Nightmare Fuel / A Game of Thrones

• When Jorah is carrying Dany into the tent as she goes into labour, while Mirri Maz Duur works some black sorcery...
  What was wrong with them, couldn't they see? Inside the tent the shapes were dancing, circling the brazier and the bloody bath, dark against the sandsilk, and some did not look human. She glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a man wreathed in flames.
  Her eyes opened to gaze up at a flat dead sky, black and bleak and starless. Please, no. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur's voice grew louder, until it filled the world. The shapes! She screamed. The dancers!
  • "The shadows come to dance, my lord..."
    • Let's go with the whole paragraph of Patchface-related, nursery rhyme horror, here; with one additional thought — where, exactly, did all those shadows go to stay?
      "The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord," he sang, hopping from one foot to the other and back again. "The shadows come to stay, my lord, stay my lord, stay my lord."
• Daenerys's stillborn child, as described by Mirri Maz Duur.
  "Monstrous. Twisted. I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him, the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for years."
  Darkness, Dany thought. The terrible darkness sweeping up behind to devour her. If she looked back she was lost. “My son was alive and strong when Ser Jorah carried me into this tent,” she said. “I could feel him kicking, fighting to be born.”
  “That may be as it may be,” answered Mirri Maz Duur, “yet the creature that came forth from your womb was as I said. Death was in that tent, Khaleesi.”
• Sansa is a better judge of character than she's usually given credit for: on first meeting Littlefinger, she is disturbed by how his eyes "did not smile when his mouth did".
  • Sansa as an eleven year old knows little of lust, but Petyr stares so intensely at her at the council meeting that it makes her feel as though she's naked. He also constantly gets in her space and touches her face like a lover. Again: she is the medieval equivalent of a sixth grader.
  • On the topic of Littlefinger, whilst being held in the deepest, darkest cells of the Red Keep, Ned dreams of Robert mocking him for putting Honor Before Reason, only for the King's face to shatter and reveal a twisted version of Littlefinger, who smiles psychotically and breathes moths at Ned.
• Ned Stark's execution. Sansa truly believed he was going to be spared and... he has his head cut off in front of her eyes.
  • Joffrey forcing her to watch her father's head on a spear is terrible as well. Her septa's head has her face rotten and eaten by birds.
• Old Nan's story of the Long Night is gripping but foreboding. This could be Westeros' future: millions dying of cold, weeping as they Mercy Kill their starving children, kingdoms and cities falling into chaos, the Others hunting people in the woods, and no one able to do anything about it.
  Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.
• The scene of the raided Lhazareen village is pretty horrific; there are heads piled up in the streets, old and young, while young Dothraki girls run around collecting the arrows from the corpses. As Daenerys walks through the ruined streets, she feels sickened, even as she tries to justify it as "the price of the Iron Throne". However, when she hears the crying of a girl being thrown down and raped over a pile of decapitated heads, Dany cannot stomach it any longer and orders her guards to stop the warriors from raping the women, bringing them under protection.