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Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- The description of Cerea’s body as perceived by a pony in the first chapter. It gives the reader a very good idea of why the fear response to a centaur is instinctual for ponies.
- Cerea’s fever-induced delerium while running through the wild zone. It is made explicitly clear that she would have died of her injuries without the Princesses.
- The description of the road that lead Cerea to Equestria. Running through alien ever-changing environments while being chased by a wall of nothingness...
- The root angler. Most of the debris around it were bones.
- The neurocypher. A monster that can scramble its prey's brains, then slowly lower itself onto the disoriented pony, mouth-first.
- The summoning ritual is one in-universe. The ability for this many unicorns to combine their magic is explicitly called a weapons-grade working. The Princesses are essentially treating it as a weapon of mass destruction with no known counter.
- The descriptions of the sudden losses of magic are horrifying.
- The first victim, a pegasus courier, almost plummets from the sky.
- The second, an earth pony merchant, has his enchanted cart drained first, and only has a second to realize something's gone wrong before it gets him.
— the forest blurs, all four knees go weak as his blood roars in his ears and there's a single moment when he realizes that sound is the only thing he can truly hear, something he's about to test with his own scream —- A zebra potioneer collapses, possibly because the potions he'd consumed before the journey had gone inert while inside of him and while laying on the ground realizes that he can no longer recognize the plants around him.
- Untreated platinum is this in-Universe.Nightwatch: "...it absorbs magic. Constantly, from everything — unless you know how to tell it not to, and that's really hard to do. And risky. So someone can wear the translator, and the platinum won't absorb from them. Just the air. And any thaums it takes in go to the spells. But when you get a lot of platinum in one place, and it's not treated...it just keeps pulling in power. Small pieces can leak a little, unless they're stabilized. Big chunks... they're more stable. They hold the magic. And when it can't hold any more, when there's nowhere for the power to go..."
- In chapter 59, Wordia Spinner interviews the arsonist who burned down Nightwatch's apartment. She starts to realize with slowly growing horror that this mare perfectly represents the end product of all the distortions, insinuations, and half-truths she's been writing in the Tattler for years, twisted to serve the fanaticism of CUNET. And all this happens before the carriage they're riding in suddenly loses all its magic and capsizes in a wild zone.
- Absolutely everything about Tartarus. It's an Eldritch Location which is at least partially aware, capable of rearranging its own geography and generating illusions to torment its captives. It can muffle or interfere with sounds, but will always let the sounds of screaming pass unhindered. Inside it, Cerberus becomes an abomination with an incredibly painful venom rather than the friendly three-headed dog he is outside. And there's the little factoid that, while inmates can kill each other, nothing you can do within Tartarus will ever let you take your own life.
- Chapter 77. Oh Chapter 77.
- The first in-person appearance of Tirek. He's healthy.
- Chapter 78 just builds on what makes Tirek so terrifying. He's revealed to be part of a highly mutagenic race of unknown origins from somewhere outside of Equestria, where the centaur form is just one of several possible forms a member can take. He was so envious of being unable to use magic that he surgically modified himself in an attempt to gain the power to manipulate magic for himself. Instead, he found himself cursed with a Horror Hunger; now he couldn't gain sustenance except by feeding on magic. When his brother "betrayed him" by seeking to find a way to undo the surgery, he killed him, then began terrorizing Equestria.
- Comes to the climax in chapter 79:
- The surgery that Tirek underwent? Implanting platinum wire into his bones.
- Despite the centuries in torment and his repeated defeats, Tirek refuses to give up his mad obsession with having magic. Even when Cerea suggests that, since now that he does have the fine control to only drain a small amount of magic at a time, he could take up a more peaceful existence by only feeding on what he needs, Tirek refuses. His logic: the only way he can possibly hope to end his hunger permanently is by taking all the magic. Even if this means wiping out Menajeria... and then moving on to the next world. And then the next world. And then the next, ad infinitum.
- The last vestige of Discord's essence inside Tirek has given him the power to manipulate the wire under his flesh, extruding it from his body to use as Combat Tentacles; he's been able to drain spots far away from his Tartarus cell by extruding the narrow wires through stone and earth for miles, then start draining where the tips end up.
- In the end, Cerea realizes that Tirek is such an existential threat to not just Menajeria, but to The Multiverse, that she is forced to kill him by stabbing him through the heart with her own Anti-Magic sword, willingly sacrificing her life to do so.
- The steady deterioration of the arsonist's mental state carries its own form of horror. She starts out by telling herself she's not to blame for the fire in Nightwatch's apartment (which spread throughout the building and put a foal in the hospital). After CUNET moves her to a safehouse in Ponyville, she takes up the idea of murdering foals who don't adhere to the group's ideals and begins adapting her magic to that end. She starts to outline this viewpoint to Wordia in Chapter 59, but one of her guards stops her just in time. Then she gets arrested and locked up in a cell at the palace, worsening her slide into madness — and after the mob breaks her out, she threatens to strangle two foals to death unless Cerea lets her go. She is ultimately committed to a mental hospital and will stay there until/unless she is judged fit to stand trial for her crimes.
