Nightmare Fuel / A Clash of Kings

• The demonic shadow creatures used by Stannis to assassinate people. Even more disturbing is the revelation of Melisandre's rather unconventional method of transporting them: they are Stannis's children, birthed by Melisandre.
  • With Renly, his shadow appeared to be moving on its own then it stabbed him in the chest.
• The Mountain's March and subsequent use of Harrenhal as a prison camp may be some of the most brutally realistic depictions of war crimes in the entire series. Arya is forced to watch as multiple men, women and children get tortured to death on the way to Harrenhal, a toddler is bludgeoned with a mace for crying for his father, and Gregor Clegane in general shows absolutely no mercy.
  • Several peasant girls are raped by soldiers. The most beautiful one is raped by four or five men every night until she hits one with a rock. Gregor makes everyone watch as he beheads her with his sword, ordering her body to be left for the wolves.
  • The old man-at-arms, Chiswyck, recounting how Ser Gregor led his men on a gang-rape of a thirteen year old innkeeper's daughter and killed her younger brother for walking in on it. Even worse is that Gregor only did this because he was in a bad mood after losing the Hand's Tourney, and the innkeeper was annoying him unintentionally. And Chiswyck thinks this story is absolutely hilarious because after Gregor and his men were done raping the girl, he made her father give back some of the money he "spent" on her because he wasn't satisfied with her "service".
  • A young mother volunteers herself to be tortured and interrogated if they'll spare her daughter. Then the next day, Gregor has the daughter tortured too, just to make sure her mother didn't leave anything out.
  • After the Boltons and the Brave Companions retake Harrenhal, the women who slept with Lannister soldiers are stripped naked and put in stocks to be raped by the Bolton soldiers. Goodwife Amabel tells Arya the same will happen to her when the Lannisters retake the castle, and threatens to sodomize her with a broom handle. She's only stopped when the girl throws the bucket of water she's carrying at her face.
    He will fall too, Harrenhal pulls them all down in the end. Lord Tywin's won now, he'll be marching back with all his power, and then it will be his turn to punish the disloyal. And don't think he won't know what you did! I may have a turn at you myself. Harra had an old broom, I'll save it for you. The handle’s cracked and splintery—
• Dany's trip into the House of the Undying in Qarth, where she encounters visions such as rat men raping a beautiful woman (a metaphor for the War of the Five Kings' devastation of Westeros), dead men feasting with severed hands (metaphor for The Red Wedding), a man with a wolf head sitting on the Iron Throne foreshadowing Robb Stark's fate; (whose eyes follow her with "mute appeal") and a dragon bursting from Mirri Maz Duur's head (metaphor for Dany's hatching of her dragons), and which ends with the Undying whispering and screaming in her skull while sitting under a great, blue, rotting heart; they then try to sap Dany of her life-force and eat her alive.
  • Just read this extract from the same scene and try not to quail.
  It seemed as though she had walked for another hour before the long hall finally ended in a steep stone stair, descending into darkness. Every door, opened or closed, had been to her left. Dany looked back behind her. The torches were going out, she realised with a start of fear. Perhaps twenty still burned. Thirty at most. One more guttered out even as she watched, and the darkness came a little further down the hall, creeping toward her. And as she listened it seemed as if she heard something else coming, shuffling and dragging itself slowly along the faded carpet.
  • Drogon hears it too!
• Ramsay Snow's treatment of Lady Hornwood, an elderly woman who he forces to marry him to acquire her lands, then rapes and locks her in a tower without food. She starves to death, but not before eating some of her own fingers. Given what we see him do in the later books, though, it's equally possible he flayed her fingers and she chewed them off to stop the pain.
• Jojen's green-dreams, such as the one about "Reek" skinning Bran and Rickon's faces. Then the one about the sea coming to Winterfell and the drowned bodies, foreshadowing the Ironborn attack.
• During the war-induced food shortages in King's Landing, widespread hunger starts to drive the people mad. A baker is roasted alive in his own oven by a mob that claimed he charged too much for bread.
  Tyrion's narration: Prices had risen sickeningly high on greens, roots, flour, and fruit, and Tyrion did not want to think about what sorts of flesh might be going into the kettles of the pot-shops down in Flea Bottom. Fish, he hoped.
  • Combined with the peasants' growing hatred of the Lannisters for their cruelty and the nobility for eating well while the poor starve, tensions finally explode on the day Myrcella sails for Dorne, when someone throws a handful of dung at Joffrey as the royal procession rides by, triggering a riot. The mob screams insults at the nobles, shouts for bread, and pelts them with stones, shit, and rotten vegetables as they flee back to the castle. Lollys Stokeworth (a mentally handicapped woman) is pulled from her horse and gang-raped behind a tanner's shop, Aron Santagar gets held down by four men and has his head bashed in with a cobblestone, the fat High Septon is torn to pieces by the mob, Tyrek Lannister disappears without a trace, and Preston Greenfield is found dead, stabbed and hacked so brutally that his corpse is "red-brown from head to heel".
    • And, of course, it's Joffrey who really kicks things off by behaving like the little monster he is, when he starts screaming for the culprit's head.
• Jaime's recollection to Catelyn of how Eddard's brother Brandon (her fiancee before she married Ned) and their father Rickard died: after Brandon heard that Prince Rhaegar had apparently absconded with his little sister Lyanna, he went to King's Landing with a handful of friends and rode into the Red Keep's courtyard, demanding Rhaegar come out and face him. Rhaegar wasn't there however, and King Aerys Targaryen had the lot of them arrested for plotting to kill his son. Catelyn, knowing some of the details, relates that Aerys demanded the fathers of the young men come to answer for their son's crimes and when they did, killed them all. Jaime, however, who was present, goes into further detail; Lord Rickard Stark demanded the right to defend his son's innocence through Trial by Combat, which Aerys agreed to. Rickard armed and armoured himself for battle, expecting to face one of the Kingsguard, only for Aerys to tell him that fire was the champion of House Targaryen: Rickard was hung from the rafters with two of the Mad King's pyromancers keeping a fire blazing under him, and told that the only way to prove his son's innocence was to not burn. At the same time, Brandon was brought into the hall tied to a post by a rope around his neck and a sword placed just out of his reach and told the only way to save his father was to cut them both free using the sword. Brandon tried, but the more he struggled to reach the sword, the tighter the rope around his neck became until he ultimately strangled himself, while Lord Rickard was cooked alive in his own armour. Jaime remembers that the look of disgust on his face was so visible the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard (who Jaime describes as better man than him and a true knight) had to take him aside and point out they were sworn to protect the king, not judge him.
  • This bears emphasis: imagine seeing someone you love dying horrifically. The way to free yourself to save them is right in front of you, but just barely out of reach. You struggle to reach it, but the more you struggle, the harder it is to breathe. You know you're just being tricked into making your death more agonizing, but you have no choice, so long as there's a chance, no matter how slim, that you could succeed. But you grow weaker and weaker, and your attempts grow more feeble, and your last thought before you die is that you failed. That is why Jaime felt he had to kill Aerys.
  • Jamie's comments that there were "trials of a sort" before describing what happened. His plural use of "trials" suggests Brandon's companions and their fathers may or may not have died in quite the same way but were almost certainly subjected to similar sadistic games. This also raises the question of whether Brandon's young squire survived due to being deliberately spared or had to go through such an ordeal but somehow survived.
  • Jaime was the youngest knight of the Kingsguard ever and he describes himself at that time as "full of cocksure arrogance and empty chivalry". Whatever dreams he had of being a true knight, brave and chivalrous, have died then and there thanks to Aerys. He was only 15 years old as he witnessed the torture of the prisoners and subsequent rape of the queen by the king, unable to do anything to stop or prevent it. He was 17 when he killed the king and is still getting scorn from others for doing it.
• Near the Gods Eye, Arya finds a wooden gibbet strung with corpses so rotted and bloated they hardly look like people at all, their eyes and faces eaten away by crows. Of the sixth corpse, nothing remains but a single leg, tangled in chains and swaying in the breeze.
• The effigies of the Seven in Dragonstone's sept being burned in tribute to R'hllor in Davos' first chapter. By itself, it wouldn't be especially disturbing to anyone except the Faith's followers in-universe, except that Davos' narration makes it sound as if he's seeing subtle signs of actual, pained, human reactions from the silent, burning gods. Considering how there are most certainly supernatural forces in play in the world and how often similar symbolic visions turn out to be true, it might even be that the Seven are also real (in some form or another) and if so, that the sacrifice is actually harming them.
  "The Maiden lay athwart the Warrior, her arms widespread as if to embrace him. The Mother seemed almost to shudder as the flames came licking up her face. A longsword had been thrust through her heart, and its leather grip was alive with flame. The Father was on the bottom, the first to fall. Davos watched the hand of the Stranger writhe and curl as the fingers blackened and fell away one by one, reduced to so much glowing charcoal."
• While traveling, Yoren's group comes across the remains of a destroyed village, with burned bodies impaled on stakes atop the walls. They find a dying woman whose arm ends in a bloody stump, only saying, "Please" over and over. She dies soon after they find her, and they bury her under a weeping willow. When the wind rustles through the branches, Arya thinks she can hear them whispering, "Please. Please. Please."