Nightmare Fuel / A Man of Iron

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A Man of Iron

• Gregor Clegane, full-stop. He's a Point-of-View character, and his chapters are quite disturbing to read.
• Ned disapproves the Iron Man because he doesn't follow the proper rules, but also because his attacking the corrupted and powerful will inspire others to become vigilantes, maybe sparking a Civil War with peasants deciding they are fed up with the elite's douchebaggery.
• Arya daydreaming about mean fates for her sister is quite creepy: first she wishes for Sansa to be fat as King Robert and fall from a tower on Joffrey and Cersei, then she imagines Sansa growing old at an accelerated rate and shrieking in despair when she see herself. Yeah...
• When he's locked into the Dark Cells, Ned muses about the many kinds of prisons you can find in Westeros. A reviewer says they couldn't understand why anyone would take the Black until they read this.
  • To go into more detail some of the ways prisoners are dealt with in Westeros include:
    • The Vale's Skycells.
    • Winterfell's version of a Chinese Water Torture Rack, where alternating boiling and frigid cold water is dropped on a prisoner's back.
    • Casterly Rock placing one in a windowless cell and then purposely alternating guard schedules and feeding times so a prisoner thinks they've been locked away for months instead of weeks.
    • The Reach's version of bamboo sprout torture, with a rose vine plant buried under a person's back and allowed to grow through their body; rumor has it that the plants end up taking over the corpse, keeping them semi alive in the cells.
    • The Dreadfort has a new prisoner select an older prisoner. The new guy gets that cell... and the next day gets a blanket made of the old prisoner's skin, with the old prisoner's face in the middle, stretched so it’s always screaming.
    • Save for the Skycells every other example listed above are not from the books but created by the author. Mr. Chaos has a very sick mind.
• Syrio drops hints about "special people" waiting in the shadows for a revolution, until "he" reveals "himself" as Mystique, scouting talent for Magneto. And she intends to take Arya to the Brotherhood.
• More mundane but no less terrifying for Tony and Pepper: Tywin called the banners and he asked Tony to bring Jon with him. Tony perfectly knows Tywin intends to use his ward as hostage against the main Stark family but has no way to politely refuse because Tywin is his lord liege.
• When Ned helplessly sees his daughter Sansa die right before him, his reaction made reviewers worry about him taking the Lady Stoneheart road - or the Punisher one.
• After revealing Jon's true parentage to the boy, Ned grimly confirms he kept quiet about it because he thought Robert would kill Jon for being the living proof Lyanna loved another man. Even now, the Lord Stark is desperate to hide this little fact because the Seven Kingdoms are full of people who would like to see the last male Targaryen dead.
• The Others are now present in King's Landing: Sansa Stark awoke as the Night's Queen.
  • Sandor's knee-jerk reaction when he sees the corpse he's watching over is talking and trying to seduce him with a suddenly mature body, is a massive Freak Out. Can you blame him for it?

A Crack of Thunder

• The beginning of the burning of the statues of the Seven reminds Jane of the people that have already been burned alive by Melisandre. It’s made obvious that Shireen has been forced to see all the burnings that have taken place, and Jane is left hoping that Shireen won’t become a fanatic like her mother.
• Ned and Cat desesperately want for their daughter Arya to be safe, but there's a Civil War raging and she's still away, so they have to accept the very real possibility she could have been killed or captured in spite of being under Syrio's wing.
• The mood in King's Landing when Tyrion and co. enter the city: fights in the streets, the Goldcloaks too scared to act because there’s a very real danger of dying via a mob, blood on the walls.
• The changes in Sansa Stark. Tyrion refuses to believe she is the genuine article because of her wildly different appearance. Bronn's gut immediately pegs the lady as trouble, whatever she is. Yes, whatever, not whoever.
• RAMSAY SNOW has a point-of-view chapter. Mr Chaos found himself quoting the Joker and Pennywise to better live in his brain. Yeah...
  • His death - whipped to death by Vanko's customized whip - is very much deserved but kinda unsettling. And as psycho as Vanko is, how much do you bet he uses this whip on poor, unsuspecting commoners?
  • Myranda's death manages to be even worse than Ramsay's. She’s stripped naked, her tongue is ripped out, her eyes are sealed shut with hot wax, and she has shallow cuts made along her torso before salt water was poured on her. She’s left wandering around sobbing and scared, looking for Ramsay... and then Vanko wraps his burning whips around her throat. Mr. Chaos goes into graphic detail of her skin burning down to the muscle before she finally dies. There is a reason this is the first chapter to receive a warning for graphic violence.
    • Making it even worse according to Mr. Chaos this is the TAME version, as how he originally wrote it was so graphically violent he chose to tone it down. He only mentions that in the original version Myranda's eyes were stitched shut with fish hooks.
  • Myranda herself is incredibly disturbing. While she and Ramsay are hunting their current victim, this is what she has to say:
  "I want to sew her pussy up. She wanted to have your baby, I can tell. I want to stick some foul rodent in her and sew her up and watch her scream as it burrows out."
• Thor confesses his brother went to Westeros for a learning travel and was supposed to come back five years ago. He didn't, and that's not the first time it happens to an Asgardian. When something is bad enough to affect a god, it's time to bring the brown pants out.
  • And Thor suspects Melisandre to be responsible for it. As if the lady wasn't creepy enough.
    • Worse. She may be an Asgardian as well.
• Let's put it this way. Tyrion Lannister, the man who faced several credible death threats with just a small sweat, is reduced to having to sleep with the candles lit after his chat with the Night's Queen masquerading as Sansa.
• Rickon begins to show an ability to tell that they’re not in the original timeline, Robb and him begin to hear a ghostly song in the crypts of Winterfell... and suddenly Rickon is swallowed by a portal in front of Robb, Roslin and Luwin.
• The Night's Queen has started to spread her poison through King's Landing, converting all sorts of people to her cause. And she turns one bird into a wight in front of Sandor.
  • Speaking of Sandor, he notes that while everyone else is complaining about the cold snap accompanying the approach of winter, he's constantly boiling. Given who he's sworn his service to, it suggests that he's being corrupted into an Other.
• Thor is a walking nightmare for Theon, since he's the Storm God who constantly opposes the patron god of the Ironborn in their creation mythos and seeks to destroy their world. He's basically the Beast of Revelation for the poor guy, and his little lightning-show doesn't help Theon to trust him more.
  • It should be noted that his fear is, for the most part, misplaced, since Thor is actually good friends with the Drowned God, who's real name is Ægir, a sea jotunn who in Norse Mythology was friends with the gods and often hosted parties for them, and the Drowned God is revealed to be a nickname Ægir got from Sif after she dropped him in a pond for trying to bed her at one of his parties. Thor's actually quite confused over why Theon would be afraid of him before he'd even done anything.
• The raw power Thor showcases. While he appears rather goofy and lighthearted when he’s pissed off he unleashes a fraction of his power, creating the blackest of storms ever seen and using the lightning to carve the words "I AM THOR GOD OF THUNDER" in the hillside near the parlay. If it weren't for Davos calling for him to stop it is likely Renly and his entire party would have died.
• Tyrion's nightmare of a demonic-looking Not-Sansa throttling him while covering herself in blood, while the real Sansa looks on while chained up.
• Vanko makes his big entrance in a recreation of the racetrack scene from Iron Man 2, made just as much more gruesome as you'd expect from Westeros. The chapter ends with him advancing on a trapped Tony and cracking his whips.
• If it hadn't been for Oberyn Jon would have died in his fight against Vanko. Repeat... Vanko can defeat someone in the Iron Man armor. His whips are that powerful.
• If she hadn't run into Doom, Dany's story would have abruptly ended with a village that uses a large scale Wounded Gazelle Gambit, appearing to have just been ransacked and in need of help, when actually the whole place is booby-trapped to kill and rob any Good Samaritans that take the bait.
• During the riot in King's Landing, a group of men try to rape Not-Sansa. She casually kills one with a Neck Snap, then tears the others apart with her bare hands. Varys, watching this from a hiding spot, is left horrified. What's worse, Sansa is not only the Night's Queen, she’s Hela.
• Bran remembering how Old Nan lovingly detailed wights retained their souls while their bodies were rotting and eating their loved ones, unable to cry while they converted their friends and families into other monsters to replenish the undead army.
  • Even worse, it implies that Tyrion's nightmare of the real Sansa being chained up and forced to watch as Not-Sansa kills people may be an accurate description of what Sansa is going through.
• According to Jojen, all of the members of the Court of the Others are awake. The Commander has gathered their forces to attack the Night's Watch and "bathe his head in their blood", while the Night's King is allying with a person strongly implied to be Euron Greyjoy.
  • Worse, thus far, there's hints at the identities of three of the Court of the Others. The Commander, with his "Skull-like visage," and the "Bathe his head in their blood," strongly suggests the Red Skull. As discussed, the Night Queen is Hela. And the Night King? He's said to have a gauntlet of infinite power, meaning that the Big Bad of the setting is Thanos.
• Arya is disappointed to find the various horrors of Harrenhal are just people's imaginations making mundane things seem scary. Except that one of them is Dormammu, who is said to grant power in exchange for your soul. And Arya's right there for the taking...
• Vampires exist in Westeros with the confirmation that Blade is around and he killed Mad Danelle, a noblewoman who drank and bathed in blood and was rumored to kidnap children using an army of giant bats.
• Magneto's rampage in Harrenhal proves just how deadly he can be. And the way he activates Gendry and Arya's mutant powers: he took the surviving Bloody Mummers and roasted them alive. With Wildfire. Poor Arya gives a really graphic depiction of Hoat burning.
• Daenerys' vision of the future in the House of the Undying has her being choked by a massive figure — one who, judging by the description of his gauntlet and his line about bringing balance, is clearly Thanos, seemingly confirming that he's the Night's King.
• Chapter 41. You can imagine how horrifying it is when the author admits he had nightmares about what he has written.
  • First, the three men that threaten to rape Jane for days. They do not do it, but not for lack of trying.
    • In order to get into the head of the rapists, Mr Chaos went through testimonials of actual rapists. Yeah...
  • Then, Thor's punishment for the three would-be rapists, which he makes so brutal that he swears bards through the Realm will have to invent new happy songs to erase the horrors he’s going to visit upon them.
    • The first is electrocuted alive until his eyes and balls explode and his flesh is completely burned - and then Thor rips the man's flaming heart and crushes it.
    • The second has all of his bones shattered, his throat crushed and then his bowels ripped out - so Thor can literally hang him with his own intestines.
    • And the third loses an arm - with Thor cauterizing the bleeding with lightning - and then proceeds to execute him with one of the most horrifying execution methods ever invented: the Blood Eagle.
  • When Thor finds out that Amora has either found or made a Destroyer Armor, he becomes terrified with good reason: a man using it can easily become a One-Man Army - but only after killing the person they love the most.
  • Thor and Jane reach Dragonstone, only to find a dying Selyse, who reveals that Amora tried to convince her to kill Shireen with a knife, but when she chose not to do so, Amora just stabbed her and told her she was going to turn Stannis into her toy and convince him to kill Shireen.
• During the Battle of the Blackwater, a Lannister guard tries to kill Tyrion — and it quickly becomes apparent that it's a wight, as it keeps coming no matter what he does to defend himself. Worse, in the process of trying to get to safety, Tyrion falls into a puddle of Wildfire, burning his hands in horrifying detail.
  • As Word of God explains afterwards, the Wildfire plan accidentally creates the same recipe for unlocking mutant powers. Except this time there's too little Targaryen blood with just a few bastard descendants among Stannis' men, and too many human sacrifices, and so it goes wrong with many of the new mutants going completely insane and lashing out randomly with their powers, while others are stuck with horrifically mutated bodies.
• We get to see just what Groot is capable of in the Bloodier and Gorier world of Westeros, growing his hand inside an Ironborn soldier and making him attack his fellows until they're forced to hack him to pieces, stomping on another so only his skull is left, and backhanding a third so hard he splatters into Ludicrous Gibs on impact.
• Loki's execution of Amora. After cutting off one of her hands, stabbing the other and pummeling her, he takes a corrosive poison that is specially treated so that you literally can’t die because of it and throws it on her face. We get a graphic description of how the flesh melts off her face and remaining hand and the venom gets into her throat and destroys her vocal chords even as she shrieks, before he finishes her off. And as he explains it, since Asgardians are in the afterlife as they were in death, this means that Amora will spend the rest of eternity deformed and in agony.
• Even Ned is disturbed by how dark his Roaring Rampage of Revenge is making him. Case in point, he keeps having to resist the urge to have Edmure suffer an "accident" so that someone more competent can take over Riverrun.
• Learning how far-reaching the Council's network of spies and agents actually is gives Tony an acute spike of paranoia.
• Once upon a time, otherworldly beings enjoyed visiting the material realm of Westeros. To do so, they merged with the bodies of the honoured dead in order to create another, new being capable of wondrous magic. Then one day, a titan happened on a human corpse, fused with it... and decided he would rather not share. And he started to convince more and more of his peers to adopt his ways, and discovered he had a gift for necromancy — he became Thanos, the Night's King, and his followers became the Others.

A Shield of Man

• Adrian notes how one of his men got drunk and wandered off into the tunnels they were exploring, and hasn't been seen since. He states that he can't think of a worse way to die than getting lost in the dark and waiting to expire... and then sentences Tywin's messenger to that fate by tossing him into a crevasse not deep enough to actually kill him, but deep enough to leave him trapped.
• When Steve tells Jeor, Benjen, Mance and Ygritte how Others are converted, he mentions fighting former allies who were taken over by Other Spirits; if they managed to wrest back control of their bodies for a few moments, when they weren't screaming in agony all they could say was 'Kill me.'
• The description of the Casterly rule over the Westerlands. Not only would they blatantly starve and exploit their subjects, they would murder and enslave anyone who had the misfortune to be more skilled or beautiful.
• Ygritte accidentally pushing Steve's Berserk Button makes him so angry he momentally terrifies his audience. Affable and slightly dorky he might be, Steve still is an Other.
• Rhodey describing how he once witnessed the Iron Bank punishing someone who tried to steal a payment from them — his body was coated in sugar and butter, before he was put in a coffin that left his arms, legs, and head exposed, then he was force-fed a spicy meal and left in a pit near a river. While the food made him shit himself, the butter coating attracted rodents and insects that fed on his flesh, with the insects also laying eggs in the feces now covering him. He would then be fed the same meal every day to continue the process, with the Bank keeping him alive for as long possible to prolong the experience. Rhodey notes that the man was still alive when he left two weeks later, and he's not sure how much longer it went on.
  • It's called scaphism, and that was a genuine torture for the Persians. Sometimes human creativity really will keep you awake at night.
• Tony and Pepper's utter horror when Jon is summoned to King's Landing, officially to serve on the Small Council but everyone knows he's supposed to become a hostage and a pawn to the Lannisters. Even worse is the possibility of Joffrey going Mad King on the young man for the slightest reason. And yet there's nothing they can do to prevent Jon's departure.
• Cersei was granted mutant powers by the wildfire explosion at the Battle of the Blackwater, specifically those of Psylocke.
  Author's Note: I think the word you're looking for here is "fuck."
  • Joffrey sent out orders for people to hunt down relics of the past and Qyburn intends to deliver one to Cersei.
• Not that we needed a reminder of how psychotic Joffrey is, but his first scene has him barely talked out of killing Janos Slynt's sons because of a quasi-treasonous comment Slynt made before his death (on the grounds that the children of traitors are automatically traitors too) and later has him announcing his intent to kill cats in order to torment Tommen (which even Cersei can't brush off with her usual delusions).
• Euron Greyjoy has become a servant of the Others, specifically the story's version of Ronan the Accuser. Which among other things means he now commands a ship full of wights and can freeze people solid but still alive and conscious. And now Asha's his prisoner, with him planning to convert her into a servant of the Others as well.
  • Even before Euron shows up, Asha being trapped in a storm with no visibility is terrifying in itself. It can actually feel like a relief when he shows up, since at least it's a concrete problem to solve rather than just staying stuck there until they're inevitably sunk.
• Without Sansa to be dominated by The Night's Queen, the body she's using is withering away. Before long, she won't be able to keep up the charade for long.
• We find out somebody engineered the attack at the Blue Oyster as a way to put Jon and Natasha down right away. Though initially Cersei and Joffrey are the main suspects, the way it was arranged was too complex for both of them, and there are no others with obvious motives. A fitting reminder of what a snake pit Jon's just entered.
• Tywin takes one look at Jon, and sees that he's a Targaryan. He doesn't quite hit the mark, but when Tony and the others talked about Jon entering a prison of daggers, they weren't kidding.
• The Commander of the Others, this story's version of the Red Skull. Jeor notes that as inhuman as the rest of the Others are, the Commander makes them seem normal by comparison — we're given graphic detail of his skull-like face, including the normal tongue and teeth that look even more disturbing when combined with the rest.
  • The Commander gleefully explains that the soul of his host body, Johann, is still trapped within him, and has long been reduced to mindlessness.
• There's something unsettling about how Natasha thinks in her first POV. While able to process information quickly, that also extends to thinking through the Game of Thrones in a matter of moments, so that the moment Joffrey thinks about killing them, she immediately starts thinking through how to survive by killing all enemies in the room, and solidify Jon's claim to the Iron Throne.
• Joffrey, warming up to Jon, casually decides that when he kills all the other Starks he'll bring Catelyn to King's Landing and let Jon do whatever he wants to her in the throne room as a reward, with it implied that he’s suggesting Jon rape then murder her.
• We get to see Adrian in action as the Vulture King as he attacks a group of Tyrell soldiers. His opening move involves swooping down and using his Razor Wings to cut six of them in half at the torso. The rest don't do much better, as he demonstrates just how dangerous the flight harness is.
• Several of the images from Catelyn's nightmare:
  • First, she sees a group of mirrors reflecting her as the various ways she's seen by herself and others. The last one, which is broken, shows her as a walking, graphically described corpse which can only be Lady Stoneheart.
  • As she's dragged towards the Moon Door, her mouth disappears, leaving her unable to defend herself or call for help.
  • One of the people dragging her to the Moon Door is Sansa, who is presented as a corpse with a smashed in head and covered in maggots.
• When the Night's Queen was seducing Tywin, she deliberately gave Sansa more control of her body in order to taunt her, meaning Tywin unwittingly raped her.
• Olenna Tyrell bluntly tells Jon that the Iron Throne is bent on wiping out Ned Stark's rebellion, and since the North would never accept anyone other than a Stark leading them, the Lannisters have decided to fulfill Catelyn's greatest fear and make the Bastard of Winterfell the new Warden of the North. Jon almost vomits after hearing this.
• When Brice tries to leave the gang, Adrian has him seized and beaten bloody. After the gang members suggest various things to do with him (including removing his eyes, tongue, and hands, or selling him as a Sex Slave, or using him as a test subject for Phineas' experiments), Adrian ultimately just stabs him through the mouth into the brain. Giving us this story's first example of someone being Killed Mid-Sentence, the narration just stopping as the blade hits home.
• Somehow, the Others have managed to block the Children of the Forest from spying on them. Given the comments about a purple haze and Yondu's belief that a thrall is responsible, it's implied that Euron is the cause, which should give a warning about how powerful he is.
• The descriptions of the Braavosian nobility lusting over Arya, who may now be physically in her late teens but is still mentally ten years old, are awful.
  • Apparently at one point, the wife of a shipping merchant entered a privy Arya was using, and forced her tongue down Arya's throat. The incident apparently still causes Arya to shiver at the thought of it.
  • Even worse, many men seem to have offered their cocks to her. Mystique had to pull her off of them before she could try to rip their cocks off.
• Gendry telling the Brotherhood about "bowls of brown", and how you don't want to know the provenance of the meat. Everyone is low-key horrified by the possibility of their new member being that desperate to not starve.
• Qyburn, already a creepy little bastard in canon, is in this story combined with Mr. Sinister. Worse, he's now working for Cersei and has offered her a gift — Maegor the Cruel's magical armor, Ultron, which he believes he can bring to life. And to do that, he claims he can summon Jaime's soul back from the dead to power the armor. Which, considering the audience knows Jaime is alive and well, means that either Qyburn will summon someone/thing else entirely different... or Jaime is shortly going to be in a lot of trouble and agony.
  • Even worse, Cersei gets the idea that she can have her own suit of armor made for her soul to inhabit, and she and Jaime will rule Westeros for eternity.
  • Just how much influence Qyburn has had on Westeros' history - among other things, he’s heavily implied to have engineered Robert's Rebellion and Jon's birth.
• The Ten Rings attack Tony's ship en route to Braavos, and thanks to their Extremis-powered soldiers manage to overpower him and Rhodey, tossing them into the sea and taking Pepper hostage.
• Jon's fear at the thought of his and Natasha's future daughter being made to marry Joffrey's future son, as per Tywin's plans.
• Meera tells Jamie a followup to the story The Sworn Sword, and Aegon's second encounter with the red widow. She and her husband "accidentally" maimed an official tax official, and in return, Aegon shows that he's no longer Egg. Going all out with "The Reason You Suck" Speech about Rohanne always reaching higher than she thinks she deserves and never quite giving Dunk the respect he deserved, and offering an ultimatum to her: accept a renunciation of all power on her husband's death, or watch her children either be sent to their deaths or be turned against her.
• Qyburn is apparently known as a boogeyman in Westeros, with stories told to children of how he'll experiment on them if they misbehave. Considering what we know of the man (both in canon and who he's been merged with), this is probably very true.
• According to Varys, the Sparrow is very likely to become the next High Septon, and shares details on how the man wants to purge Westeros of anything he views as a violation of the Faith.
• Vulture King's attacks result in the death of all people in the merchant caravan attacked. That's bad enough on its own. Then, finally, there’s a survivor that could be questioned to confirm whether other bandits were involved — a pre-teen boy that survived by crawling under a bramble bush, leaving him with permanent scars in addition to severe trauma. And to cap it off, afterwards Tywin decides that the best way to provide for the kid is to leave him in the care of one of his men — Ser Adrian of the Tombs.
• Petyr, Gwen, and Miles recounting how they got their powers. When the wildfire explosion went off and unleashed the magical wave, the attic they were hiding in was suddenly swarmed by countless spiders, which crawled over them and bit them repeatedly. While they may have been ultimately unharmed, it's still a disturbing image.
• The reason why May Parker was allowed to become a Secret-Keeper for the Spiders: she noticed them suddenly acting secretive, and she started to believe they had been recruited by pleasure houses. These kids are thirteen at the most — Jon is utterly stunned and first insists it's a nasty joke, because he's that disturbed by the idea of child prostitutes.
• Euron's wight horde attacks the Umber encampment where Robb's group is being held, where it's revealed what happened to Asha — she's become this story's version of Nebula, which involved mutilating her to the point of seemingly breaking her will. Worse, the chapter ends with Robb being captured, with Euron planning to do the same to him.
  • Also, Euron thinks that Thanos, who wants to Kill All Humans, thinks too small. Let that settle in for a moment.
• Steve becoming enraged when Jeor suggests he raises a wight as a demonstration to the skeptical Cotter Pyke, briefly becoming a terrifying beast just like the rest of the Others.
• Euron has gone the Bolton route in decorating his cabin.
• Rhodey is revealed to have been captured by the Red Priests, who now intend to burn him as a sacrifice.
• Joffrey drunkenly threatening to mutilate Natasha if Jon doesn't hand over his Valyrian steel sword.
• Bruce Banner, talking about his visit to Old Valyria, ominously says that the Freehold opened a door and let out something they shouldn't have, and that he's lucky he only got stuck with the Hulk. Dany thinks of one of her ancestors, Princess Aerea (who died being cooked from the inside out and infested with giant worms) and shudders.
• Joffrey is so drunk he states out loud his intention to have all the members of the Faith in King's Landing beheaded just because it started to rain during his wedding, and then that he might let the Boltons live so they will flay every person in the Seven Kingdoms alive.
• Steve gives more details about his mother's abduction: after learning of her, King Casterly decided to rape her in front of her husband and young children — the eldest being barely five years old — then told Lann he would send the dwarf the bastard to raise if she fell pregnant. After hearing that, Tormund almost begs for confirmation that such a twisted man was put to death.
• When Cersei, enraged by Tywin's insults, moves to slap him, Tywin calmly tells her that if she does so he'll force her to become a Silent Sister and have her tongue cut out. The same fate awaits her if she even thinks of doing so in the future, and if she lays so much as a finger on him, her punishment will be even worse.
• Littlefinger is apparently being tortured to try and find his "co-conspirators" in Joffrey's death. While he's far from innocent in most matters, the fact that he legitimately has nothing to do with what happened makes it all the more horrifying.
• Jaime reveals that he and Gerold Hightower once got lost in the Red Keep's abandoned passageways and wandered for hours. While they got out when they stumbled on a servant who helped, Jaime was left traumatized and having repeated nightmares of getting lost in never-ending corridors and stumbling on such lovely imagery as the skeletons of long-lost princes or an elderly version of Jaime himself who never escaped and has since gone mad.
• Euron reveals that buried underneath Hardhome is a pool of a liquid that came from another world (confirmed by Word of God to be a mass of Symbiotes), which he’s been experimenting with by throwing prisoners into, resulting in them all turning into mindless berserk beasts with warped muscles. And to top it off, the victim explodes in the end, just like all of Euron's previous failures. He implies that these creatures are the reason that at least some of the prior attempts at building a society at Hardhome over the centuries have failed.
• Euron's Faux Affably Evil nature lends him a creepy effect that leaves Robb very disturbed.
• The Masters of Meereen unveil their trump card — the Juggernaut, who easily tears Wade apart and No Sells the Hulk. Unfortunately for the Masters, he then decides that Asskicking Leads to Leadership and takes over the city by force.
• During the chaos of the fight against the Juggernaut, many slaves take advantage to turn on the Masters, further spreading the violence. Daenerys can't help but realize that this is just a taste of what will happen in Westeros when she has to fight to conquer it.
• Robb becomes notably bloodthirsty after bonding with Venom - they casually converse about eating Euron, and they nearly bite off Asha's head during the fight. Even if he's still a good guy, it's unsettling.
• What's worse that Euron being Ronan? Him becoming Carnage.
• Sandor nearly cutting Littlefinger in half in the Trial by Combat before taking his head off.
• The Lannisters now know that Lyanna and Rhaegar had a son and are determined to find and kill him. Jon and Natasha are rightfully terrified by this, and plan to flee King's Landing right away.
• Margaery, revealed to be this story's version of Scarlet Witch, is the one to kill Tywin in this universe, by means of throwing him out the window of his office. We get to witness the fall from Tywin's POV, which like Brice's death scene ends by just suddenly stopping.
  • Loras, who’s Quicksilver, casually explains how easy it was for him to kill Joffrey and frame Littlefinger for it. Also, he and Margaery were the ones who engineered the Blue Oyster fight, in order to try and eliminate Jon as an asset for Tywin.
  • In short, Adrian's paranoid ramblings about the Tyrells were right — they're allied with Magneto's branch of the Blackfyres, and have been since the time of Aegon V, plotting to weaken Westeros and attack it from within so he can take the Iron Throne.
• Cersei is driven to vomit by seeing what's left of Tywin after his fall. Qyburn, by contrast, waxes poetically about human biology... then asks to keep the flesh after preparing the bones for funeral, as part of his research. Cersei doesn't want to know what he's using it for, but lets him.
• Steve is convinced that the Red Skull is planning to go after Daenerys, to try and turn her into an Other and use her as a Dragon Rider. And considering what the Others were able to do with one of those in the show...
• We get a look inside Qyburn's head, and realize the full depths of his twisted experiments:
  • Expressing disappointment at Robb marrying Roslin when he had hoped to use him and Myrcella to crossbreed the Stark and Lannister lines, he considers kidnapping Myrcella and using drugs and memory alteration to make her and Robb sleep together, just to get her pregnant with a child he can study.
  • Aegon the Unworthy was a failed experiment that Qyburn let live, and was so fascinated by all the prominent descendants that failure of a king produced that he was actually hoping Joffrey would become like him in order to see if the process would repeat itself.
  • He engineered the extinction of an entire race, and erased every record of them, just so he could use their now-dead language as an unbreakable code for his research notes.
  • He caused the Tragedy of Summerhall solely as an attempt to kill Duncan the Small and Jenny of Oldstones, because he didn't like the idea of their bloodline (though he apparently doesn't mind Mystique's existence).
  • At least three of Lysa Arryn's failed pregnancies were caused by Qyburn slipping her potions, just to see what affect they'd have on in-utero babies. He keeps the fetuses in jars in his lab.
• Qyburn carries out his ritual to put Jaime's soul into the Ultron Armor, something that is bound for failure because Jaime is still alive. But then the armor moves... and speaks of killing Tywin and Joffrey... and Qyburn realizes who he has summoned. It's not Jaime... but Petyr Baelish, who promptly flies away.

A Web of Lies

• After three books, Norman Osborn finally makes his appearance and he's a complete and utter psychopath, gruesomely murdering a debtor in front of his terrified wife and infant child before leaving her utterly lacking in ressources, anticipating one of his henchmen raping her.
  • How petty is Norman? He was so infuriated about Stannis "stealing" Davos and helping him to go straight that he arranged for baby Shireen to be infected with grayscale.
• Littlefinger/Ultron slaughtering most of Yoren and Adrian's Night's Watch caravan in order to forcibly recruit the latter into his service. Realizing that saying "no" means death, Adrian bends the knee.
  • And to make matters worse, Littlefinger apparently wasn't idle while dead. His spirit's learned a few very crucial secrets in King's Landing (fortunately, it didn't venture any further out), such as Adrian being the Vulture King and his hatred of the Tyrells, Jon's Secret Identity and through logic Tony's as well, and the Spiders.
• According to Jane, Thanos is moving to block off movement between worlds, because he's scared of Ultron's existence. Let that sink in for a moment.
• Bruce reveals what he learned of the Doom to Dany — the Valyrians' efforts to turn themselves into Physical Gods culminated in the creation of Apocalypse, who in this setting is closer to an Eldritch Abomination. Being a massive giant, it took nearly the entire population working together to kill him, of which there were only five survivors, who died soon after from their wounds. And Apocalypse's blood ended up poisoning the land, making it a wasteland where every living thing mutates into a horrible monstrosity — Bruce's transformation into the Hulk was because of a small cut on his hand was exposed to contaminated water. The story disturbs Dany enough that she decides to walk on the ground with Bruce instead of indulging in flight, no longer viewing her new powers as an unqualified blessing.
• Doctor Octopus makes his proper debut, casually trouncing the Spiders in battle. Also, by all appearances, his tentacles in this story are organic.
• When Cersei ordered Qyburn escorted out of the city and killed to silence him, he responded by not only singlehandedly killing her men but utterly dismembering them, keeping their remains on display in his new lab as a subtle warning.
• Being bonded with Carnage has somehow made Euron even more crazy and bloodthirsty than he already was. And now Ultron has recruited him for his war...
• As the Spiders in their regular clothes are conferring with Varys and Natasha in the Red Keep, Doctor Octopus enters the room, politely inquires what they're talking about, and cheerily goes to fetch some books related to the discussion. A trembling Gwen asks Varys who was that, and he replies that was the new Master of Coin, who he views as trustworthy, or at least what passes for trustworthy in King's Landing. A monstrous criminal is the Master of Coin, and is skilled enough to pull the wool over the Master of Whispers.
• Mace Tyrell sheds his affable image to reveal he controls most of the criminals in King's Landing through a network as part of his plots to help gain control. And when Cersei attempts to kill him, Margaery nearly kills her by pulling her arms so hard that they are dislocated to then force them back in place, before using her powers to put the former Queen in an And I Must Scream situation. What makes this more unnerving is that Mace doesn't drop the affable tone as he admits all of this to Cersei.
• Sandor's conversation with the Night's Queen starts out disturbing and gets even creepier when she starts growing and changing her body right before his eyes. Even creepier, Sandor is so under her thrall that he immediately rationalizes that she was always like that.