Nightmare Fuel / Knights of the Borrowed Dark

Keep the lights on tonight...

Knights Of The Borrowed Dark

• The prologue. The visitors torturing Ackerby to get information out of him and encouraging him to take his pain out on Denizen as they leave... it makes for an extremely unsettling start.
• The encounter with the Bad-Dream Angel.
• Tenebrous can come out of every shadow. Any. Shadow.
• The Clockwork Three coming to Crosscaper Orphanage.
  • Everyone in Crosscaper is sent into a forced sleep except for Simon, and he has no idea why. Simon has no idea what the Three are either, except that they're not human, and are somehow feeding on the nightmares and misery of his sleeping friends. If they find him, he doesn't know if they'll kill him or worse. Every basic need becomes a peril. His chapters are absolutely terrifying.
  • He's given a Hope Spot in chapter 16, which is violently yanked away... and then he hears what sounds like the Three torturing someone.
  • Later chapters reveal that someone is Grey.
• The Cost. The price for their power is that their skin turns into iron.
• Denizen's run-in with the Woman in White in Rathlath. And Pick-Up-the-Pieces is also pretty scary, for that matter.
• The end of chapter 16.
  The Man in the Waistcoat: I wouldn't fight it, Little Knight. Worming into the heads of mortals is a talent of ours. Of course, the process isn't perfect, flesh being what it is. There have been so many.... Well, tools often break in the hand.
  • The Man in the Waistcoat taunting Grey after forcing him to use a Cant against an innocent civilian sounds very...personal, and very chilling.
    The Man in the Waistcoat: Look what we made you do...
• There's no telling what ancient Tenebrous can do.
  • We get to see some of their capabilities later. It's not pretty.
  • It's also notable that Grey is the one who brings this up, including the specific idea of them being able to literally root through a person's mind for information. Is he speaking from personal experience, perhaps?
• The Endless King has Breached once before. The body he left behind is the entirety of Os Reges Point.
• Deeeeeaaaarrrr Siiiiiiiimmmoooonnnnnn.
• Denizen imagining what governments might do to him if they find out about the existence of Knights.
• The Art of Apertura. The Tenebrae. What Denizen almost sees...
• When Vivian is shot, she falls down on top of Denizen.
• Grey's situation. Dear god, it's possibly the most horrific thing in the entire book.
  • Thralldom. He never says exactly what the Clockwork Three did to him, but they can force him to do things and then forget... unless they think it would hurt him more if he remembered. And while he was trying to abuse loopholes as a way of fighting their control, it didn't seem to be working well. And this has been going on for about two and a half weeks.
  • He genuinely thinks that shooting the Hardwicks is better than whatever the Clockwork Three are planning on doing to them. Some of his lines could imply that the Three were going to kill him once this was all over, and that he wanted them to.
  Denizen: They'll kill you. They'll kill you for this.
  Grey: One can only hope.
  • Everything about his hand. And then he rips a piece of his own flesh out.
  • How much physical pain he's in when he disobeys an order.
• Grey sobbing in pain on the ground after Vivian breaks his jaw to stop him speaking Cants...and the sobs slowly turning into a horrible ticking noise as the Clockwork Three get closer.
• The cage Mercy was in was made of iron fillings.
  • Grey built this cage.

The Forever Court

• The prologue is insanely creepy. It introduces a cult of people who seem to have the same powers as the Knights do, and they worship a… something... called the Redemptress.
• John-Of-Sorts, a Tenebrous that replaces people and feeds off the emotions of the community. It kidnapped children and kept them in cages in its basement, and the person it imitated didn't survive.
• The Redemptress, and the iron Adversaries in the basement.
• The Cants in Denizen's head telling him exactly how he could kill his friends.
• Retreat. Dear God. It's an underground asylum where Knights who lose control of their powers are locked up. And “locked up” meaning trapped in impenetrable spoken-steel prisons with locks on the outside.
• The Cost of building just one Hephaestus Warplate is so great that people had to give their lives to make them.
• The members of the Forever Court that the Knights meet with. They're the nobility of the Tenebrae, so powerful that other Tenebrous are afraid of them, too.
  • Mocked-By-A-Husband. We don't entirely know what it looks like because it's physically hard to focus on, but it's humanoid, with a creepy number of joints… and is very hostile towards the Knights.
  • Malebranche—a murder of snow-white Creepy Crows in a human shape. Its voice nearly makes Denizen—and actually makes some Croits—vomit, and it can use its crows as spies, which it kills when they aren't useful anymore.
  • Rout, the executioner with a Slasher Smile.
• Malebranche appearing to the Croits out of nowhere.
• The Croits attacking the Order, starting with taking the lights out with Tabitha’s terrifying Prayer.
• Tabitha’s death. It's the first time we've actually seen the Cost completely swallow someone.
• Grandfather having carved his own iron hand and arm into a weapon—and the first time we see what's under his left sleeve, he's using it to break Uriel’s rib.
  • Later, Ambrel dresses in Accusers’ Red and goes after Uriel with a file, intending to forcibly shave his arm down.
• Denizen’s experience with the Tenebrae in book one was unnerving at best, and, while he came out in one piece, it introduced that it's filled with monsters you don't want to see and water you don't want to drink. Uriel isn't so lucky when he uses the Art of Apertura. As he blindly struggles through the black water, one of the Tenebrous sharks snatches Ambrel, and when he opens his mouth to call for her—
• When Denizen's eye literally explodes with the Cost. Ack. And it messes up his vision in a really creepy way for the rest of the book, too.