Nightmare Fuel / Fallen London

Fallen London is a largely text based web game with clever storylines and an interesting Victorian atmosphere. Some of the descriptions, however, are pure Nightmare Fuel. Just be glad that we aren't living in this timeline...

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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General

• What are the Sorrow Spiders? The story goes that spiders drink from your eyes while you sleep. Sorrow-spiders bite off a whole eye. They get their name from the tears that flow from the remaining eye, and they don't steal eyes to eat them. They use them as eggs.
  • A later storyline reveals that they can travel through mirrors. You will never look at that full length mirror in your bedroom the same way again.
  • Additional information from Sunless Sea reveals that they do not, in fact, come from Parabola as previously expected. These horrific things are not eldritch beings from the dream realm, or something born out of Neathy strangeness, but something that exists in our world; they come from a place "between stars" and therefore the Judgements are both fully aware of them and permit their existence. Which means that, in theory, they could be on the surface.
  • Delve too deeply in the docks, and you might find your way to one of their nests, presided over by a spider-council. What is a spider-council, you ask? Oh, just a hideous monstrosity created from the forms of dozens of component spiders. Like wax, the game says. It speaks. And it wants your eyes...
  What is a Spider-council? Sorrow-spiders are already repulsive. Spider-councils are what happens when sorrow-spiders go bad.
  • A story in the House of Chimes hints that Spider-council come from the eyes of people who have been exposed to the Correspondence. And, if you happen to go down the Watchful stories, your exposure to the sigils is only a matter of time. Which means YOUR eyes are going to be some of the most prized.
• The Cantigaster basically is a mass of poisonous flesh that Was Once a Man, he got that way due to a Deal with the Devil made by his then-fiancee, the Duchess, after he was bitten by a snake. His life was saved but at a horrible price.
• The very concept of "snow" in an underground cavern.
  It must be, in part at least, frozen water: when it melts, it refreezes as black ice. Tiny, desperate fish and insects can be seen frozen in the ice, no larger than a fingernail, eyes distorted with fear.
  • The stuff somehow enables you to create entire living beings out of it, too. It does horrible things to anyone examining it without being careful, having destroyed at least one microscope and done terrible damage to its users. It explodes souls exposed to it in a terrible shower of sparks and fire. Creatures ingesting it either die or mutate into miniature copies of the Bazaar. And from what you later learn, in its liquid form it can ensure Death by Despair just from drinking it. Turns out "Tears of an Eldritch Abomination" is a terrible, terrible substance.
• "Welcome, delicious friend." It's charming yet so very frightening.
• Make no mistake, while usually the Correspondence is a fairly humorous Brown Note, it's still very much something mortals shouldn't be meddling with.
  By day you write. By night you dream of vast frozen gulfs of space. Behind you, something impossibly huge is screaming.
• The entire game can get scarier when the potential futures are taken into account. Sunless Skies's premise is the stars being murdered and the Empress herself abandoning London.
• For a very human horror, the card to gain the Midnighter profession has you covered. While a child, a woman who would later become a queen of the great game burnt down her orphanage with the children still inside to cover up her transfer to a notable family (or possibly because she could). It's also implied the children did not come back from that death and worse still she got away with it. Until you decided to get involved...
  • For a wonderful description of the aftermath is quote from the detective assigned the case who still remembers the crime. In vivid detail.
  "The orphanage was her first day on the job. Ten minutes a copper and pulling corpses from the smoke, their skin crackling like well-fried bacon."

Ambitions

• In the "Light Fingers" Ambition, The Orphanage, in its entirety. People are only sent here if their parents are dead (or murdered), and the entire place is a strange sort of asylum/hospital dedicated to creating and testing psychoses in the inmates, using the mind-affecting excretions of an eldritch monster.
  • It's revealed later that Mr. Fires is the one who had the Orphanage created, in order to force/manufacture love stories for the Bazaar. Those 'experiments' involve using the moon-milk to force inmates into falling in an obsessive, unhealthy 'love' with anything shown to them. People, objects, places...hell, Clara was forced to look at the Orphanage itself when she was trapped there! Nobody is immune to the effects of the moon-milk...
• In the Light Fingers ambition, you're treated to a nasty piece of work called Poor Edward. He's an agent of the Masters who tells you to drop investigating the Orphanage, otherwise he'll bury you alive because killing you wouldn't really work in the Neath. He then gives you some herbs that would erase your memory. When you finally get to the Orphanage, if you aren't good at sneaking around it, you'll discover Edward was not bluffing and will bury you alive.
  You've moved to a new area: A small, velvet lined box. You can't see anything. You have just enough space to twist onto your belly or your back. Oh dear God. Oh dear God.
  • The mysterious gifts that you start receiving from him after a certain point in the Ambition become this, if you choose to open them rather than disposing of them. The first gift is a jar containing his parents' hearts that he's had since he was a child in the Orphanage. How precious! The second gift? It's filled with soil...and a small shovel, to "commemorate" that time he buried you alive. The third gift is probably the most normal-looking gift at first glance: a matryoshka doll shaped like you...with him on the inside. And finally, the fourth gift is perhaps the scariest gift of all in that he gives you his skinned-off face. You see, Poor Edward has fallen madly, desperately in love with you from that time when his face was splashed with the moon-milk. He still has a burning hatred for you...a hatred only matched by his artificial love for you.
• There's a good reason the Light Fingers ambition is mentioned so often in this page. After all, you need to actually let your Nightmares reach 8 or higher in order to make progress. And what's one of the ways you can raise your Nightmare that becomes available? Why, listening to the Fading Music-Hall Singer sing is a surefire way.
  Songs that slide from her throat like a snake. Like a writhing knot of eels...The songs work their way into your dreams.
• Light Fingers continues the horror, as you venture to the roof of the Zee. It is full of literally twisted abominations called the Starved Men. One particularly dogged one is chased off. But slowly, it begins clawing its way into your Zeppelin. And when you reach a modicum of safety, by barely flying past thousands of these abominations, you can see how they become twisted—they literally stretch themselves, tearing their bodies. And then you undergo Sanity Slippage when you finally prepare to milk the Moon-Mother.
  • SHE EMBRACES ALL CHILDREN SHE EMBRACES ALL CHILDREN SHE EMBRACES ALL CHILDREN
  • After all, a mother loves her child.
• The end of the "wedding" between you and Poor Edward is this, if you betrayed him and let your Hybrid decides his fate. It'll shoot its moon-milk into his face, and if your Hybrid has higher Moon-Misery than Humanity, it will convince Edward that he wants to be eaten...before devouring him.
  • And if it has more Humanity, it will force Edward to look at the Parabola-Orphanage and trap him in the reflection the nightmare forever. Note: this is also what you will do to him, if you decide to pour the moon-milk on his face yourself.
• The climax of "Nemesis" has you discover yet another dreadful form of Prisoner's Honey: Cardinal's Honey, which transports you to the dreams of the dead. A heavily-diluted and antidoted drop of the stuff has you Buried Alive and nearly lost forever as the dead plead with you to leave them alone (just like with Gaoler's Honey from earlier on). This is what you pick as the murder weapon for Mr. Cups, who you eventually inflict the full dose on, leaving it phasing in and out of the dream, with half its body worm-riddled and rotten away like a corpse. It ends up begging you to spare it, offering the return of your lost loved one in exchange for the antidote you just happen to still have on you. You can refuse it, and even more cruelly, empty the bottle just out of arm's reach as Cups futilely tries to reach it before being pulled down a final time. And the cherry on top? Your character does not get Nightmares from the whole ordeal. Considering the "everyday" horrors of the Bazaar (like getting caught during a heist) can send you straight to the State of Some Confusion, what kind of monster have you become that you can sleep soundly after this?
• In Heart's Desire, the Merry Gentleman is among your rivals. Yes, the one mentioned in the Dreams section below, and he's ready to mess with your mind again. Thought one was enough? Have a full city of them. And it’s only the beginning...
  The people you pass on the street – in their tall, chimney-like hats and their long coats that drag behind them like folded wings – they think you can't tell that they're watching you.

Dreams

• If your Nightmares quality reaches five, you will get this event:
  In the street, you pass a tall, cheerful man with a brisk manner, a stovepipe hat and a row of bright brass buttons down the front of his coat. He winks familiarly as you pass and spreads his hands: eight fingers. You've seen him before. Of course you have. He was beside your bed when you woke this morning.
  • And this storylet follows you everywhere you go, except into death, exile, or prison. Even leaving the city towards the Hinterlands won't help.
  Is he here too? Even here?
  Outside the station, you pass a tall, cheerful man. His buttons wink. His gloves... yes. Eight fingers. Of course.
  • The 'failure' of the particular event: That night you dream of a tall building lit by cheery fires. A sign reads CLEFT FOR THEE HIDE IN ME. The walls are wrong. The walls are wrong. Quite possibly one of the most disturbing lines in the game. Compounding this is the fact he shares some kind of connection with Albert, King Consort. "Cleft for Thee hide in Me" is a jumbled reprise to a line from Rock Of Ages, a hymn which was well known as being Albert's favorite and was actually what was played to him when he was on his deathbed. The original line goes: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee". The 'Rock' that replies in the Fallen London nightmare appears to be anything but God.
• When your Nightmares gets to 6, you start to draw Recurring Dreams cards that cannot be discarded. The only way to get rid of them is to play them, which raises your Nightmares even more. It really drives home how inescapable your nightmares have become. In particular, you begin seeing things that aren't there, and your dreams begin merging with reality.
• Even though the Recurring Dreams storylines increase your character's Nightmares attribute, they aren't actually that bad... Except for the ones that unlock at Nightmares 6, where the boundary between dreams and reality seems to break down.
• Reaching Nightmare 7 by itself.
  THEY ARE COMING THEY ARE COMING THEY ARE COMING
• Some of the recurring dreams storylets can be rather disturbing, especially the Is Someone There? collection.
  You are standing between two mirrors. Your reflection smiles, so you smile. Your reflection moves its hand, so you move yours. It takes a very long while for you to realise that this is the wrong way around.
• The "dream about fireworks" you can get if your lodgings are rat-infested:
  You dream that you're standing, holding a candle, in a classroom filled with cheerfully shouting children. You touch the candle to their heads, one by one. Each time you do, their skin crisps away to reveal a child-sized mass of rats. Awake. Awake.

Locations

• Everything about the Iron Republic. Everything. You can see it right from the description:
  Freedom from laws and tyrants. All laws and tyrants, without exception. This place is exceptionally dangerous. You may be permanently changed.
  • When they say all laws, they mean all laws. Includes the laws of logic, physics, and chance.
  • The picture used for the Iron Republic Streets location: a close-up of someone's eye as they're being chased by a mob, with said mob surrounded by flames.
  • For one part of the Seeking the Name storyline you'll be asked to give a reason why you're seeking the name. The questioner (themselves a person freed from the the horrors of Seeking) gives a mix of pity, irritation, or understanding for your choices. But if you say it's due to your visit to the Republic...
  "Have you ever been to the Iron Republic?"
  Things are different there.
  A long silence
  Then a sound. Is she... is she weeping? "Yes," she says very quietly. "Just once."
• The Cave of the Nadir. Filled with a colour man was probably not meant to see, that rapidly robs you of your memories... and causes your skin and bone to grow over your eyes.
  • Occasionally, you find the victims' skulls, their eye sockets completely filled with bone. But the Irrigo's soaked into them, so much that simply having one can erode your mind.
  No. Parts of you are crumbling. No. No!
• Polythreme. The city is enchanted with a magic that makes inanimate objects alive. This doesn't sound so bad until you realize the implications — as the sidebar gleefully points out, this includes things like candles.
  • Best illustrated by a card you can get if you play as a Clay Man:
    "IN POLYTHREME THE BED I SLEPT ON WAS A SLAVE. THE ROOM WHERE I SLEPT WAS HACKED FROM SCREAMING STONE. THE WATER I DRANK BEGGED ME TO STOP. THEY PAID ME IN COIN THAT PLOTTED MY DOWNFALL. THE MEMORIES ARE TROUBLING. THIS PLACE IS BETTER."
  • The city itself is actually surprisingly upbeat. It comes off as more quirky and bizarre than legitimately terrifying. (Even the option to write a travelogue condemning it as a horrible place actually comes off as comical, because the only "horrors" you end up writing about are the milder ones, like underwear coming alive.) Though if you let Troubled Waters rise too high on the way there, you get to experience some of the actual horror in your own ropes tying you up right as the ship itself comes alive, and decides it doesn't feel like cooperating. You then spend several days being helplessly dragged all over the Sea of Voices until this unnatural life dies down, and leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere.
  • The Corsair updates have brought a new fright with them in the form of bounty hunters from Polythreme. As in the ships are hunting you. And thanks to their sheer size they're much more lively than usual.
    Your bosun contends that the vessel was simply attempting to ram you, to punch a hole in your hull with a submerged and hidden bow-spike. But you know the truth, and so do your crew. You stood at the railing as the Polythremean hulk charged towards you, heedless of cannon or torpedo, and opened its hungry mouth.
  • You learn more about it in the Heart's Desire ambition and it gets troubling all over again. Polythreme is what happened to the lover of the First City's ruler. He was dying, the Masters took the city into the Neath and put an immense diamond into his chest to make him immortal, he became an animated statue that then developed into an entire island. He is the island and the city. The diamond went to pieces long ago and sometimes part of the city breaks off into a Clay Man carrying a fragment, which the Bazaar imports for cheap labor. Clay Men are docile and willing but upset to be born and resigned to their fate; Unfinished Men are born of Polythreme's nightmares.
• The third coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers. It's where the tigers keep humans locked up in horrible conditions, tucked away where few people will ever see them, and apparently held there indefinitely. It even gives your character nightmares just from walking around and hearing the screams!
  "Get me out of here. I don't belong here. I'm only here because they think I'm possessed. Why am I here? I don't know how my family will eat now. I'm not possessed, I'm not possessed, I'm not possessed. I'm only here because I chased a cat! Where am I? For God's sake let me out. You there! I'm only in here because I organised a strike. Give me a mirror! Give me a mirror!"
  • It turns out at least some of them are not human, and are blackly dangerous monsters. You only find this out after you've had a number of chances to free many of them.
• Uncovering a Night-Whisper in the Forgotten Quarter. Whatever it was that your character found in that box, they were not pleased.
  What is this? No... ...no...
• You can spend Appalling Secrets as one of the ways to gain supplies for an expedition in the Forgotten Quarter. The flavor text tells you that you have learned what you need to avoid in the Quarter. Including Mt. Nomad, "whatever that means." People who have played Sunless Sea know what Mt. Nomad means. The Quarter can be a little creepy on a good day. Going in knowing people are scared of THAT being there is just terrifying.
• Late, late in the game, near the end of the Great Hellbound Railway, lie the Hurlers, standing stones inscribed with the Discordance. If you thought the Correspondence was bad, with it setting everything on fire, burning off your brows and often scorching your eyes, then you've likely never walked in such frostbite your lips froze shut and the water in your very eyeballs grew sharpened ice crystals. And if you want to learn more about what it is (or rather what it isn't), you're doing to be visiting the Boatman via some very unpleasant methods. Getting your brains scooped out and being eaten by a whole room full of rats type of unpleasant.
  • You can cooperate with Mr Stones and build a trading outpost there. Then you can rob its very secure vault, and let visiting Stones know you did it. The angry Master will release its autonomous teeth (you usually only find out about that Master fact in Bag a Legend) and reduce with them the building to dust, and remove the clerk from her post, for you to find her later. In many different places all over the station.
• Irem has its moments once you start working Fate's loom, and visiting different potential futures ahead of you. Some of them can be fairly unsettling...
  • The Brilliant Future is more low-key, as it takes a little diving to start realizing just how much of a Crapsaccharine World the sunlit London is; the sheer level of power the Ministry was given over everything and everyone, and the way it's used to keep the populace placated and out of the loop, is more Orwellian than anything the current Fifth City has. And then there's the way the omnipresent Lily-Balm (the actual "sunscreen" that keeps Londoners from burning up) is obtained, harvested from captive devils.
  • The Altered Future is less of a future, and more of an ocean full of literal dead ends to your threads: All those little deaths you just didn't come back from one day, painful yet ignominious. Drownings, bleeding out in various places from various sources, poisonings one and all... the only way you can navigate this "place" is through sense-memories, all of them varying degrees of unpleasant.
  • The Ruinous Future is both tragic and horrific, presenting you with a Fifth City so utterly destroyed not even the Rattus Faber survived. Even the False-Stars have fallen off the roof, dead and putrid, their glim turning nearly black and lightless. The people are, of course, also dead, but in ways that would make even Tomb-Colonists nervous: Everyone rotting alive needing to patch themselves up with dwindling fabric, not to mention starving to death yet unable to die and forced to dig through the ruins for anything that could even approach sustenance... that is, if they aren't so far gone they can't even eat in the first place. You never get even the vaguest idea of what could've caused this, even just a single possibility. Your character, who can otherwise handle the other futures (including the previous horrors), is desperate to get out. To quote the Loom storylets:
    Get me out of here. Get me out of here! GET ME OUT OF HERE!
  • Mastered the Discordance mentioned above? You can find yourself in a Discordant future... or rather, No Future. You can end up in a place where everything is gone, every last inkling of a universe made to not exist. The only place left is the one that already didn't exist... and once there, if you take the related Destiny, you can finish off what is left. And thus ends the universe entire, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with four words made Law:
    No Thing Shall Be

Non-repeatable storylines

• One of the cards for the "Playing With Broken Toys" storyline gives you the opportunity to help a father fix a wind-up soldier toy for his daughter. If you choose to help, the soldier starts marching around, and the daughter is delighted... and then it turns and attacks the father, who runs away, though you still hear screaming. Later, they find the body... but not the toy. Unsurprisingly, your Nightmares increase as a result.
• When you're on the Velocipede Squad, you can be tasked with rescuing an informant whose cover has been blown from Dante's Grill. If you don't pedal fast enough, you arrive on the scene. There's no informant, just "a smug infernal maitre'd and a new dish of the day."
• Jack-of-Smiles is the Bazaar's version of Jack the Ripper. While he's usually harmless enough, since death isn't permanent in the Neath, he can permanently kill citizens by chopping them into bits—and that's before you learn who he really is. He's a sentient set of knives that trades hands endlessly; anyone that handles one becomes Jack. Even worse is a Fate-locked storyline where the player can choose to become Jack, which comes with a content warning for graphic text.
• The things you have to do in order to advance the Cheesemonger story are horrific and a pretty good indicator of the settings' Black-and-Grey Morality. Among the things you have to do in order to progress are incite multiple lynch mobs against the Rubbery Men, blackmail a desperate Tomb Colonist into giving up the only things he has left of his old life, and destroying the lives of innocent people. The only reprieve is you can take some sort of revenge at the end, and even that is empty; the 'best' result is to make the instigator happy, as if you take revenge nothing changes at all.
• The whole rescue sequence aboard the Presbyterate vessel Delight is unsettling, thanks to the fact the visions with and without the mask on are so radically different. The vessel that looks so prim and proper is a mess of red sap, emaciated sailors, imprisoned birds and filth everywhere...
  • Delighted challenges have a 50% chance of "success" even without the Shattered Mask equipped (with it, it's 100%), meaning your character cannot completely shut out the ship's Glamour even if they try.
  • Presbyterate interrogations. They don't make you confess... rather, they get some horrible pink parasite called a Traitor's Tongue, implant it into you, let it eat your actual tongue, read your mind and do the confessing for you. It happens to the man you found in Cline, and you find them doing it to the Naturalist.
  • The one doing the interrogation is the Second Sacristan. He looks like an Ambiguously Human figure in a robe and mask... and then, you upset his carefully arranged order within the vessel by just being there. And he reveals he's no such thing as a human as he rips his robe open and nothing but arms come pouring out. Snapping and cracking arms and claws and graspers that keep growing more inhuman joints, and growing longer, and multiplying out of nowhere, until the ship cannot hope to contain them all. The Delight goes down erupting from the inside in a mountain of hands and arms that try to drag you into the depths to the very last second. You never get to find out how the hell that happened, and all the Naturalist can say about it is that he really hopes they don't send the other Sacristans. In the chapter after that you can catch a hugely distant glimpse of the Second Sacristan in the distance... now bigger than the behemoth Midnight Whales, and actively mauling one with its thousands and thousands of arms just because it was there. A little later in Irem, one of the Naturalist's futures has the Sacristan attack London (yes, the whole city!) by flooding it and ripping it apart with its arms, in retribution for you and the Naturalist meddling with the Design.

Seasonal events

• The Mr Sacks visits. Ever wanted to see some of the Santa mythos through a spectacularly creepy, original lens?
  That night as you sleep, Mr Sacks crouches on your window-sill. His robe is the colour of salt, and his hood is trimmed with red fox-fur. I have brought you gifts, he whispers.
  • Especially when you realize that particular Mr Sacks is Mr Eaten, who is a whole refinery worth of nightmare fuel on his own.
    • One of the options when faced with this Mr Sacks is to accept a single crumb of bread from him. If you haven't figured out what that particular Sacks is, you'll figure it out when you see what you actually get from that choice. A chance to start Seeking Mr Eaten's Name.
• The Starved Man invasion of London had plenty of freaky moments, because Starved Men are Body Horror incarnate who have so mastered the Shapeling Arts they can alter themselves, others and even the very earth with just a sweep of their hands. They try to reshape London to a form that they believe will endure what's coming, leading to structures of bone that quickly collapse on themselves and rivers of rotting fat running beneath the ground. And those who try to stop them get reshaped right then and there; you witness an explicit attack of one vomiting Amber onto the hands of someone that tried to fix a building and sculpting them into useless nubs like they were simple wet clay, but they can do worse...
  They are slow to harm Londoners – though the people left with wooden skin and liquid bones would disagree.

Destinies

• Some of the Hallowmass storylets give you a peek into what could be Fallen London's endgame. In particular, this trope comes in with the Liberation of Night. You witness the Calendar Council setting off some kind of device that saps the light from everything in the Neath, along with killing the Bazaar (yes, "killing;" if you didn't know the Bazaar was alive before, you do now.) Fire and chaos erupts all over London, exacerbated by the fact that no one can see - everything has ceased to shed any light. Civilians desperately flee for the exits back to the surface while looters and sorrow spiders take over. Your character is presented with a choice over who they must save; innocent strangers, your Constant Companion, or no one, if you're that ruthless (or if this was what you planned). In any case, there's a massive loss of life (even the possibility to return from the dead in the Neath is not much consolation), and the terrifying implication that the darkness will spread to the surface and beyond to all the universe (and if you know the true significance of the Correspondence, you know how indescribably, unimaginably bad that is). It certainly paints dealings with the Revolutionaries (and the Nadir) in a different light.
  • Later, you can see it coming...^* Note that at the time, Advancing the Liberation of Night was thought to be permanent. The Railway and Parabola expansions added numerous ways to set back the Liberation and reduce or even zero out your contribution, should you choose to do so, making this much less scary.
  You have minutely contributed to the Liberation of Night.
  • In Sunless Skies, the Great Work has begun.
  • And perhaps worst of all, it's Gray-and-Grey Morality, at best-and the Calendar Council is the morally superior side in most moral estimations. The reason it's called the "Liberation"? Because it is in fact liberty from the Judgements, the uncaring, self-centered, myopic, and racist sentient stars that control the universe, by eliminating sunlight-and with it, the same heartless Great Chain that is causing the Rubbery Men such trouble and preventing humanity from being more than the constant victims of a Cosmic Horror Story. If the Liberation goes off, then all light's extinguishment will result in a world of perfect freedom. Perhaps a miserable freedom, but the very fact the people who want to extinguish light are genuinely Well Intentioned Extremists really throws how much of a Crapsack World this is into perspective.
• To elaborate on the above point: The entire reason humanity and in fact all life exists is to be food for the Judgements— they eat souls. Devils were originally created as something like brewers, distillers, and ultimately sommeliers for their celestial masters before rebelling— not because they find the practice abhorrent, mind you, but because they personally resented being slaves. They still do all kinds of nasty things to souls, up to and including using them as a power source by burning them. There is absolutely no escaping a hideous spiritual end; even what looks like the afterlife is basically a wine cellar for the Sapphir'd King, one of the most powerful Judgements in existence. The only successful attempt at talking a Judgement into trying something a little less horrific resulted in the creation of the Halved, an Eldritch Abomination among Eldritch Abominations that still manages to be better than the Sapphir'd King.
• In one potential Destiny, rather than being destroyed as the Bazaar finalizes its purchase of the Sixth City, London is abandoned by the Masters and the Traitor Empress and the ceiling crumbles to reveal the sky. Any hope of normalcy is crushed as the Sun doubles down on 'correcting' London, shining an excessive amount of light specifically over the hole surrounding the city and burning anyone who doesn't conform to the new police state's policies or truths. London effectively becomes British North Korea and is literally ruled by god.
  • In another, everything goes to hell. London is completely destroyed, and the survivors scrounge for scraps just to survive one more day.
  • And the last destiny is that you somehow attain the power of a pseudo-Judgement and then warp reality so that everything will cease to exist. What you were truly intending and whether or not you succeed is intentionally left unclear.

Exceptional Stories

• During the doll version of "The Gift" Storyline you wind up posing as a footman when the Royal Family is eating. You can't look directly at them, only by standing in front of a mirror facing it. It's made very clear that the mirror is just an illusion to avoid seeing what actually is happening. The text itself says that you should not turn around. When you finally can, the table is covered in gnawed at bones snapped and chewed by inhuman teeth. But the mirror showed pink lamb and vegetables.
  "The Bellicose Prince helps himself to a final Brussels sprout before he leaves. You hear something heavy dragged off the table and out of the room."
  • And if you do decide to turn around, you get a perfect view of the diners and the meal of the day. Mercifully, your senses flee.
  • Also it hints at what happens when a person drinks too much Gaoler's Honey. It slowly changes you until resemble something that comes from the realms of nightmares.
  • At the end of the story, where you're trapped in the web Beatrice has wrapped you in, the Captivating Princess reveals that you were the gift—to Beatrice, that is—all along. And one of the options is to let Beatrice feast on you so she can 'grow up'. It's unclear what's scarier: the small bits of what your character can remember...or the lack thereof.
  "Her needled fingers pierce your heart. Your memories of what follows are fractured; broken glass rattling in a box. She did not want your blood, though you lost plenty of that. No – she dug deeper, and dined on something less replaceable."
• In the August 2015 Exceptional Story, you can discover that sunlight mixed with moonlight can make you see a different world— specifically, a London that never fell. Cool, right? Turns out the Calendar Council is just as bad on the Surface as it is in the Neath. And they won.

Seeking Mr Eaten's Name

• The Mr Eaten storyline. It begins with a ravenous hunger in your stomach, and it only goes downhill from there...
  • Really, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name could have a Nightmare Fuel page all to its own. One action you can perform:
    Consume a Talkative Rattus Faber
    "Why are you looking at me like that? I knew a man used to look at me like that. Funny sort. Kept a candle in his - "
    Down in one
    "Wait no mmf mggl mmmmmfff!"
    The aftertaste is distinctly sewery, and you're still damnably hungry.
  • St Arthur's candle. The storylet where you get it implies you render it out of your own body fat.
  • The Nightmare Carnival. Just what the hell is up with it? Is it just you misinterpreting somewhere horrific as a warped version of something you already know? Is it you stumbling around a more-or-less harmless carnival and, in your delusions, seeing it all as some sort of hellish land? Or did your quest for the Name actually bring you closer to the truth, and let you see a seemingly innocent carnival the way it actually is? The fact the writers pulled some of their best tricks to work here only adds to it.
  • The first brave/foolish soul to get St. Erzulie's Candle sacrificed their tattoos, Profession, Notability, Destiny, and even Ambition to get it. Permanently.
    • And the worst part of the above? You don't have to do that. There's an option to get the candle that costs absolutely nothing, and the only reason not to take it is because of paranoia or sheer masochism.
  • To get St. Gawain's Candle, your character has to go through some impressive Body Horror: your head is cut off, your body sliced open, and the skeleton, organs, and muscles scraped out to leave only the hollow shell of their skin. The skin is then filled with burning hot wax (rendered from the living bodies of other Seekers) while a wick replaces the spine, running from the crown of your head to the hollow of your groin. The kicker? None of this is fatal - the Correspondence is used to keep you alive throughout. You are St. Gawain's Candle, now.
  • Some of the later actions to advance your quest in Seeking the Name include having a dentist pull some of your teeth out... so you can eat them. Your deranged character is delighted to do this, likening it to having a maw inside their own maw, so they can eat, and eat, and eat, and eat...
  • There's also the card where your character sets fire to a candle shop and tries to devour their own burning flesh because it smells so delicious.
  • Although details regarding the ending are withheld, the quest's completion renders your account unplayable. Yes, permanently unplayable.
    • What little we know is that you travel NORTH of the Neath, to the Avid Horizon, a place where you have been told not to go, ever. There, you, now completely insane, arrive at a massive door, and you are told you will be grievously wounded and killed forever should you choose to knock on it. What horrifying things could lurk beyond the door? Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies tell what lies ahead, which shall not be mentioned here.
  • Even the forums on the event have some scary stuff:
  An Individual: Congratulations I think? Whatever waits you at least you'll be the first to put your foot prints in that terrible terrible snow. You should think up a phrase to say. Like "one small step for man" and what not. That is, if you can speak. Just screaming a lot is another option.
  Omega8520: The ship has been eaten, along with so much more.
  bjorntfh: And, yes, I do burn. Forever. Look to me for guidance, and I will always lead you North.

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Nightmares is increasing...

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