Nightmare Fuel / Mythos Effect

Let's just say it's not fun to be a Turian in this fic.

• To begin, we have the conventional war on Shanxi. While the Turians are on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle from the very beginning, it gets worse once the higher ups get reports of several of the human Humongous Mecha literally eating their troops.
• Later we get to see Tagers preforming boarding action against the Turian vessels in sort of a eldritch rehashing of Alien. It doesn't help the Tager symbiotes give their hosts a sadistic bloodlust.
• And then comes the night offensive on Shanxi:
  Private Orthus: DEMON! IT'S AFTER ME! THE EYES! THOSE HORRIBLE EMPTY EYES!
• Once the war begins in earnest (all the above stuff was just "the Relay 314 Incident") the human perspective almost disappears. Up until this point, the human portions, for lack of a better term, humanized the story, and kept it a little less horrific. Now, combined with the Turian Hierarchy firing shots in the dark and the more experienced and reasonable officers responsible for the surrender at Shanxi Reassigned to Antarctica, things are going to get even more bloody.
  • The war proves to be so horrific that any Turian who's spent time fighting humanity insists that the ones who die are the lucky ones, especially those that die quickly. The ones that survive aren't nearly so fortunate.
• Adrien, a newbie to the fight against humanity, is left aghast and horrified when he watches three veteran soldiers nonchalantly spread a dead Turian's guts all over their armor to mask their smell.
  • Word of God says - and now, a full-blown sidestory shows - that Julek, one of the veterans, apparently was present at the Fall of Apparitius, where after besieging the city for a week, NEF forces spread a Mind Rape spell on the Turians that caused them to hallucinate their worst fears, after which they attacked and massacred the defenders. Julek was one of the few survivors, who somehow managed to drag himself to friendly territory - only for his commander to give him a milquetoast congratulation and tell him to get ready and prepare to get sent back to the meatgrinder. He then interpreted all of his efforts as some giant cosmic joke, paired with the Joker's first laugh from The Killing Joke.
    On the plus side, (in his opinion) he's much happier now.
• There's a brief mention of a Turian who, decades before, somehow managed to start a cult that took control of half a planet and demanded independence from the Hierarchy. Said half planet got pounded back into the Stone Age, but... for all of humanity's hopes of preventing Eldritch cults from spreading around, it may actually be too late.
• After Adrien's first major battle against humanity, one of the Tagers appears in his quarters in the middle of the night with intent to kill him and does kill several other soldiers before leaving. It's later revealed that dozens of other soldiers were killed the same way.
  • Arguably the worst part is that that was a secondary objective. The primary objective? Destroying the food and medicine stores, which they accomplished.
• After the events on Digeris, Sparatus reveals that the Turians may have a stroke of good fortune, as they have discovered an intact and completely abandoned NEF vessel in their space, and were able to tow it to Palaven's Moon of Menae in the hopes of reverse-engineering their technology. Of course, Quentius points out the obvious concern: why would the humans completely abandon one of their own warships and just leave it floating in the middle of space?
  • It gets worse as Quentius eventually learns more details from one of the Turian Merchant Marines who discovered the ship in question: the ship wasn't abandoned when the turians found it. There were still humans onboard, sending out garbled transmissions that nevertheless made one thing clear: they were begging the turians to blow up their ship because something horrific was loose onboard. When the Turian Navy eventually showed up and decided to ignore the warnings and tow the ship back home, they were detecting no lifesigns of any kind on the derelict vessel.
    • The indications are clear. Something eldritch somehow got onboard a NEF warship and wiped out the entire crew, something so bad that the humans who have faced countless horrors were terrified to the point of begging to be destroyed. And now the Turians have taken the ship with said horror onboard and have brought it to the heart of their civilization. Chapter 26 ends with the turians opening up the chamber it was sealed in, freeing the entity.
• Chapter 27 opens with Quentius and Palaemon attempting to get ahold of the latter's contact on Menae, only for something else to answer and explain that it's killed everyone in the compound, possibly even the moon. The voice (which Word of God has confirmed was based off the title character from The Darkness) is described as conjuring up images of worms and maggots, and is noted to have an odd and unnatural inflection to their pronounciation, even though the words are undeniably Turian, which a horrified Quentius realizes isn't due to crude mimicry, but malice; this thing is intentionally twisting and butchering his native tongue as a show of disdain.
  "You want a naammme? My naaaame?" it replied. A horrid cackle emanated from the omni-tool. "No. No, no, no, no. You shall have no name. But you will know me. Know me and fear me. I see your world. Ssseee its lights. Its citiesss. I will have them aaaallll, and those that scurry within them. You and your kind shall be the firsst. I will feast on you all and make you one with me. Your bones will be my teeth. Your ssskin my tongues. And your flesh, your precious flesssh, will be my form. I claim you all. You are mine. Mine. MINE! MIIIIIINE!!"
  • Quentius has Draxon call Menae's main base during a meeting of the Primarchs to prove his point. The base attempts to connect with the research facility and fails... before he realizes something is actually coming straight for the base. The Primarchs end up listening to the absolute chaos that follows as all attempts to stop the mysterious creature utterly fail, and then when it attacks the room where Draxon's contact is.
    The sounds that now came through the call were so horrible, Quentius couldn't believe they were real. A mixture of Turian screams, the crunching and snapping of bones, wet, meaty ripping and tearing sounds, all accompanied by gurgling snarls and growls, made up a symphony of death that filled the Hall, the speakers amplifying every last terrible noise.
    
    Then, after what felt like hours, the screaming stopped. The last sound to be heard before the line went dead was Commander Verras's voice, now reduced to a pitiful whimper. "The mouths...oh, sweet Spirits...the mouths..."
• A canon sidestory has Nator recount in utter despair that he's learned the NEF, as terrifying as they are, barely qualify as bacteria to the true powers of reality. The seemingly unstoppable nightmarish monsters they command aren't even worth noticing to the "true sapient life". Worse, one of those beings that he describes as "residing in a dimension further above us than we are to our own shadows" has taken notice of him. He left his friend all the information the NEF gave him in the eventuality that the being paying attention to him "decides he's no longer an amusing mote of dust."

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