What is the creepiest, spine-tingling moment in your stories? A "dark moment" doesn't have to involve a character violently dying, it can just make the reader want to puke. Like, for example, a moment that made me sick to my stomach (in a good way) was in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, when one of the characters (not gonna say his name because spoilers) TALKS TO HIS HALF DEAD WIFE LIKE SHE IS STILL ALIVE. I actually based a scene in my Warriors fanfiction off of that scene, when a character (again, spoilers), reveals that she has been murdering toms to freeze then and "have fun" with them. She also wants to live forever so she and her "lovers" can have "eternal fun".
One of the darkest moments is probably towards the end of the 'second 'book', when the protagonists learn the backstory of their amnesiac companion. They find a long-abandoned building a ways off the main road, and enter when said amnesiac says the place is familiar. Inside, they begin to notice a rotting stench, and one woman realizes the entire place is held under an illusion spell. She breaks it, and it's revealed the entire place isn't so recently abandoned, and underwent some sort of bloody struggle, complete with quite a few dead bodies. And it only gets worse once they realize what the place was for…
Nobody's ever in any danger, but it still doesn't make the place any less horrifying.
Amnesiac says place is familiar, amnesiac has ties to said place, blah blah cliche
I'm not sure, really. Probably the climax, when my mc Nyir figures out exactly what the "dragons" are and why they hunt humans. It's gonna have this eerie parallel where her son is just heading out on his first mission to fight dragons, all while his mom is finding out that it's completely hopeless and he's definitely going to die… or something. Haven't hashed it out yet.
My character accidentally kills his girlfriend’s sister before being wounded.
The second book in the series: Jade, the main character, is an Outlet- meaning her existence gives a major godlike diety the ability to keep existing. She's the only Outlet for her diety (the other dieties have multiple outlets). She finds out that the diety, who she considers a brother, has experimented on human beings to try to create an Outlet before he succeeded with her, and has hid his demonic failures in a prison. Yeesh.
I haven't written out details like that yet, but this inspired me to put in more variety in the tone of my story. I think the most revolting thing that COULD happen would be when the government of one of my countries commits an atrocity that my mains witness. Very vague, but yeah. I'm also planning on having my MC have to learn how to torture, which makes him want to run away and puke.
I have this entire universe called The Void where it picks people out from different worlds. The Void feeds on negativity, especially fear, so it tortures its victims and disposes them into the edges of space to die when they're devoid of emotion. It's sentient, but doesn't have a lick of sympathy for anyone inside its reaches. It's also implied that the Void has fed on other alien forms of life, in a story entirely about humans who still think aliens are largely a myth. My story's a visual novel, and if you chose to take the one route where you enter the Void, you get a complete POV change from you player-avatar protagonist to a supporting character trapped in the Void. In fact, the Void is omnipotent, so the only way to escape is just that; escape. (You can't punch a universe.) It's creepy, it's unnerving, and it leaves so many questions unanswered, the source of its horror.
That is hard to choose.(My universe is depressing.) I would have to go with a scene in the final battle of my story. Bit of background- Polaris is a superhero with lightning powers, he is personally responsible for accidentally killing his entire family, he has been betrayed by pretty much everyone he has ever cared about. The only character who can keep him out of completely shutting down from depression is Angel, his best friend. During the final battle, the villain is absolutely destroying the heroes. At one point during the fight, Polaris finds Angel, dead. This breaks him and he just starts trying to use his lightning to bring her back. This lasts for an entire page before Polaris gives up and shuts down. This is just one of many possible answers from my story, others include a seven day torture scene performed by one of the heroes on an innocent, the deaths of several septillion of innocents, and many others.
I did something really dark in The Book of Stars.
So, Fyllo's freckles are…
BLOOD SPECKS FROM WHEN HER MOTHER DIED GIVING BIRTH TO HER.
One of my characters gets injured probably too many times, but it’s a war story (in the second book) so I guess it’s fine?
I plan for my MC to get a horrible flashback to when the Antagonist first took over the world, and learned that she had the same exact powers as he did. Basically, he captured her brother, who she cares for so much she would do ANYTHING to make sure he lives as long and healthily as possible, and tricks her into coming to his lair.
He captures her, and tortures the crap out of her, mocking her. If you want a description, he basically transformed his arms into claws, stuck them in her torso, and dug around in her organs (or, rather, what's left of them) and started pulling stuff out. Also, her blood is blue because she's technically dead (I think I remember reading somewhere that blood with no oxygen in it is blue) and he'll kill her brother right in front of her by crushing his head.
Yeah. Nightmares for my MC for days.
When my MC's wife, Caroline, finds out that he has killed around ten people, even children. Not only that but she goes and hangs herself so she won't be around him anymore.
In one of my stories, the entire thing is super freaking dark. Basically my MC's family falls apart when:
- she watches her sister get hit and killed by a train
- her father kills the train's conductor, gets found out, is put on death row
- her mother becomes an alcoholic
All of these things trigger vivid nightmares, and she starts smoking and putting out the cigarettes on her skin as a form of self harm. This entire story is very, very dark—-probably my darkest yet.
Wow these are intense. Something I wrote recently was really hard to get through, one of my characters, a 17-year-old in a post-apocolyptic universe who ran away from an abusive mother and suffers from alcoholism and severe bipolarism, talks to a companion's four-year-old child about her suicidal thoughts, and then feels better because the child, who doesn't really talk, isn't giving her unsolicited advice or trying to talk her out of anything.
In my first story, my both of my main character's parents die early on, when the villains set fire to their house. She's naturally upset and believes she could have saved them. It's later revealed by another character that both of her parents actually had their throats slit before the house was burned down, which means that the main character couldn't have saved them even if she had been there. The healer (who was the one who had to give the MC the bad news) left that detail out so that MC could take comfort in the fact that her parents' deaths were painless (since they would have passed out from smoke inhalation).
In my second story, so far the darkest moment has been when my youngest character gets tortured (I'm not exactly proud of having to do that, but it's unfortunately necessary to the plot. He's 13, by the way). There's also another moment right at the beginning where one of the main characters is almost killed by his own father. Later on, there's another bit where a character finds a diary while he's spying on an enemy group. He starts reading through it; the person who wrote the diary talks about how he was abused by his father, contemplating suicide, all kinds of dark stuff. He eventually comes to realize that the diary belonged to another character that he knows, who had never opened up about his past.
My third story is still a bit of a work in progress so this may not end up being the darkest moment. So far though, it's when my MC witnesses his classmate (who had previously been missing) getting shot like 4 times. He runs out and tries to save her but he can't handle the sight and ultimately ends up getting shot and passing out shortly after. He wakes up in the hospital, and finds out just shortly after that his classmate had died before the doctors even had a chance to save her.
There's this author I love– Sherrilyn Kenyon– who writes amazing fantasy/science fiction books. What makes her books so utterly chilling, however, is the abuse she puts her characters through. Read anything by her and you'll know– there's torture, rape, deaths, etc…
More scene since I’ve been working on writing more:
- The leader of a mafia-type group invites an associate to dinner. She’s kind and civil to him the whole time and then the main course is brought out on one of those silver trays with a lid. He lifts it and there’s a fish on it. The mafia leader makes no big deal about it until she offers to walk him home. She and her brother take him walk him to the river and she orders her brother to drown him. The whole time she’s holding the threat of rubbing out her brother’s old friends and he is forced to kill the man.
- The brother mentioned above witnessed his close friend having her leg practically destroyed in an explosion and he is captured before he can help her.
- one character finds out her past, meets her mother, witnesses her mother’s death, and her closest friend being killed in the span of a few weeks. She also has to lie to said closest friend on his deathbed about taking his place as heir.
