Nightmare Fuel / Child of the Storm

Spoilers are off.

Book I - Child of the Storm

• The entrance of the Winter Soldier. When he first appears, it's left unclear exactly what he is, and has a room full of hardened Death Eaters and Werewolves terrified of him. Without saying a word. The only people who aren't scared of him are those who know he's coming and Gravemoss (who's completely Ax-Crazy anyway). Though, the heads of the manticore and the nundu rather helped make an impression.
• Chapter 21 from beginning to end.
  • The Veidrdraugar as a whole.
• Gravemoss is arguably Nightmare Fuel incarnate.
• The backstory of Hela, crossing over with Tear Jerker. Loki seemed to be experiencing an irrational case of concern about his lover and unborn daughter and his parents (father's) anger, so hid them away. However, the birth went wrong and both mother and child died. Loki used necromancy for the first and last time to resurrect the child, Hela. And then she became something of a Creepy Child and had an involuntary case of Vampiric Draining - small plants and animals tended to die around her - required to keep her in the living world. So Loki, with the help of Thor, Sif and the Warriors Three (apparently how they met each other), raises her in Helheim, but has to leave her there eventually.
  • From Frigga's point of view: her younger son has just disappeared with the pregnant girlfriend that, of course, she knew about, she knows how dangerous a birth can be so she's desperately looking for him, and when Heimdall finally picks him out, rushes to the scene, as fast as she can... to find her son, his arms bloody to the elbow, weeping, with her firstborn grandchild dead in his arms while his beloved girlfriend is already dead. In essence, she was too late.
    • And the experience drives him to use necromancy. Dark magic. As a powerful sorceress herself, one who taught Loki the ways of magic, that must really suck.
  • From Odin's point of view: he essentially set the whole thing in motion by being such a distant, frightening father that Loki would rather run and risk who knows what then own up and seek help. It is all on his head. And you can bet that he knows it.
• Loki's time with Thanos was this, according to what little we've picked up from him. While he explicitly wasn't mind-controlled, his experience was far from pleasant.
• The Darkhold doesn't just grant the means to create veidrdraugar. It grants the means to put them into mass production.
• Gravemoss rips Sif's heart out. With every intention of turning her into one of the veidrdraugar. While Dresden manages to prevent this and Doctor Strange pulls a Deus ex Machina, but it comes very, very close...
• In chapter 60, after winning something of a Curbstomp Battle against HYDRA's werewolves the aged up kids seem to be coasting to another victory with minimal actual peril faced... then, in a matter of seconds, they are curbstomped by a robot based on the Destroyer controlled by Baron Zemo which inflicts some of the first genuine, non-trivial injuries on them and despite the fact that Harry and Diana are in Thor's league of power, comes very, very close to killing several of them. This isn't the conflicted Winter Soldier or a less powerful Elite Mook. This is someone who not only is wiling to kill them but very definitely can and wouldn't think twice about doing it.
• Chapter 65 exploits the Fridge Horror of Ginny's experience at the hands of Riddle's diary, having Sean explain to the Hogwarts staff that Ginny has considerable psychic trauma following her encounter with Tom Riddle's diary. When Snape questions this, Sean retorts:
  No. She only spent nine months being mentally manipulated and slowly drained of her life force by a powerful and malevolent psychic entity that tricked her into trustin’ it. She’s fine.
  • Being a man who knows what he's talking about thanks to his time at Interpol, he then goes on to directly compare Riddle's diary to a sexual predator, explaining the parallels. Afterwards, the staff look a mixture between sickened, horrified, and homicidal.
• Chapter 66 presents the scenario of being trapped in a memory of a violent superpowered battle powerful enough to shatter mountains with a young psychic who's completely lost control of his powers which are making everything real.
• Part 2 of Chaos Reigns gives us a glimpse of the horrors that are breaking through into Earth due to the Darkhold being free, as an army of N'Garai and Mindless Ones, led by a Mabdhara, swarms into Chicago, leaving a trail of death in its wake. The scene of one their feeding spots is enough to make even Dresden, who's used to this sort of thing, retch. And he notes that, as long as the Darkhold is still loose, this is just going to keep happening all over the world. Often in places that won't have a friendly neighborhood wizard around...
• Chapter 70 provides a HYDRA Paratrooper's point of view when they're attacking Hogwarts from the air in the middle of the night. The response comes in the form of a Mook Horror Show at the hands of Archangel, who, moving too fast to be visible as more than a silver blur, uses his Razor Wings to destroy HYDRA's Quinjet, then methodically destroy their flight-suits or dismember them, while the mook in question slowly loses his mind... and then he's faced with Archangel, described as a blood-spattered avenging angel in the moonlight, before Archangel removes his wings and leaves him to plummet to the ground.
• Chapter 71's description of HYDRA unleashing the veidrdraugar on their targets and when that (rarely) fails, they grab people off the street, put them under the Imperius curse and inject them with particularly unstable Extremis, turning them into unkillable living bombs, is fairly horrific.
• When the Winter Soldier attacks the Ministry and carves through everyone in his way, that's scary enough, if not entirely unexpected. But if he hadn't killed Arthur, best-case scenario is that the latter would've been used as a hostage. Alternatively, Lucius might've given him to Gravemoss. In fact, this is quite likely - certainly, it was an awful enough fate that the Winter Soldier genuinely thought that killing Arthur with his bare hands was the merciful option.
• Chapter 72 reveals that Luna died from a bullet in the lung. This means that she would have died slowly and painfully, drowning in her own blood.
  • It also has Thor living every parent's nightmare: finding out that his son has died. The fact that he was resurrected immediately afterwards does not make it any better.
• Chapter 74 has Harry finally snapping and demonstrating just how mindbogglingly terrifying an enraged psychic can be.
• Chapter 77: Chthon rises, which turns the skies red and unleashes demons over the entire Earth.
  • Hell, pretty much every aspect of Chthon's appearance is designed to show that this is just Wrong, capital letter fully deserved.

Book II - Ghosts of the Past

• Know all the in-universe Fridge Horror about Harry's Psychic Powers? Voldemort, who now has some of that power himself, proves that it's all completely justified. He turns Carol, Uthred, Diana, Pepper, Jane, and the Twins into People Puppets, threatens to make them kill each other (in Pepper's case, says he'd make her cut out and eat her own unborn baby and enjoy it), and then induces a "Freaky Friday" Flip in them, banishes them randomly and sets more People Puppets, Death Eaters, to hunt them down. All purely to fuck with Harry.
  • He also gives Betsy an aneurysm in order to eliminate her from the battlefield, and induces a panicked Thor into nearly killing Harry in the heat of the battle.
  • To add to the example above, if you thought Voldemort was scary in canon, this story has managed to make him walking Nightmare Fuel.
  • The majority of the time the "Freaky Friday" Flip is usually Played for Laughs. There was nothing funny about how it's done here.
• Peter Wisdom a.k.a. Regulus Black. If you're capable of unnerving the freaking God of Thunder, then you're a force to be reckoned with. Now that he's Director of MI13 and damn close to being de facto ruler of Britain, it would be a suicidal move to get on his bad side.
• What happened to Rachel Grey, Jean's twin sister who was believed dead because Sinister kidnapped her in the maternity ward, dubbing her Madelyn 'Maddie' Pryor and raising her as his Living Weapon. Even worse, Strange understand too late what was happening and was powerless to prevent it, only arriving in time to prevent Sinister kidnapping Jean as well.
  • The contrast between Jean and Maddie/Rachel is played up, not for the whole Evil Counterpart aspect, but to underline how absolutely horrific what's been done to Maddie is, and how utterly broken it's left her - a Living Weapon that Sinister doesn't even need to exert telepathic control over, one only barely able to grasp the concept of making her own choices beyond mere flexibility within the parameters of whatever mission she was given, after months of patient, careful coaxing from Gambit, one who is driven to confused tears by the way that post Heel–Face Turn, everyone's being so kind. This, on its own, is a Tear Jerker. Where it crosses over into Nightmare Fuel is where one remembers a) that this is a seventeen year old girl, b) that the techniques involved were focused on systematically demolishing the foundations for any kind of free will.
    • Oh, and just to pile on the Nightmare Fuel? If Strange had been only seconds later, Sinister would've gotten Jean too.
  • Additionally, Doctor Strange spends the entirety of the Forever Red arc as a psychotic Mood-Swinger - as a product, it is implied, of the above, as he vowed never to be too late, after he was too late to the Battle of Camlann, and magical vows carry real power and real consequences, never mind the psychological ones. That's horrifying enough. But half the time, he's even more Crazy Is Cool than usual. The other half... normally, he's smooth, knowing, in-control and often affable. At worst, he's a bit brusque. This time, not so much. He's gaunt to the point of being skeletal, having worked himself to the bone in a way that Frigga explicitly states should have killed him trying to 'make it right', his shadow keeps twisting and transforming, changing shape more and more the more agitated he gets, and generally he winds up frightening villains and heroes alike by his mere presence, being on the verge of outright snapping. And when Uhtred accidentally questions his given word... well. As he makes clear, if Uhtred had not had good reason to be upset himself, or been a child, Strange would have killed him on the spot.
• Wanda shows she's her father's daughter by making good on her promise to reduce Sinister to screaming, traumatised atoms if she ever meets him. He undeniably deserves it, but... damn.
  Wanda: Actually, no. You're right. I am like my father. I am his daughter. And do you know why? Because I am going to fulfil that promise I made, a promise to render you down to traumatised, screaming atoms if you ever went near my godson again. And while I'm not going to have the time to make it last, I am going to enjoy it. So scream, you bastard, scream!
• And Sinister lives. Worse, he still has Harry's genetic material in his clutches and intends to clone him.
• When Lorna tries to call home, her own mother is unable to remember her because Sinister wiped her memory and everyone Lorna ever knew back in Australia to ensure no one would ever come for her. Presumably, the same happened to the other prisoners.
• Project Red Son is revealed to be Harry with Undying Loyalty to the Red Room. You may now piss your pants.
  • Also doubles as a Tear Jerker.
• Lukin starts using Red Son's psychic abilities to make other countries dance to the Russians' (or more specifically, his) tune. It's not violent (except where it is implied that it very much is, with spies vanishing all over the shop), but people are compelled to do exactly what he wants on a continental, if not global, scale. Superweapon indeed.
  • Asgard's answer to one of their princes being kidnapped is to unleash the Scourge Of God by starving Russia, destroying their food and energy resources. And Frigga swears to ramp it up until Harry comes home. Never mess with an Asgardian Mama Bear, especially when she's the Queen.
• Chapter 12 shows why getting on Magneto's bad side is a very, very bad idea. In less than two minutes, he reduces what General Lukin calls the pride of the Red Room and their answer to supernatural threats into crumpled and crippled ruins. Particularly nasty is when he flays one of them with his own tentacles and crushes a Powered Armor... with its pilot still inside.
• Sinister comes up with a nanotech virus he uses on the Red Son when it is obvious he is going to lose. What's it called? Project Transmode. Yes, as in Cable's Techno-Organic virus. Like that virus, it's hyper-aggressive, starts to eat him from the inside, and rapidly turns his body into metal. Magneto, who is fighting him in Bayville (which is in New York, mind you) has to hit him with a brutal lightning strike (for which he created a geomagnetic supercell storm and - as a mere side-effect - generated auroras that were visible in Kansas) just to slow down the virus. And it still nearly spreads to Wanda.
• According to Strange, in almost every potential timeline, when Maddie found out her true identity without Gambit's help and moral guidance, the death toll cracked seven digits before she was destroyed. In the best case scenarios. The worst involved her becoming Dark Phoenix and burning most of the universe, with various Eldritch Abominations scrambling to finish the job.
• And yet it can get even worse. For example, after the brainwashing gets wiped out, Harry is so furious with everything he becomes the Dark Phoenix!
• While also awesome because of how it was delivered and whom it was delivered to but Harry's utterance of this line sends chills down the spines of all who know what it forebodes:
  I AM LIFE
  I AM FIRE
  NOW AND FOREVER
  I
  AM
  PHOENIX
• When Strange tells the Council Elite that Thanos is coming for Earth, they all freeze up. Think about that — the Skyfathers are among the most powerful beings on Earth, and the thought of the Mad Titan terrifies them. Just what are Harry and the others going to have to deal with when the time comes?
  • Gorakhnath later implies that Thanos, for all that he's a fool in his beliefs, is every bit as brilliant as Doctor Strange. That itself is terrifying.
• Harry's description to Hermione of just what the Diary Horcrux did to Ginny on a psychic level, comparing it to a giant constrictor snake wrapping around her mind and slowly crushing the will and life out of her, over the period of most of a year, to make her mind and life-force easier to swallow and digest.
  • He then explicitly refers to it as Mind Rape and remarks that it's not a phrase that he uses lightly, since he knows whereof he speaks, having been on the receiving end.
• What Constantine did to the Zataras in the name of strategic expediency is bone-chilling: enchanting them without their knowledge or consent just in case they were snatched by Voldemort, which would trigger the enchantments and make them explode and killing everyone around, to hopefully both kill Voldemort and keep their knowledge out of his hands. And he was their ally at the time.
  • And worse, after it worked with Sindella, he manipulated the grieving Giovanni into going after the wounded Voldemort, in the hopes of either Giovanni successfully finishing him off or being captured and the same thing happening as before, killing Voldemort anyway. Oh, and when Giovanni had justified reservations, he turned to Wanda (Constantine's girlfriend at the time, and considering the chronology, probably in the early stages of her pregnancy with his daughter) to ask her if he could trust Constantine. She in turn went to Constantine, to seek assurance that the plan was sound. He assured her it was, not mentioning the enchantment, and she gave Giovanni the go-ahead. Giovanni died, and though Wanda was upset, she was willing to forgive Constantine - any plan can go wrong, right? Then she found out about the enchantments. In light of that, the surprising thing is less that she didn't tell him about their daughter, more that she didn't kill him on the spot.
• How powerful was Surtur as the first Dark Phoenix? He destroyed a galaxy. He destroyed multiple galactic scale empires, including all but the homeworlds of the great powers of the future Nine Realms. Yggdrasil's entire structure was engineered to imprison him and empower the King or Queen of Asgard to fight on his level sufficient to distract him for long enough to seal him away. That's how bad.
  • And Harry's going to have to fight him - and probably fairly soon.
• The threats made by Syrus and his coterie of vampires to Stevie in order to keep Carol in line are pretty chilling, with Harry later grimly confirming the 'turn a bone into a toothpick' trick is one that Syrus has pulled before - on a young child, no less.
  • Grey Court vampires in general are this, with Wanda pointing out how they're more or less perfectly engineered predators of humanity - they're far faster and stronger than humanity, with predator's senses and instincts, even without their other powers. Also, having once been mortal and looking mortal, they can blend in more or less perfectly with the rest of humanity, and without supernatural senses (or thermal imaging), they're very hard to pick out.
• When Harry snaps into Tranquil Fury and decides to deal with Vampire!Dudley personally, the results are chilling - for all Dudley's power, he's helpless before Harry - who, speaking in a calm, unwavering voice, explains how this is not personal, and it is not for revenge. Oh, and he's doing this while systematically dismembering Dudley, without missing a beat or taking a scratch, finally decapitating him.
• Alison talks to Clark a little about how, as a child, she was kidnapped by the Red Room. Think about that: An eight-year-old girl, in the hands of the Red Room.
• The Clan Askani senses something powerful stirring in the Astral Plane and dispatch a group of seven of their members to psychically investigate it. Six of them are incinerated by it, destroying their minds and bodies almost immediately. They took the brunt of the attack, shielding the seventh enough that they live long enough to pass along a message from the being responsible: EVERYTHING BURNS.
  • Worse, it wasn't even an attack - they just brushed up against it, and that was what happened.
• The glimpse of Muspelheim that appears in chapter 40 is pure Nightmare Fuel. It's not, as might be expected, a world of flame and shadow (which would be scary enough), but a different kind of hellish world, one where everything has been burnt to a crisp and rebuilt with mathematical precision. No art, no growth, no soul, no natural beauty... no life.
• In chapter 41, when Harry gets a look at multiple versions of him in alternate realities (some roughly at the same point in time as him, others a good deal older), he sees one where he is the Dark Phoenix, described as the King of Ruins and Lord of the Burning Wastes, who's sitting on Odin's half-melted throne in the shattered palace (with a number of visibly dried bloodstains), surrounded by the broken remnants of Gungnir (Odin's spear), Steve and Carol's shields, a crumpled helmet that used to belong on an Iron Man suit, a bow (Clint's) and a pair of bracelets (Natasha), the shattered Mjolnir, and a giant human-like skull (implied to be the Hulk's), and the Dark Phoenix in question — confirmed by Word of God of being aware he was being observed — goes Laughing Mad, all while Yggdrasil burns eternally in the background. Harry is unsurprisingly absolutely horrified after seeing it, retching, with it being made very clear that this possibility is his worst nightmare.
  • And it's not just that this Harry murdered his family, who he loves dearly, and Carol, who going by the shield, he'd have already have fallen in love with. What makes it worse is this: The Power of Love weakens the Dark Phoenix, while it's created/powered up by The Power of Hate. And Harry is heavily defined by his capacity to love, with even his worst deeds/plans coming from there (including a willingness to risk becoming the Dark Phoenix in the first place). Just how much did he hate to overcome that? More to the point, why?
• While Harry resolves the situation with casual ease, chapter 42 is worth examining. Specifically, the descriptions from Cedric's point of view of steadily being paralysed by the Barrow-Wights' chant, being unable to overcome it to do more than even move his eyes are chilling enough. But the way that later on, he's not even able to manage that, having been turned into a puppet and made to attack a friend who for a moment he's genuinely afraid he's about to kill. Thankfully, said friend is Harry, who manages to both comfortably disarm him and break the spell, but it's adequately demonstrated that being turned into a Wight is a Fate Worse than Death - and more to the point, while Harry can treat such things with almost casual disregard, not everyone is as powerful as he is.
  • The Barrow-Wights' master, the Elder Wyrm, meanwhile, is a great deal creepier, being an ancient dragon the size of a mountain with a reputation for destroying planets in the name of his master, Surtur, and a personality that's best described as a blend of Glaurung and Smaug. Again, Harry is more or less completely unfazed by what's going on (in fact, he's actually enjoying it) - cautious, careful, and calculating, but mostly only worried for the other Champions. However, as the narrative shows, the other Champions, who are all talented but otherwise normal young witches and wizards, understandably find it genuinely terrifying.
• In chapter 51, Harry's Vision Quest courtesy of the Norns has several aspects of this.
  • His first past-vision, of the Negative Zone's Annihilus-led incursion into reality, is described in terms befitting a Cosmic Horror - which is more or less exactly what it is. In the process, it gives Harry and the readers an up close and personal view of what the reality warping effects of the Negative Zone's incursion and attempt to impose itself on reality are like: specifically, the inhabitants of one of those worlds are either mutated into creatures from the Negative Zone, or said creatures tear their way out into reality Chest Burster style. The narration notes that the inhabitants in question, which are specifically described as harmless-looking and defenceless Ugly Cute creatures living on a previously Arcadian-looking planet, are terrified, screaming and trying to run, but that they can't run from this, because there's nowhere to run to. While Sunniva rectifies matters, repulsing Annihilus' invasion, burning those contaminated worlds and stars that she couldn't save, and manages to save the world in question... it's still chilling.
  • His second past-vision is similarly nightmarish, showing the climax of the Asgard-Dark Elf war and the fallout of Malekith (wielding the Aether a.k.a. Reality Stone) and Bor going all out. This includes describing in loving detail the various horrific transformations to the planet and soldiers fighting in the war (a lake of melted, somehow still living, flesh is one relatively mild example), as well as the Body Horror undergone by both Malekith and Bor. The former's face has been blasted so that half of his helmet, a white bone face-mask, has been melted to his face, while the other half has been melted and burnt black, and the latter has had his armour partly melted into his flesh, as well as being struck by a blast that started dissolving his arm. And that was the result when it's explicitly stated that for whatever reason, Malekith can't quite use the Aether to its full potential. Oh, and to make it worse? It confirms Chapter 50's Never Found the Body - Malekith is still out there. And he's quite probably ruling Svartalfheim again right now.
  • One of the present-visions is of a very strange and creepy part of space, a pocket universe which travelling to is described as being comparable to a dark and twisted version of the Bifrost, that's absolutely devoid of stars... except for one. One star, surrounded by a black - so black that it absorbs light - web-like Dyson Sphere that periodically dips tendrils into the star to collect giant spoonfuls of stellar matter, and transfers them to a strange and perfectly spherical black planet, on which is a Shi'ar base. In it, they're studying something about the size of a car, made of strange, pale crystal, and somehow... egg-shaped. Oh, and as Harry is pulled away, he suddenly detects something: Dark Phoenix fire. This causes an outright freak-out, which from the now Fantastically Indifferent Harry is a rare thing indeed.
  • One of the visions of the future shows Hermione surrounded by a crimson red aura, with solid black eyes, and a very unnerving expression on her face - something that more than one reviewer has remarked looks uncomfortably like a prelude to a House of M type scenario.
  • Another, though, involves a direct psychic confrontation with Surtur himself, one described in eerie tones, with Surtur being described as grasping Harry's mind and studying it with the same kind of casual curiosity as Tony would a new gadget, before trying to do exactly what Tony would - take it apart to see how it works. And then there's the Mind Rape after he doesn't get what he wants.
• Harry's memories of being raped by Belova while in his Red Son phase, simultaneously elided and described in sickening detail. The author explicitly states that it is possibly the darkest section in the fic so far.
• Given Jean and Maddie's psychic connection, it's mentioned that if Harry's Phoenix fire had flared up due to the above, it might have overflowed into them. Which could've led to three Dark Phoenixes at once.
• The Fallen Fortress in the Forbidden Forest that Voldemort tricks Hermione and Ron into entering: normally, it's a ruin. On some nights, usually when the moon is full, it's intact, drawing people in, with Hagrid relating how that nearly happened to him when he was still an apprentice gamekeeper, after he heard screaming and went to help. He was barely stopped in time. This is because it's haunted by a gestalt spirit being made of the collective pain of everyone who died there, trapped by the enchantments designed to protect the Fortress in the first place, which usually takes the form of an unnatural mist. With nothing else to alleviate its own suffering, it torments people with visions of their worst fears and traumas, before killing them.
  • In Harry's case, it picks a mirror image of his own form, and picks at his insecurities and inner darkness before shifting into Yelena Belova and taunting him about what she did to him.
  • In Ron's, it takes the form of the Winter Soldier, appearing right behind him, effortlessly swatting him aside, and hunts him through the Fortress, before trapping him underground, conjuring up a false ghost of Arthur Weasley that lectures him on his failure to avenge him, then attacking as the Winter Soldier again, beating him up, breaking his wand, and taking off his mask to reveal Harry who taunts him before starting to choke the life out of him.
  • In Hermione's, it shows her a twisted version of herself, apparently corrupted by Chaos Magic into a borderline Empty Shell, then apparently transforms her into it, before Harry appears, attacking her, blaming her for not controlling her magic better and somehow betraying him, and intending to kill her, before it pulls a Grand Theft Me and starts using her body like a puppet.
• After years of being discussed, in Unfinished Business we finally see the remains of the original Project Pegasus and some of the horrors that were unleashed when things went bad.
  • A symbiote Nimue recruited as one of her guard dogs latches onto Peter, nearly consuming his mind as it takes over his body.
  • The heroes encounter a group of humanoid bat creatures, which are hunting them... which they realise are humanoid because they were originally human. For additional impact, Carol only realises this after she's literally punched through one's chest and out the other side... and as it's dying, it looks at her with human eyes and she sees gratitude. This triggers flashbacks for Deadpool to his own experiences with super-soldier projects, leaving him unusually taciturn for much of the rest of the chapter.
  • Holocron!Strange while guiding the heroes casually reveals that the Red Son project Harry was subjected to was the second iteration. The original was the Soviet equivalent of Pegasus and ended just as badly, making the same mistakes. One of them was, as put by Strange, quoting Lovecraft: "do not call up that which you cannot put down." Gives a certain context to why Alexander Pierce of all people cracked like an egg when Alison merely referenced its resurrection back in Forever Red, doesn't it? Well, sweet dreams after thinking that over...
  • Carol goes up against several beings vaguely resembling Warren (Archangel), with it being speculated by Gambit that they're clones of his, Pegasus having somehow gotten hold of his genetic material. Strange tells him they're not clones, but refuses to elaborate on what they are. At the very least, they're hints of what Warren could become...
• The heart of Project Pegasus manages to be even worse — a forest composed of trees that used to be people, which acts as a natural factory for magical Super Soldiers and super weapons. And as Holocron!Strange points out, Alan Scott sealing the facility only ever left it dormant, not dead, with Nimue now waking it up again.
  • Strange mentions that the facility has minotaurs, which have mutated to be more like great apes with bull heads, and unicorns, which have a habit of goring and eating people.
  • Oh, and those people trees? They come to life and start attacking the heroes, the sentient fungus animating them trying to absorb them — we see this done to Deadpool, whose body eventually bursts apart from his Healing Factor fighting the fungus. Strange eventually has to fix him by reversing the assimilation (in Deadpool's own words, he absorbed the fungus rather than the other way around).
  • Nimue overwhelms Carol's magic armor with no effort, then turns her into a tree.
• Nimue unleashing all of Pegasus' horrors on New Orleans, with the attack spearheaded by Woodrue, who has been transformed into the Man-Thing.
• At one point while dueling Nimue, Strange causes her to start vomiting up parts of her soul. He then dismisses it as torture, saying that if he were torturing her, everyone would be hearing her screams; when Monica comments that they're currently all in a time bubble while everything outside (including Nimue) is currently frozen, he just shoots her a cold look and makes it clear that wouldn't stop the screaming.
• At the height of her power and Villainous Breakdown, Nimue splits off pieces of herself to attack Mab and Titania and seize control of the Faerie Courts... and until she recalled them to boost herself against Carol, she was winning.
  • Aforementioned breakdown shows just how batshit crazy Nimue is by this point. When she sees that the majority of magic users are fighting against her rather than embracing her vision, she decides to just wipe out the world and start over.
• We finally get an Info Dump about Surtur's Great Captains, and it's pretty terrifying:
  • Jormungand. First of all, he's a dragon the size of a small moon. Secondly, he's awakening his children and calling them to him, many of whom were nesting within planets that are being torn apart by their awakening. And finally, there's the fact that all of this has gotten the attention of the Shi'ar, with D'Ken planning on going to war with the dragons for it... which Loki figures will be a total slaughter on the Shi'ar's part.
    • It should also be remembered that Jormungard went toe-to-toe with Thor once, and even getting thrown into a neutron star didn't destroy it permanently. It's also the creature that spawned Dave the Elder Wyrm.
  • Skoll the Devouring Dark. A massive Living Shadow with no set form, it feeds on entire planets, to the point of its actions often being mistaken for Galactus. Worse, according to Loki, It Can Think despite appearing to be a mindless beast.
  • The Soul Eater. A living mental virus which travels through the astral plane, infecting people and hollowing them out into Empty Shells that are fanatically loyal to Surtur, and end up either being used as hosts for other spiritual entities or turned into Fire Giants. Loki has managed to quarantine it, but only after 897 worlds were damaged beyond repair, with another 3049 needing an average of three centuries to recover — and according to Loki, this is minor compared to past outbreaks.
  • The Shaper. A former Dwarf artisan who now uses stars and a ringworld to forge new minions for Surtur, the most dangerous of which are the "Phoenix Eggs", which are essentially evil Celestials. It's implied that one of them is Ego.
  • The team of the Frozen Shadow and the Lightbringer — the former freezes people into living statues that Loki compares to Weeping Angels, while the latter removes their souls and reshape them into miniature versions of Surtur to try and imitate his "perfection". Loki says that attempts have been made to reunite victims' souls and bodies, but refuses to go into details of the results beyond saying they were "unpleasant".
  • The Black Captain is a former Eternal named Zagreus. According to Loki, he's the most dangerous of the Great Captains because he's clever and can think outside of the routines that all the others take (he still has a routine, it's just much more subtle). Not to mention the fact that he could be hiding inside anyone.
• The whole Clones Are People, Too theme? Heartwarming, especially where Gambit is concerned. In retrospect, though, it casts an Awesome Moment in much harsher light - Harry's obliteration of the Red Army of clones. As Harry reveals, while they were programmed, they were innocent, newborn, they'd never even had a chance to live - and he could have saved them. He could easily have wiped their programming, or just turned them off until after. But at that point, all he cared about was that they were in his way. Ron protests that they were just copies.
  They were alive. Their bodies were copies, but their souls were not. You can't copy a soul. They were people, and I knew that. I just didn't care.

Book III - The Phoenix and the Serpent

• Annihilus and his invasion from the Negative Zone are treated relatively lightly by Harry and Sunniva... but that's because they're in a position to fight back. From the point of view of those on the ground, caught by an invasion that's often from within them, it is nothing short of Lovecraftian horror.
• Malekith's actions gain a much more terrifying set of long-term consequences, when Buri explains just how Bor turned out the way he did, explaining that he Used to Be a Sweet Kid and got hit with the brunt of Malekith's Reality Stone fuelled 'turn-Asgardians-into-savages-to-retroactively-justify-my-conquest' whammy, which not only set Asgard as a whole back by hundreds of millennia, despite the best efforts of Buri and Strange to mitigate it, but turned Bor into a true savage who embraced his dark side and tried to kill his father when Buri tried to help him.
  • And if this was not bad enough, it's established via this and the glimpses we get through Sunniva and Buri that Asgard was, though not perfect, a much kinder and gentler and less Proud Warrior Race Guy society prior to Malekith's handiwork. Contrast that with the rougher, more ruthless, and more unstable Asgard of the present where magic is still somewhat looked down on, Fantastic Racism is still a problem, and there are elements of Stay in the Kitchen values lingering even after thousands of years of Odin's reforms... and a fairly severe population deficit thanks to thousands of years of near constant conflict, Asgard itself nearly being destroyed, repeatedly, from Bor's reign through to the birth of Thor and Loki. And this had a significant impact on not just Asgard's society, but Odin's personality, which in turn impacted both his sons, and his grandson, leaving all four with textbook Generational Trauma.
• The Grandmaster seems from what little that's obvious to be his usual quirky MCU self, and Sakaar to simply be a magnified version of what it was. Then you find out that it's an Eldritch Location that's an aspect of the Eldritch Abomination that is the Grandmaster, who once was Annihilus, ruling it as a capricious and nigh-omnipotent God-Emperor who treats people as collectables or action figures, kills millions or billions in fits of temper, and is slowly digesting/absorbing everything that falls through, leaving behind Empty Shells that he sometimes plays puppets with, identity-less Wraiths that end up as Body Snatchers to regain some sense of identity, and Dementors, that feed to do the same. That's right: Dementors are basically the scraps of his feeding process.
  • The mere possibility that The Grandmaster might be keeping Johnny Storm for…having “fun” with him brings out some of the scars Harry has from his time in the Red Room. When this happens, the dorky kid, the experienced soldier and the arcane demigod sides are replaced by someone cold and vengeful, promising to “do as I did during the Battle of London, and make an Elder God SCREAM.” Hal Jordan did not think Harry was dangerous before, but now…
• Part of chapter 12 is written from the Grandmaster's point of view, and it is chilling in how alien and self-centered it is. He takes narcisism to new levels, regarding everyone and everything in the universe as playthings that he is saving by absorbing them into himself, and with an amused detachment towards mortal concepts such as identity, emotions, and time.
• Ben Grimm at one point muses on the opponents he's faced in the ring and got to know, including a certain Dax-Ur, a Kryptonian scientist he rather got on with and who happened to be as powerful as you'd expect from a high-blood Kryptonian. Then, the Grandmaster used what is very heavily implied to be blue kryptonite to strip his powers and trapped him in a labyrinth with a super-sized lab mouse, because he's a scientist, right? He was Eaten Alive, and as Ben recalls, the rest of them were expected to find it funny.
• The Grandmaster’s final, desperate gamble to try to escape his well-deserved destruction is to try to possess FRANCIS RICHARDS. Thank God, Harry and Sunniva saw it coming and had a contingency ready.
• While chapter 15 is largely light and warm and joyful, towards the end it discusses Anakin's struggles with darkness and the nature of redemption, paralleling it with the Avengers and underlining all that they've done - and Harry makes plain that they're not so different. He then reveals that after the shock wore off, if he hadn't noticed Anakin slip away, if he'd been half a second slower, Anakin would have put his lightsabre through his head. Harry pointed out that his children would need him, but stated that what really got through was resorting to telling him that that would be the easy way out.
  "You see, I get the feeling that he's decided he can't punish himself if he's dead. I'm not sure if he's accepted he deserves to live, but he's sure as hell decided he doesn't deserve to die."