Tear Jerker / Thy Good Neighbor

• Chapter 5. Brandon, desperate to give his clearly out of his depth father an advantage in his negotiations with Lord Fairchild, challenges Cyril to a duel, only to be treated as a joke, curb-stomped and then disinherited when he tries to backstab Fairchild in a panic. Poor Rickard is left devastated thinking he's failed his dead wife and Brandon is treated as a danger within his own home.
• Combined with Nightmare Fuel, but Cyril's past in Yharnam clearly did a number on him. Unlike the North where honor is believed to be able to win everything, Cyril makes it clear the only reason he survived Yharnam was due to quick thinking, luck, and continuing the work of better, dead men.
• The Training from Hell Cyril puts Brandon and Ned through leave both boys thoroughly traumatized and terrified of the Eldritch Abomination staying so close to their home.
• In Chapter 11, Ned talks with Cyril about his methods, which results in Cyril talking about the Scourge of the Beasts and how bloody the affair was. Throughout his explanation, Cyril comes off as cold and detached when speaking of how he more or less walked over the corpses of his fellows and callously slaughtered the civilians infected by the Scourge. During this, however, Cyril opens a small music box. Ned also notices a bloodstained ribbon lying next to where Cyril grabbed the music box from. Anyone who's played Bloodborne will know exactly what those items are and realize that, as cold as Cyril comes off during his discussion with Ned, he hasn't forgotten the people he failed to save.
• After the Whitehill men attack the Old Workshop, Evetta just quietly laments that she hoped Cyril would be able to find peace in the Waking World after leaving Yharnam.
• Rickard's grief over Lyarra's passing still weighs heavy on him. It's even to the point where he sometimes daydreams about a world where he only has three children and a still living Lyarra. He constantly dreads the day when he wakes from the dream without being full of self-loathing.
• Gehrman's treatment of Evetta. As Cyril puts it, Gehrman was a skilled warrior and an apt teacher, but a callous man and a worse father. By the end of his life he saw Evetta as a thing and left everything he had to Cyril, not giving a damn about her. It's heavily implied both in story and in Bloodborne that this treatment is due to his lingering feelings for Lady Maria.
• Lyanna quietly sharing her own feelings about her mother with Evetta.
• The prologue to Book 2 has William Dustin reflect on how distant he and Brandon, his foster-brother, have grown, and his feelings of inadequacy when he is told that Brandon grew leaps and bounds over him by apparently just training with Eddard (as they cannot tell William that they have been training with Cyril), made worse by him remembering what his late father once told him: Steel sharpens steel. If Brandon became so powerful training with someone other than William, what does that say about him? In the end, Brandon hasn't been rude or unkind to him, hasn't purposefully distanced himself from William, the two have just drifted apart, despite having once been brothers in all but blood and name. To cap the tragedy, William reflects that distant as they have drifted, he is ready to bow to Brandon and accept him as the Lord of the North... not knowing that as soon as the North retinue returns from Harrenhal, he will accept a Hunter's Contract and pass the mantle to Ned. As the author's note says: bridges don't have to burn to fall into disrepair.

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