Nightmare Fuel / A Dance with Dragons

• Starting from the very first page, the point-of-view character for the book's prologue is a wildling skinchanger named Varamyr Sixskins, whose crimes include raping hundreds of women and, when he was six, killing his baby brother via warging into one of the family's dogs and mauling him.
  • A group of wildlings on the run, including a mother and her baby, are devoured by a pack of starving wolves that includes one Varamyr has warged into. Even Varamyr himself is somewhat horrified by this.
    Leagues away, in a one-room hut of mud and straw with a thatched roof and a smoke hole and a floor of hard-packed earth, Varamyr shivered and coughed and licked his lips. His eyes were red, his lips cracked, his throat dry and parched, but the taste of blood and fat filled his mouth, even as his swollen belly cried for nourishment. A child's flesh, he thought, remembering Bump. Human meat. Had he sunk so low as to hunger after human meat?
  • Thistle's reaction to Varamyr's attempt to use his warg abilities to pull a Grand Theft Me on her: she tears out her eyes and bites off her tongue.
  • The end of the prologue is some of the most terrifying writing Martin's put in the series.
    When they reached the crest the wolves paused. Thistle, he remembered, and a part of him grieved for what he had lost and another part for what he’d done. Below, the world had turned to ice. Fingers of frost crept slowly up the weirwood, reaching out for each other. The empty village was no longer empty. Blue-eyed shadows walked amongst the mounds of snow. Some wore brown and some wore black and some were naked, their flesh gone white as snow. A wind was sighing through the hills, heavy with their scents: dead flesh, dry blood, skins that stank of mold and rot and urine. Sly gave a growl and bared her teeth, her ruff bristling. Not men. Not prey. Not these.
    
    The things below moved, but did not live. One by one, they raised their heads toward the three wolves on the hill. The last to look was the thing that had been Thistle. She wore wool and fur and leather, and over that she wore a coat of hoarfrost that crackled when she moved and glistened in the moonlight. Pale pink icicles hung from her fingertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. And in the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known in life.
    
    She sees me.
• Theon's chapters are very frightening due his close proximity to the utterly depraved and psychotic Ramsay Snow. Such as the description of how, after the Ironmen holding Moat Cailin surrender for an offer of safe conduct, Ramsay flays them all.
  • The Chapters in Winterfell are very creepy, with the Ten Little Murder Victims plot. People keep dying mysteriously, those in Winterfell don't trust and despise many of the other occupants, paranoia is rising and they are turning on themselves.
  • When the Boltons arrives at Winterfell, they find a large number of peasants squatting in the castle's ruins. Roose promptly has his men kill most of them, then uses the survivors as slave labour to repair the damage to Winterfell, promising that if they serve him well, he won't flay them. Once their work is completed, Roose has the lot of them hanged, though none of them are flayed beforehand.
• Ralf Kenning's fate is quite nauseating. Poison from a crannogmen's arrows brings on Body Horror like you wouldn't believe.
  Beneath the furs he was naked and feverish, his pale puffy flesh covered with weeping sores and scabs. His head was misshapen, one cheek grotesquely swollen, his neck so engorged with blood that it threatened to swallow his face. The arm on that same side was big as a log and crawling with white worms. No one had bathed him or shaved him for many days, from the look of him. One eye wept pus, and his beard was crusty with dried vomit.
• The bloody flux/pale mare (essentially dysentery). Particularly the scene where Daenerys tours a camp of its victims. There are hundreds of people sick and starving, pleading with Daenerys to help them. One woman pleads for food for her baby. Dany fells utterly wretched; these are supposed to be her people, her 'children', but she has hardly anything to give them. She can’t let them into Meereen because they’ll infect the population, but she cannot stand the thought of just leaving them to die outside the gates. The bodies of the dead are starting to pile up and rot, which not only smells and looks horrific, but makes the infection spread faster. Some people are so sick, they can’t even bathe themselves. Even some of Dany's guards fear to walk among them because of how contagious they are, but Dany insists on helping them and orders the bodies burnt to try and stop the disease from spreading. While better than just leaving corpses out to rot, the sight of dozens of mass pyres burning outside the city is only marginally more pleasant; dozens of men, women and children who's names we will never know fed to the flames in a desperate attempt to save the rest.
• The aftermath of Quentyn Martell's attempt to tame Viserion, he should have taken into account the more violent brother Rhaegal sneaking up behind him... Most people who see him afterwards all agree it would have been kinder if the dragon had just eaten him alive.
  When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.
  Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.
• The drowned city and the stone people (the people inflicted with greyscale in the Sorrows).
• During Stannis' march to Winterfell through a harsh blizzard, food supplies run so low that four soldiers are caught roasting and eating the body of an already dead soldier in desperation, and are burned alive as a sacrifice to R'hllor to make the blizzard stop. Even The Stoic Action Girl Alysane Mormont doesn't stand to watch that dreadful spectacle and Warrior Princess Asha Greyjoy starts to feel ill.
• As of ADWD, Varys qualifies. He was always a creepy Stepford Smiler with an inscrutable hidden agenda - but now he's proven that he can disappear suddenly without a trace; and, if you're a genuine threat to his plans, whatever they are? He reappears just as suddenly, in your room, having already slit your buddy's throat and giving you a Breaking Speech before shooting you and setting a bunch of Creepy Child orphans on you to shiv you to death. And it's definitely not the first time he's done this. Scary stuff.
• Ramsay's treatment of Jeyne Poole, who is forced to marry him while pretending to be Arya. She is also repeatedly raped and beaten, and so scared of him that when she is rescued, she initially cannot believe it and believes that it's just a cruel trick masterminded by Ramsay.
  • As if a penchant for flaying people wasn't horrific enough, it's not just fingers but toes as well. Just think about how many nerve-endings there are in toes.
  • It's even implied that Ramsay has forced Jeyne to perform sex acts with his dogs.
• The story of Ramsay's conception. When Roose first saw Ramsay's mother, a miller's wife, he wanted to partake in a banned custom where he slept with the new brides of his smallfolk. When he learned that the miller had married without his consent, Roose hanged the miller and raped his wife underneath her husband's body. As Roose tells Theon about it, he has absolutely no remorse, underscoring how deeply scary he really is. He even makes an off-hand comment about her being "hardly worth the rope" and how that was also a bad day because a fox he was hunting got away and his favorite horse came up lame.
• The Sons of the Harpy attempt to assassinate Daenerys by forcing a confectioner to prepare poisoned honey locusts for her, holding his daughter hostage until the queen is dead. When the attempt fails, the man's daughter is returned to him, cut into nine pieces, one for every year of her life.
• Bran's slow descent into Obliviously Evil. He willingly feeds on humans while warged into Summer, and unknowingly feeds on them when Coldhands brings steaks (which the ranger says are pork, but are implied to be Night's Watch deserters). Bran also takes over Hodor again and again, with Hodor being 'broken in' and hiding in a corner of his mind crying when Bran takes him. Bran has broken two of the three major rules of Skinchangers. Let alone what may be happening to Jojen. Bran doesn't even realize the rules exist.
• When some of Jon's men cast doubt on him for choosing Satin, a former whore from Oldtown, as his steward, Jon retorts that they have much worse recruits in the Night's Watch. One man he mentions is a cook who branded himself with a seven-pointed star for every septa he raped, covering his left arm and calves with stars. Another barred the door of his father's house and set fire to the place, killing everyone inside.
  • When Jon finally gets fed up of the indifference from the senior officers in the Night's Watch's regarding the wildlings trapped at Hardhome at risk of dying in their thousands, he bluntly spells out why leaving them to their fate is not an option...
  Jon Snow: Are you so blind, or is it that you do not wish to see? What do you think will happen when all these enemies are dead? Let me tell you what will happen. The dead will rise again, in their hundreds and their thousands. They will rise as wights, with black hands and pale blue eyes, and they will come for us.
• The Apocalyptic Log that is Cotter Pyke's letters to Jon during the attempted rescue mission to Hardhome. In Pyke's last letter, he notes that the wildlings have resorted to cannibalism to survive, and are so crazed the Night's Watch have already had to fight off several attacks from desperate wildlings trying to seize control of the ships sent to rescue them. All the while, wights and potentially worse are lying in wait in the surrounding woods and seas, attacking anything that gets too close. Pyke's final line is a desperate plea for help by any means necessary, while Melisandre warns Jon no one he sent with Pyke is going to return alive.
  At Hardhome, with six ships. Wild seas. Blackbird lost with all hands, two Lyseni ships driven aground on Skane, Talon taking water. Very bad here. Wildlings eating their own dead. Dead things in the woods. Braavosi captains will only take women, children on their ships. Witch women call us slavers. Attempt to take Storm Crow defeated, six crew dead, many wildlings. Eight ravens left. Dead things in the water. Send help by land, seas wracked by storms.
  • Speaking of Melisandre, she has a premonition that seems to foreshadow what is about to happen at Hardhome...
  Snowflakes swirled from a dark sky and ashes rose to meet them, the grey and the white whirling around each other as flaming arrows arced above a wooden wall and dead things shambled silent through the cold, beneath a great grey cliff where fires burned inside a hundred caves. Then the wind rose and the white mist came sweeping in, impossibly cold, and one by one the fires went out. Afterward only the skulls remained.
• Jon Connington remembers famous "Battle of the Bells" at Stoney Sept, that he has lost seventeen years before. Basic gist is, while Connington searched for wounded Robert Baratheon house by house with loyalist army, Ned Stark and Jon Arryn arrived to save Robert. Connington and loyalist army lost the subsequent battle. But that is not nightmare fuel. Nightmare fuel is what Tywin Lannister would have done if he was in Connington's leadership position. He would have burned the whole town, every man, woman and child and beast, sifted through the bones until he found Robert's then accepted Ned Starks and Jon Arryn's surrender.
• When Tyrion, Penny, and Jorah are enslaved and being walked through a soldiers' camp, their overseer Nurse forces them to watch three slaves being punished for trying to escape, bound to crossbeams and used as target practice for the Tolosi slingers. One of the slaves gets hit in the knee with a lead ball and it explodes in a gout of blood and bone, leaving the lower leg dangling by its tendon. Some of the soldiers laugh at him as he screams, while others curse because they had bet coin on the slinger missing his target.
• A little Meereenese girl is killed and partially eaten by Drogon, and her grieving father brings her scorched bones before Daenerys as proof of her fate.
• As part of his training to become a greenseer, Bran wargs into the heart tree in the godswood of Winterfell, and sees many past events that took place there from the tree's perspective. The last thing he sees is a man being sacrificed to the tree by having his throat slashed with a bronze sickle, and Bran can taste the blood as it spills onto the heart tree's face.
• Doran Martell gets word from his spies that Cersei has ordered his young son Trystane to be killed on his way to King's Landing. The caravan will be attacked by outlaws shouting "Halfman, Halfman!", and Ser Balon Swann will "tragically fail" to save him and later swear that he saw a glimpse of Tyrion.
• While training with the Faceless Men, Arya learns how they change their faces: they skin them off the people who come to die in their temple (after they're dead, thankfully). The face she is made to wear for her first assassination mission belonged to an abused girl with a shattered cheekbone and broken teeth. She gets a flashback of being brutally beaten by the girl's father, and is told that the girl was beaten so often and so viciously that finally she came to the House of Black and White to seek a painless death.
• The last chapter of the book, where Kevan Lannister is ambushed by Varys; he walks into Pycelle's study only to find the Grand Maester dead, his skull cracked open, and then Kevan is shot by a crossbow, largely so he can frame Tyrion as Kevan's killer to drive Cersei mad with paranoia. He spends a while monologuing before apologizing, and telling him it's time to make an end of it. The book ends with Varys' child servants approaching Kevan, and the creepiest line imaginable.
  And in their hands, the knives.
  • Also, Varys's explanation why he's killing Kevan; he was the only one who could unify the disparate factions backing Tommen after Cersei's incompetence shattered their alliance. With Kevan dead, both sides (Cersei and the Tyrells) will assume the other has had Kevan killed, distrust and infighting will shatter their alliance and plunge the Seven Kingdoms back into even bloodier fighting, all so Aegon VI Targaryen can step out of the wings and ascend to the Iron Throne. Varys, for his own reasons, is willing to unleash untold death and destruction on an already devastated Westeros, on the cusp of winter, for a Kingmaker Scenario. On top of that, it's unlikely Tommen is going to come out of this chaos alive.
  Varys: I thought the crossbow fitting. You shared so much with Lord Tywin, why not that? Your niece will think the Tyrells had you murdered, mayhaps with the connivance of the Imp. The Tyrells will suspect her. Someone somewhere will find a way to blame the Dornishmen. Doubt, division, and mistrust will eat the very ground beneath your boy king, whilst Aegon raises his banner above Storm’s End and the lords of the realm gather round him.”