Nightmare Fuel / A Storm of Swords

• The Red Wedding, especially Catelyn's raving insanity, just before they kill her. Sweet Jesus, that bit when she laughs and rips apart her own face borders on Nausea Fuel in the extreme as well. Not to mention the brutal mutilation and desecration of Robb's body.
  • And you thought the drums in the deep scene in the mines of Moria were scary? Try the single drum belonging to a musician rather than a war-band of mountain orcs. BOOM... DOOM... BOOM... DOOM... BOOM... DOOM...
• This is more of a psychological thing, but that scene in ASOS when Roose Bolton very calmly tells Jaime that the smartest political move Vargo Hoat could have made when he captured him was to abuse and mistreat him so badly that by the time Bolton heard about it, he would be too afraid of Tywin's revenge to ever consider letting him go home is its own special kind of awful.
• "They'll be here soon, the sons."
• Dany's march to Meereen. To taunt her, the Great Masters of the city nail a disemboweled slave child to each milepost along the roadside, with an arm outstretched, pointing towards the city. They do this for a hundred and sixty-three miles.
  • And when Dany conquers the city:
    Meereenese Noblewoman: How many must you have to spare us?
    Daenerys: One hundred and sixty-three.
  • Particularly as Daenerys doesn't really show very just motivations for it, wanting to make herself feel better for the children but from the sound of it randomly murdering a group of the elite without even checking who was responsible.
• The Unsullied, slave soldiers who have been put through insane 'succeed or die' (not an exaggeration) torture intended to deprive them of identity and self-preservation. A slaver boasts that he could order an Unsullied to stand in a spot for as long as necessary, and he would do so until he dropped dead, and another character comments that they would willingly kill themselves if their master ordered them to. Then there's their training, which such highlights as having no names, but the ones they draw in a lottery every day, being given a dog, raising it for a year, then being forced to either kill it or be fed to the others, and being ordered to purchase a slave baby, kill it in front of its mother, then pay the owner afterwards for his loss (and Kraznys mo Nakloz laughs at Dany's initial assumption that the coin is given to the mother). Needless to say, it feels very gratifying to see Dany turn them on their former masters.
  • Astapor in general is a nightmare inducing city, with the slaver masters having grown fat off the blood & suffering of the slaves. Disobedient slaves are punished by being half flayed, and betting on whether a bear will eat a little slave boy dipped in honey before it eats one dipped in blood or rotting fish is considered fine entertainment. "Bricks and blood made Astapor, and bricks and blood her people" indeed...
• Lysa Arryn trying to murder her own niece by holding her over a six hundred foot drop. If that's not bad enough, the man she loves then kills her instead. To make it creepier, she didn't scream. She just fell through the Moon Door and disappeared.
• The prophesies of the Ghost of High Heart.
  I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a fish. Dead she drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open, oh, I woke from terror.
• Sam's recollections of the battle on the Fist of the First Men in his first chapter. It's no wonder he can't stop crying.
  • The undead bear that the Others use as a shock weapon in the battle drips with this trope. Sam recalls most of the fur and flesh has sloughed off its body, to the point its skull is visible, and it smashes aside any attempt to stop it during the fighting: Thoren Smallwood gets his head torn off with a single blow from its claws when he tries to bring it down.
  • After the Fist of the First Men, the Others continue to pursue the Night's Watch as they retreat to Craster's Keep. Since they have no weapons that can harm the creatures, all the Night's Watch can do is arm themselves with torches in the hope the fire will keep the Others at bay. Anyone who falls behind is never seen again, save for periodic blood-curdling screams when the Others catch them.
• In the village of Stoney Sept, Arya sees soldiers hanging in crow cages as punishment for killing eight people at Tumbler's Falls, naked and exposed to the elements to die slowly. One of the soldiers raped someone, so he was castrated and what's left of his genitals is "a crusted brown hole crawling with maggots". A fat man stuffed into one of the crow cages is burned red all over from the sun, and his eyes look like boiled eggs floating in a pool of blood.
• Lady Stoneheart, seen through the eyes of Merrett Frey. After Catelyn's throat was slashed by the Freys at the Red Wedding and her corpse was thrown into the river to rot for three days, Beric Dondarrion gave her the kiss of life to revive her, exchanging his life for hers. Now she leads the Brotherhood Without Banners, and she's dead set on revenge against those who killed her family.
  Her cloak and collar hid the gash his brother’s blade had made, but her face was even worse than he remembered. The flesh had gone pudding soft in the water and turned the color of curdled milk. Half her hair was gone and the rest had turned as white and brittle as a crone’s. Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin and black blood where she had raked herself with her nails. But her eyes were the most terrible thing. Her eyes saw him, and they hated.
  
  “She don’t speak,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “You bloody bastards cut her throat too deep for that. But she remembers.” He turned to the dead woman and said, “What do you say, m’lady? Was he part of it?”
  
  Lady Catelyn’s eyes never left him. She nodded.
  
  Merrett Frey opened his mouth to plead, but the noose choked off his words. His feet left the ground, the rope cutting deep into the soft flesh beneath his chin. Up into the air he jerked, kicking and twisting, up and up and up...