Tear Jerker / InCryptid

Sad moments in the series.

The Fran and Jonathan Healy Era

• The title given to Daniel Healy by the Aeslin Mice, the God of Early Arrivals and Earlier Departures, because he's killed by an assassin while still a child.
  • Jonathan's description of what happened in "The First Fall" is a combination of tear-jerker and Nightmare Fuel - the bogeyman woke Daniel up before he killed him to hurt his family, and from the way the story describes it, it wasn't pretty.
  • At the end of "The First Fall", Juniper watches Fran and Jonathan go, and talks about how her daughter and Alice will be best friends forever - before mentioning that she'll never see Fran again. Worst of all is that she's right - the next time the reader sees her is in "The Star of New Mexico", after Fran has been killed.
• "We Both Go Down Together" Multiple ones.
  • The general malaise surrounding the town and what happens to people as they get older and turn into merfolk who forget they ever had human lives.
  • Fran and Jonathan's newborn gets kidnapped, but they get her back, which leads to a Heartwarming Moment.
  • The reason why Angus and Elaine's father were kidnapping the fishfolk babies: Angus wanted the children to have more time on land before the change, and Elaine's father wanted to give her a life away from Gentling after her fishfolk stepmother returned to the sea. Unfortunately, after Elaine learns about her father's role in the kidnappings, she wants nothing more to do with him, and Angus's punishment is to return to the sea and forget what he did.
• "Oh Pretty Bird": The dawning horror of the situation in the town of Whiting, Indiana.
• "Broken Paper Hearts". Alice knows what death is, and that sometimes people come back as ghosts. But she's only six, and is completely distraught when it happens to her own mother. It also adds a retroactive tearjerker to the times that Seanan has referred to Frances by a long version of the Aeslin title: the Violent Priestess, Who Never Learned To Be Careful.
  • When Jonathan and Enid find Fran's body, Jonathan starts speculating on what happened to her, like she's just another random victim and not his wife - up until he says that she never learned to be careful and finally breaks down.
  • And to make things worse, the whole thing happens around Alice's first Valentine's Day at school. The last paragraph describes how the coroner's assistants carrying Fran's body out step on the pieces of the Valentine that she meant to give to her, torn apart after she learns that Fran was killed.
• "The Star of New Mexico": During the vigil held by the Aeslin mice, Fran's high priest asks one of her newer priests to witness her funeral in his place. When asked why, the priest - the same mouse that traveled with Jonathan to Arizona back in "The Flower of Arizona" - admits that he had loved her, making the act of witnessing her funeral too painful. Afterwards, he tells the new priest that he must lead the congregation from now on, and goes off to die of grief.
• That brief moment in "Target Practice" where Alice mentions that the frickens aren't afraid of her anymore. This sets off Jonathan, because part of why Frances died is because the thing that killed her didn't scare the frickens, either.

The Price Family Era

Discount Armageddon:

• The discovery of Piyusha's body.

Midnight Blue Light Special:

• The realization by Verity that Dominic's apartment and life are so spare and empty of anything but duty (and that itself is being slowly taken from him by his awakening to the fact that his duty is a cruel sham) that no one but her would miss him or even notice he had disappeared if he died.
• Mike's guilt when he thinks Verity has died.
• Dominic's guilt at the realization that the Covenant captured Verity because he thought he could trust them not to lie to him about what they knew or didn't know.
• Sarah's guilt at what she has to do to protect Verity.
• Verity's guilt over what Sarah did to herself to protect Verity.

• "IM" Arthur's 's guilt over wanting to talk to Sarah again, and his angst over not having told her how he feels about her.
• "Jammed": The discovery of the corpse of Holly go Lightspeed.

Pocket Apocalpyse:

• Alex recruits some of the Aeslin mice, who consider it a holy mission in service of their god, to help him determine if any of the Thirty Six society have been infected with lycanthropy-w. One of them crushes the mouse to death, refusing to acknowledge that the mouse had been told to stop and would acknowledge no order to begin again that didn't come from Alex, his god.
  • Alex's guilt.

Chaos Choreography:

• Body discovery again - Poppy and Graham. And the subsequent realization that they were not the first. A few chapters later, the fact that the snake cult were able to complete the murder of another pair of dancers despite the best efforts of Verity, Dominic, Alice, Malena, and Pax.

Magic For Nothing:

• Antimony asking Sam to get her Aeslin mice to the airport a favor that means she doesn't get to go home or to be with him.

Calculated Risks:

• After Sarah finally regains the trust of her friends and family after erasing herself from their memories, Sarah has to perform another equation to get them all home. She knows she may die in the process, but is willing to do it for her companions and everyone else who got stuck there with them. And then, when she needs more brain processing power, Artie touches her and is reduced to an Empty Shell. She's able to rebuild his psyche from the bottom up thanks to everyone else's memories, but is it really the same Artie?

Spelunking Through Hell:

• The prologue chapter, in which the Crossroads finally grabs Thomas, and Mary has to talk down a pregnant Alice before she can go after him through the portal.
  • At one point, the narration mentions that the Aeslin mice had been reciting the catechisms of the God of Early Arrivals and Earlier Departures, a.k.a. Daniel Healy, Alice's deceased older brother, and that Thomas had to explain to them how listening to those stories - which definitely would have included how Daniel had been murdered - were hurting Alice.

Aftermarket Afterlife:

• Jane and Dominic's deaths. Jane didn't get much character development over the series, but it's still tragic that she died just as she had finally met Thomas and she and Alice were trying to reconnect. With Dominic, we've seen him grow and develop from the very beginning of the series, so it hits a lot harder, and we see how consumed by grief Verity is.
• At the end, when Mary, Sarah, and Annie are bombing the Covenant headquarters, they try to evacuate all the Aeslin mice there, but some of the older ones refuse to leave the only home they've ever known, and decide to Face Death with Dignity.