One day a pony was born without a face.
All she had on her head was smooth white fur. Where her eyes should be were just strange bulges that were soft and slightly squishy to the touch, like there were eyeballs underneath but the skin had grown over them like a fungus. There was no mouth but if you touched the spot where the mouth should be you could feel the outline of zig-zag teeth, sharp like a razor wrapped in leather. The only orifices at all were two nose holes through which the faceless pony breathed. If the pony put her nose right up to your ear and sniffed you’d hear a high pitched sound, like a dog having a nightmare. Her hair was a blue of neither the sea nor the sky nor anything else natural.
But the faceless pony’s parents loved their foal and decided to care for it no matter what.
Daddy was a doctor. His office was a crush of potions, chemicals, toxins and poisons suspended precariously above compact and poorly repaired machinery. He was burned severely and his mane was coming out in clumps. He had been handsome once, but he had gone into his lab and raged, throwing his chemicals about in his fury, blaming them for the malady that afflicted his daughter.
After he had regained his senses he set to the task of providing his daughter with sustenance. She could not eat and could not drink but he would nevertheless provide. He devised a compound made from his own blood and his wife’s milk, placed it into a syringe, and injected it directly into his daughter’s stomach. That was how she fed.
Mommy was an artist. Her office was clean and tidy now that all the paintings were gone. She had slashed them and piled them up and set them all alight - after all, what was the point if her daughter would never get to see them? She tried her best to give her daughter a normal childhood with all the opportunities of a normal pony but every time somepony flinched or backed away at her daughter’s blank visage she flew into a rage.
After she had regained her senses she decided that she would conceal her daughter’s deformity. She gathered her most expensive dyes and paints and mixed them together for days, searching for the perfect shades. When she had them she took up her brushes and turned them upon her daughter. On her blind face she painted two large, rounded eyes, painted black eyelashes, painted irises of her favourite colour. She drew a smile on her daughter’s face, and then she wept to see her daughter smiling.
Those eyes were her masterpiece - coronas, irises, reflections and the finest of details - but they were still too confronting. The mother of the faceless pony decided to conceal them behind glasses, large and rounded-purple, like a blind pony might wear. Dressed so the faceless pony could walk amongst the children and almost seem like one of them - for a short time at least.
The faceless pony was watched and doted on every second of every day. Her daddy took her through endless experiments and chemical trials, and as time went on he became increasingly less concerned about medical ethics or codes of practice. Despite all his experimentation he never found a better compound for feeding his daughter than the mixture of blood and milk that his instincts had directed him to on that very first day. If he needed to adjust it at all it was to slightly favour the blood rather than the milk, for she seemed to appreciate that more as she grew.
His experiments did have other effects. He flooded her body with vitamins and alchemical compounds to increase speed, strengthen bone and accelerate healing so that even blind his precious daughter would not be helpless. With the gift of sight forever out of reach, he turned his attention to creatures with unusual senses - bats, spiders deep sea fish - and began experimenting (vivisecting) to find other ways to make the faceless pony whole.
Mommy’s time with the faceless pony was just as important. Day by day she carefully touched up the paints on her daughter’s eyes, searching for any sign of imperfection and cleaning away the wears of sweat or weather. After a time she came to be more playful with her daughter’s eyes, erasing them and drawing them surprised one day, angry the next, and seductive the day after. When her daughter failed to develop a cutie mark she took her flank as an additional canvas. One day she drew a musical note and imagined her daughter as a beautiful singer. The next day she drew a bold crown and told her daughter she was destined to be a princess. She made a game of it and told the faceless pony stories about the lives she was meant to live - the lives she should be living, if only -
As I said, the faceless pony was watched and doted on and cared for almost every second of every day. She walked mute between her mother’s stories and her father’s experiments and for many years. They did everything for her from the moment she awoke to the moment she fell asleep. They injected her breakfast, bathed her, read her stories, helped her exercise, and brought her strange and unusual flowers that she’d breathe deeply from with quivering nostrils. As this went on Mommy and Daddy drifted away from their old friends, and the outside world all together. Nopony understood. Nopony could understand. Nopony treated their daughter as she needed to be treated, so away with them.
The house of the faceless pony was strange to the town. Strange chemical scents and animal screams echoed out at strange hours. Mommy would come in to town to buy paints and milk and refuse to speak of what happened there. Rumours abounded, and the ponies became fearful.
One day a bold young filly decided to break in to the house of the faceless pony. She imagined it would be like any other haunted house - creepy, creaky, old, but ultimately safe. Instead she saw a vision of a darker world. She saw a wall covered with a hundred paintings of disembodied faces, ideas from Mommy about what to try next. She saw a hideous reaping chamber where pigs, rabbits and other wildlife were strung up by their hind legs, their throats were slashed, and their blood drained down into metal buckets. One of these animals was a pet dog her friend had lost a few weeks ago.
Horrified, she tried to run - only to come face to face with the faceless pony. It looked at her with painted eyes of staring red and smiled a painted smile. The filly screamed, and the faceless pony pounced. She was strong - so strong - and she struck the filly to the ground, skull ringing. The faceless pony picked her up and carried her away.
When the filly woke up she was in a dark and dusty attic, and the faceless pony was standing over her. The faceless pony groped her clumsily with icy-cold hooves, feeling the shape of the filly’s face and neck and body. The filly wasn’t brave any more, and she begged and pleaded for mercy. The faceless pony then picked up a syringe filled with blood, so the filly started screaming, which made the faceless pony grope until she found her mouth and hold it shut. The filly cried and cried as the faceless pony pushed the syringe into her belly and filled her stomach with blood.
This grotesque ritual repeated itself every day for three days. The faceless pony would slip away when her parents weren't watching and visit her prisoner bringing with her a bloody syringe. The filly would beg and plead and scream but the walls of the house were too thick for her to be heard, and when the faceless pony had completed its foul violation it drew the filly into a bone-bruising embrace and held her until the tears stopped. Then it left her again in darkness.
The town came to the realisation that the filly was missing. The parents of the faceless pony weren’t the first to blame - they were in fact the last place the town went to check, because they had kept to themselves quietly for decades and caused no trouble. But when all other options were exhausted they gathered nervously into a crowd and climbed the hill together.
When they reached the top of the hill Daddy came out to confront them. The crowd demanded to search the house. Daddy refused. They declared their intent to search the house regardless of his consent. Daddy went inside and came back with a crossbow. Somepony tried to snatch the crossbow away from him. That wasn’t smart. She died thrashing on the ground. Daddy died under trampling hooves.
They stormed the house with bloody horseshoes. They found Mommy and dragged her away, screaming and fighting. They broke into the attic where they found the lost filly, starved and shaking. It wasn’t clear who started the fire but all of them agreed with the decision. They backed down the hill as the house burned down.
Mommy was put in an asylum. The poor brave filly was put in therapy. Daddy was put in an unmarked grave far away from the grave of the pony he shot.
They found no sign of the faceless pony.
