. Even the steel surfaces in here were gleaming like silver, and if it weren't for the dust, it would have seemed as though it were the cleanest room in which I'd ever been. But that meant there was still no food to be easily taken, sadly.

A door on the other side of the room was marked with “pantry,” and we moved towards it, though we all stopped to peruse the cooking implements in the room. While it normally would have been fun to whack something with a frying pan, it was hard to find humor in anything right now. Gilda spared a glance at a large knife with a bizarrely rectangular blade—and when she noticed I was staring, she smirked. “It's a butcher's knife, pony. For chopping meat. Probably kept it for visiting carnivores like myself—which is why it's in such bad condition. I've seen butter knives sharper than this, back in Gryphonstone.”

I nodded and followed Red towards the pantry, and Gilda followed behind me—after giving the big knife one last glance, as though she were having second thoughts about leaving it behind. She didn't change course though, and so we left the kitchen together.

The door led into a brick passage, which immediately turned left and angled downwards in a ramp, with stairs hewn from the stone running directly alongside it. I was confused by the two being side-by-side, but at least the ramp wasn't steep enough that I had to worry about losing my balance and tumbling down. The pantry was built directly under the kitchen, with more bricks forming the walls and ceiling, and now that we had begun to descend into the mountain again, I could feel a chill from the insulated room.

Gilda made directly for a small scattering of burlap sacks and old wooden barrels placed against a wall, and we followed behind her now. Red seemed more shocked than anyone else when Gilda tore open a sack with her claws, and a pile of lumpy vegetables rolled out onto the smooth stone floor. Just to be sure, I picked one up and looked it over, and there was no doubt; this was a potato. It seemed to have paused mid-rot, as a large portion of it was turning black in a distinctly unappetizing way, but it was at least still partially edible.

I remembered the fish, but I bit into the rotting vegetable anyways, and delicious earthen juices dribbled out around my teeth. It was raw, sure, but it was food, and it wasn't like I really knew how to cook anyways. Red, for his part, opened up another burlap sack and found a bounty of bread loaves inside. The ones near the bottom of the sack were turning blue, but the ones at the top only had a few small patches, which Red scraped off using a short hunting knife he pulled from under his armor.

He winced when he bit into it, but he kept chewing until he could swallow. “Ugh. Ain't eaten since I crossed the border. Ain't had bread since...well. Been a long time.”

Gilda halfheartedly broke her loaf in half, and then chucked the moldier half back into the bag so she could chew on the other. “Gross. Hope there's something better than this...but it's something, at least.” She looked up at me, while I was still cramming the raw potato into my mouth, and the edges of her beak wrinkled. “You guys can just eat raw potatoes? I thought they had to be cooked first.”

Red paused before he took his next bite, and glanced over to me. “Whuh? We do have to—Holly, spit that out! Gonna make yourself sick.”

But it was delicious! And also I was already starting to feel a little sick. Maybe he was right. I reluctantly dropped the rest of the potato back in the pile, and Gilda handed me the rest of her chewed loaf instead. “Here, eat this. I'm gonna go see if they have an icebox or something. I need meat.”

I started to cram the bread into my mouth as fast as I could, while Red watched Gilda dart around a corner. As he chewed on his own loaf thoughtfully, he glanced around the barrels, and mumbled quietly, “Wonder if there's apples in any of these. Must've been years since I had one from the farm.”

Another memory quietly slotted into place. I'd heard “Sweet Apple Acres” mentioned before, and I'd met Applejack—though “met” maybe wasn't the right word. But until now, it hadn't clicked for me that her farm, that their farm, had been an apple farm. Now that I understood that, I had vague memories of the place—trees heavy with red and green fruits, lush branches and well-maintained fields. I'd seen it all from above when flying, and I'd walked through it—I even remembered faces. Orange, yellow, green, red...

“Holly?” Red tilted his head at me. “Gotta swallow, else that bread'll get caught in your throat. Quit starin' at me.”

I choked on the bread, before remembering to swallow, and then looked back at him. “S-sorry. I just...I remembered you. We've m-met before. B-before all this.”

Apple Bloom had been such a cute little filly. What happened to her? What happened to all of us? Guilt shot through me again as I looked at her older brother, and I knew that I had to tell him. Even if he was angry.

I started to speak, only for a loud crash to echo through the basement, which startled us both. Red was on his hooves in an instant, and growled, “Gilda went that way. Come on.” Then he crammed the rest of the bread into his mouth at once and galloped away. I tried to do the same, choked again, spat out a soggy blue lump, and followed behind.

When we reached Gilda, it turned out she was fine—though in hindsight it was a little foolish to think she would have lost a fight to something down here. Instead, she'd found another Hollow guard wandering around, and had apparently pulled a wooden shelf full of wine bottles down on top of him. The undead stallion was pinned to the floor, groaning as he tried to pull himself out, or pull Gilda towards him, but she barely even paid him any attention as she sorted through the surviving bottles. She only gave us a glance as we ran around the corner, and took in the scene. “I'm fine, chill. Just can't find anything worth eating down here.”

“Eeyup,” Red said, as he relaxed a bit. “Any good vintages?”

Gilda held one up by the neck to read the faded label. “This one's from before the moon princess got back. Probably vinegar by now, though.” She gave the cork a hopeful twist, but it refused to budge. “Eh, whatever.”

Then we jumped again as she slammed it down on the head of the squirming Hollow, and they were both showered in glass, vinegar, and black blood. “Yeah. About what I figured.”

I shook my head, to clear the ringing from the loud crashing sound. “Y-you gotta warn us before you d-do—“

“And you ponies need to stockpile more meat!” Gilda screeched suddenly, interrupting me. “There's nothing in here! There's no wine left, it's all just grain and vegetables! I don't know what Gallus was eating, unless he's figured out some way to live off of candy and cookies like you all apparently can!”

“We don't need to eat,” Red stated bluntly. “I stopped hunting when I worked it out. No point, any more.”

“No point in hunting,' he says. Like it's that rutting easy. Might as well tie my wings and throw myself off the mountain now, if hunting's so pointless.” Gilda was speaking in a low growl now, and she wasn't even looking at us. She was too busy staring at the Hollow, still pinned under the shelf and struggling limply.

Slowly, I took a step forward. “G-Gilda—“

She grabbed the shelf before I could say another word. “Holly, help me push this off him, so I can drag him out.”

“Why?” Red asked, as he stepped back. I followed his lead, even if I wasn't sure why.

“So I can get at the good bits. Shoulder, flank, rump. Good meat in all of those. Liver's tasty, too.”

“That's a pony, Gilda.” Red had drawn his axe now, and Fleur twitched eagerly against his hoof. “Long undead, maybe. But still a pony.”

“I don't give a flying rut. I've eaten pony before. If that's the only meat left in this city, then I'll eat it again.”

“G-Gilda, you c-can't—“

“Can't what, Holly?” She let the shelf drop back onto the Hollow, who grunted in pain once more, so she could turn her full attention on me. “Can't hunt? Can't fill my belly? What am I supposed to do with this damned hunger, then? Just let it eat me alive?”

Red narrowed his eyes. “Better than lettin' you eat a pony alive.”

“And what are you gonna do about it, huh?” She turned to face Red, and if she cared about the axe he was holding, it didn't show on her face. “Gonna kill me instead? Gonna rip me apart like another Hollow? I'll just get back up, eventually. We all will. Unless you're gonna suck me all the way dry. I've seen that happen, and it looks awful, but I'll take that over living with this rutting pony disease—“

She paused suddenly, then turned back to me. “You know how to do it, don't you? You did it to that ghost, back in the city.”

I swallowed another wet lump of bread that had stuck in my throat. I knew how to drain a Hollow, true. Absorb their equinity, and kill the person, leaving their body soulless. I'd done it to Apple Bloom, and I'd never wanted to do it again. I definitely didn't want to teach it to Gilda, because I had no clue what she'd do with it.

But the way she was acting...the only option we were going to have in a few seconds was to kill her. And she was right, she'd just keep coming back. And the trick wasn't hard to work out, especially if someone was acting as wild as Gilda. She'd hunt us too, I was sure of it. So we'd have to drain her, and...

Despite everything she'd done, I still considered Gilda my friend. And I couldn't do that to her. So I nodded. “Okay.”

Red didn't relax; he just looked me dead in the eyes. “This is a bad idea.”

“Shuddup.” Gilda spat at him, before she dragged me over to the still-squirming Hollow. “I need this, Holly. You're more Hollow than I am; you know the hunger. Stupid that I didn't see what it was before.”

I did know it. I'd never felt it as bad as Gilda seemingly was, though. No matter how many times I'd died, no matter how despondent I became, no matter how much I Hollowed and lost myself...I was never as ravenous as Gilda seemed to be. Was it worse for gryphons? Or was Gilda just taking it so much harder than anyone else to which I'd spoken? Gallus had seemed alright, but then, we hadn't spoken to him much—

“Holly.” Gilda made a snapping noise with her claws in front of my face, and my attention returned to the Hollow in front of me. Right.

I tried to remember what it felt like, and work out how to describe it. Eventually, my memories crept to the changelings. “You r-remember the changelings? They k-kind of...opened their m-mouths, and sucked it in like...like air? But it's m-more than that, like you're r-reaching out and touching their f-fire, and pulling it into yourself...”

“Pyromancy. Figures.”

“D-do you know any...?”

“No. But the language sounds simple enough. I'll work it out.”

Hesitantly, I nodded, and let Gilda grab the stallion's bleeding head. She bit at the air, took deep breaths, and a few other things to try and work it out. After a few awkward attempts where she was clearly getting frustrated, she started to find success by balling up her other claw into a fist, and taking deep ragged breaths. Even as she was, apparently she could sort of meditate...at least, well enough to find her own flame, and that of the Hollow.

As soon as she looked as though she might be making progress, I stood up and stepped away, so she didn't drain me by accident. I found myself standing next to Red, who barely gave me a glance before returning his eyes to Gilda. “You're a fool, holly.”

“I...I know.”

“You're too damned nice for this world. That's gonna get you killed.”

I lowered my head. I was never more sure of that in my miserable unlife. Arguably, it already had, multiple times. Had turned me fully Hollow once already, somehow. Maybe that was all I was good at: not staying dead.

Gilda gasped, and my attention returned to her just as pink smoke began trailing out of the dying Hollow's face. It wasn't more than a thin wisp; the Hollow already didn't have much left, but Gilda drank of it greedily. She shuddered in strange pleasure as she pulled it inside, kindled her own fire with his dying embers, and fed as a Hollow for the first time.

After she was done, the Hollow was still moving, but much more lethargically. It already didn't seem as though it would be able to escape the shelf it had been trapped under before, and now it barely had the willpower left to struggle. If we weren't right in front of it, it might have just gone still entirely.

But Gilda...it was hard to tell when a gryphon smiled, but Gilda was grinning at the edges of her beak. Red noticed it too. “Y’all full now?”

“Barely a scrap. But I felt it. I felt the hunger stop, just for a little bit.”

Red didn't relax. “You gonna drain us next?”

Finally, she turned to him, and clicked her beak. Then she looked at me, and did the same motion, as though she was tasting the air between us. Eventually, she shrugged. “You two aren't much more than he was. You're a little more tasty, Red. But I think I'll wait for a real meal.”

“And that would be?” Red stepped back, while Gilda stood and started walking towards the exit.

Gilda spoke over her shoulder as she walked past us. “I've come all this way to kill Dash, for what she did. It'll be good to make it really stick, like it's supposed to, instead of just sharpening our claws on each other.”

Author's Note

"Fun" anecdote: when I wrote this chapter, money was getting particularly tight, and I had to get creative with groceries. I never got half as bad as Gilda is here; I never went to bed hungry. But my diet still mostly consists of cheap rice and beans augmented with canned chicken, and past-date bread, whenever I can get it. I'm better off now though, and slightly more financially stable, just so nobody worries.

The song for this chapter is Black Isn't Black, by the Black Angels. I believe this is the first appearance they've made in Hollow Pony's "soundtrack," but I do enjoy their sound; it just doesn't often fit the tone. If I ever get around to writing Warhorse, then that kind of 70s psych-rock would be perfect for mercenaries doing bad things in exotic locales, and they'll be featured much more heavily as a result.

As always, send thanks to my pre-readers, Prince-Nightfire93, Citizen, SisterHorseteeth, and Non Uberis. Not only does their feedback and commentary make this story better for all of you, but they're patient enough to endure my idle rambling when I should be writing instead.

Finally, my links to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Hopefully the situation will change enough in the future that I won't feel as though those are necessary any more.