Nightmare Fuel / Circleverse

aka: The Circle Opens

• Sandry's introduction in her book. In the midst of a plague and people rioting in the streets out of panic, her maid had decided that the best way to keep her safe was to seal her inside a magically concealed room while she went for help. Instead, the maid was brutally murdered right outside the hidden door - all within earshot of Sandry, who was powerless to do anything. With her parents dead, as well as the only one who knew of her location, she wonders if all she can do is wait to starve to death.
• In Tris's Book, it's mentioned that all four are having nightmares about the earthquake in the previous book, and Tris gets a wind's-eye-view of the innocent slaves she slaughters in the pirate attack.
• Sandry and Briar both deal personally with plagues that kill people close to them.
• Everything that happens in Battle Magic. What Briar, Rosethorn, and Evvy see leaves them with PTSD. Evvy in particular is tortured and left in a heap of corpses.
• Daja's first scene in the series: she wakes up and realizes that she's all alone in the middle of the shipwreck, with no way out, nothing left except the suraku, and oh yeah, her family's corpses are all around her.
  • Being made trangshi is its own kind of Nightmare Fuel, especially since it's brought on by your entire family dying. Survivor Guilt is one thing, but your society's traditions demand that you caused it. You're also thrown out on the streets with nothing but a staff, regardless of age, and all Traders have to avoid you.

The Circle Opens

• Magic Steps
  • Unmagic, from a mage's point of view. Sandry has actual nightmares about it. Aptitude with it is a kind of Lovecraftian Superpower as unmagic is "opposed" to life in general. Exposure to it fosters depression and apathy. An anecdote is told about someone who used unmagic to teleport across thousands of miles and then spent a year in bed, raving, later saying that all his senses had shut down. And assassins are using it, leaving traces of it everywhere they've been.
  • Alzhena as a character underwent Sanity Slippage mainly offscreen, some combination of It Gets Easier and unmagic fostering apathy in her. She'd loved Nurhar once, had felt a debt of gratitude towards the Dihanurs, and had had some qualms about killing children. By the time the book begins she's little more than Ax-Crazy but even this soon fades and she's left feeling empty and disappointed that even assassination doesn't bring her any joy. She kills the doctor that cleans her wounds after the latter charges a high fee. Nurhar has to point out that was stupid because now no healer or doctor will dare administer any treatment they need. Alzhena is by then unable to care.
    She fought to go on - why? Was there a point? Yes, she remembered dully, the killing to come. Once it was done, she could stop. She could do nothing. No one would insist that she get up, walk about, eat, dress. They would leave her alone. That would be good.
    • One of Alzhena's victims is a baby who she butchers in their cradle, right in front of their horrified family. Making this even worse is that she was invisible due to the unmage's Anti-Magic powers at the time, meaning the family just suddenly saw their baby die horrifically with no warning or explanation, and then were all subsequently slaughtered by the same invisible thing that killed their child.
      • Even worse, Alzhena kills the baby as its nanny is leaning over the crib, but leaves the nanny alive. When we later see her being questioned, she's still covered in the baby's blood.
    • The moment where Alzhena takes Pasco hostage. He's just a kid and had been doing a good job of hiding himself, using dance magic to make himself invisible. Alzhena, however, notices cake crumbs spilling out of thin air, makes a logical deduction, and reaches forward to grab him.
  • The unnamed mage Alzhena and Nurhar employ - well, "use" is more appropriate - has basically been trafficked by various criminals to exploit his Anti-Magic / Casting a Shadow powers his entire life. Currently he is an Addled Addict dependent on the dragonsalt they give him. The family employing them "rescued" him from the pirate who had cut off his legs. Despite unmagic influence he's aware that he's no better off now. He wants to die. Through Alzhena's eyes he's just kind of creepy and obnoxious. When Sandry sees him, she's horrified to realize that he's actually Pasco's age, something like twelve.
  • How Sandry deals with the trapped trio after Alzhena takes Pasco hostage. She remains calm even as Alzhena starts cutting into her student's skin, but then goes for Plan B: twisting the unmagic in their bodies into a rope. With how their bodies are threaded and veined with unmagic, this cuts them to pieces. She doesn't want to do it especially after realizing that their mage is a child, but the other choice is to watch Alzhena cut her student to pieces. Nurhar begs for their lives, realizing they're about to die. Sandry shakes her head. Later she says in a deadened voice that she still feels their blood on her hands, literally.
    • Possibly worse, when Sandry spins the unmagic up the unmage doesn't even leave a corpse behind, simply evaporating into unmagic which is pulled into the rope. He has been so corrupted that there is no longer anything human left in him. He does at least die giggling rather than in pain.
• Street Magic
  • Lady Zenadia, pits gangs of children living in the streets against each other for her own amusement. And when they fall out of her favor, she has them strangled to death and turned into fertilizer for her garden. When Briar first visits her estate, the plants happily tell him what good food they get.
  • The way in which Zenadia's mute kills his victims is absolutely chilling. He has been trained to be completely silent on his feet, and victims have virtually no warning before he drops a silk cord around their necks and pulls it tight, strangling them swiftly and without mercy. Even Briar almost falls prey to him, and is only saved thanks to his ability to speak to plants, who call out a warning to him just before the cord drops around his neck.
    • On the other hand, the way in which Briar kills the mute, by way of splitting him open with a fast-growing plant beneath his feet. The mute's scream of fear and agony, during which we see that his tongue has been cut out, is the only sound he makes during the entire book.
  • Briar is called to help heal a boy from the Camelgut gang who was attacked by the Vipers, the above mentioned Lady Zenadia's pet gang, and suffered a blow to the head during the attack. By the time Briar gets there, however, the poor boy is on the final stretch of a long-term brain bleed from blunt force trauma that has effectively left him braindead before he finally dies.
  • Evvy, a ten-year-old girl, was sold as a slave years before by her own mother for the crime of being a little girl who took up space and food her older brothers could have had instead, and the mere memory of this event still brings her to tears. It is implied this is not an uncommon occurrence, either.
• Cold Fire
  • The arsonist burns and blows up several buildings, killing over a hundred people. The descriptions don't skimp on just how horrifically each victim dies.
  • Ben Ladradun keeps his wife's skeletal hand on a shelf; it's an in-universe example for Daja, who later has nightmares about it crawling all over her face.
  • Ben's Sanity Slippage doesn't help. He had good intentions at the start. In the beginning, he's furious with himself for setting a building on fire where a homeless woman was sleeping, because the idea is to make sure no one gets hurt. That doesn't last long. He's Laughing Mad on the inside later, when he sees the dead bodies from his later fires. Later, the inspector says to a shocked Daja that it's always how it starts with arsonists: just one little blaze, and they get addicted to the thrill.
  • Daja realizing that the magical gloves she created to fight fires have been used to set them instead.
  • The later targets: a private home full of people (including the guests for a child's birthday party), a bathhouse (the furnace of which exploded, setting most of the buildings around it on fire) and worst of all, a hospital.
  • Ben's execution; Daja brings him into custody and provides testimony at his trial, where he's suffered a Villainous BSoD. He's brought to the public square in plain clothes, with a single drum providing the music, and tied to a stake for burning. Daja realizes that the fire is carefully arranged not to make much smoke, meaning Ben will be conscious for the entire time rather than suffocate. As he fights the urge to scream, Daja realizes that despite his crimes, Ben doesn't deserve such an agonizing death and increases the flames. Several other mages get the same idea, giving Ben a Mercy Kill. They are disgusted with the magistrate because the point of the sentence is justice, not vengeance.
• Shatterglass
  • Tris is horrified when Niko reveals to her that Lark (of whom the book says this: "She [Tris] loved Lark") once worked in the entertainment section where the murderer of the story is committing his murders. Then the following conversation compounds it:
  Tris: She [Lark] actually wore the horrid yellow veil?
  Niko: Actually I think she wore it as a neck scarf. Now that's an unsettling thought. (the killer strangled his victims with their veils)
  (Tris draws the Circle of the Living Temple on her chest)

Will of the Empress

• Sandry's kidnapping in The Will of the Empress. She wakes up in a wooden crate and panics due to her fear of darkness. She can't create a light source as the crate has a Power Nullifier. She is then told by Fin that he intends for her to marry him and will permanently restrict her magic. By the time she is rescued, her hands and feet need bandages due to wounds she inflicted on herself by hitting at the crate walls.