We Who Will Die
65 pages • 2-hour read
Stacia StarkWe Who Will Die
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Chapters 33-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Chapter 33 Summary
Rorrik uses his invisible power to force Arvelle to watch Hester’s prolonged execution by lions. When it ends, Arvelle confronts him, but he dismisses the spectacle as a gift she should appreciate. She accuses him of enjoying violence, and his menace drives nearby guards and healers away. When Tiernon arrives, Rorrik releases her and vanishes.
Arvelle has sustained a concussion and other injuries due to her recent fight with Baldric. When given a choice, she opts for the quicker remedy of Tiernon’s blood so that she can be well enough to visit Maeva. At the healers’ quarters, Axia tells her that Maeva is unconscious but will recover. Tiernon offers his blood to aid Maeva’s healing. Arvelle holds a vigil at Maeva’s bedside.
Hours later, Arvelle wakes to find Rorrik in Maeva’s room. He asks why she dislikes killing, and she explains that she thinks of the families left behind. When she asks if he cares about anyone, he reacts with cold fury. Nevertheless, he compliments her defensive instincts and acknowledges that he was careful not to harm her in the arena. Arvelle asks about Tiberius Cotta, struggling to reconcile his contradictory nature. Rorrik challenges her simplistic view of morality, and she admits that no one is entirely good or evil. He warns her not to be reckless and then disappears. Tiernon later arrives, saying there is something she needs to see.
Chapter 34 Summary
Tiernon brings Arvelle to his quarters, where she finds her brothers, Evren and Gerith. She breaks down with relief, noting how they have grown. Tiernon rescued them while Elva was distracted. The brothers are still wary of Tiernon. Arvelle spends hours with them as Gerith demonstrates his wind abilities and Evren discusses books. When Arvelle leaves for training, she sees sorrow flash across Tiernon’s face.
In the training hall, Nyrant is furious about her absence and forces Arvelle to fight all 18 remaining novices with live steel as punishment. The novices all feign their attacks, refusing to seriously harm her. They whisper support, with Brenin calling the deceased novices—Baldric and Hester—poison. Calena praises her for making Rorrik kneel in the arena. Nyrant angrily leaves in defeat.
Arvelle visits the healers to check on Leon and Maeva. When Maeva wakes, Arvelle explains that Baldric and Hester targeted her because of their friendship. Arvelle apologizes for pushing Maeva away and confesses that her best friend died in the Sands six years ago, leaving her emotionally numb. Maeva comforts her, and they resurrect their friendship. Maeva mentions that Neris has been visiting her, and Arvelle realizes that the two are romantically involved. Arvelle reveals everything about Bran’s blackmail, her brothers, and her mission to assassinate the emperor. Maeva vows to help. Arvelle admits to taking the imperius spot meant for Maeva, who forgives her. They discuss the murders, and Arvelle describes sensing the trapped souls in the victims’ corpses. Maeva identifies this grisly tableau as a sacrifice to Mortuus, and Arvelle resolves to search Leon’s room for evidence.
Chapter 35 Summary
Arvelle enters Leon’s blood-splattered room. A large chalk sigil for Mortuus covers the floor. She concludes that Leon was drugged and ambushed by someone he trusted. While searching, she discovers a small lavender feather beneath a chair leg.
Realizing that the feather belongs to a maginari, Arvelle asks Maeva for directions to their underground prison. In the tunnels beneath the arena, she finds a massive, warded cage holding thousands of maginari. A centaur named Linaros confronts her, but a griffon named Pholus reveals that Antigrus shared his final moments with them. Pholus views her mercy killing as honorable. A harpy with lavender wings appears, matching the feather. A gorgon offers to magically show Arvelle the killer’s memories and explains that the killer was extracting her venom to use as poison; she states that the killer will be compelled to finish sacrificing Leon. Through the gorgon’s memories, Arvelle realizes that the killer is Albion. She promises the maginari freedom and tells them about Maeva’s escape plan. She then races back through the tunnels.
Chapter 36 Summary
Arvelle tells Neris that Albion is the murderer. They sprint to the healers’ quarters, where Axia informs them that Albion is currently with Leon. They burst into Leon’s room to find Albion with a dagger, but he shoves Neris against a wall and flees. Arvelle chases him through secret passages into Rorrik’s garden and then through another hidden corridor. The pursuit ends at the library, where Albion traps her.
Chapter 37 Summary
Albion clears the library floor, revealing another Mortuus sigil. Raving in a fanatical state, he claims that Mortuus will resurrect their dead loved ones. Arvelle realizes that Tiberius manipulated Albion’s grief. She rejects Albion’s offer to bring back Kassia, arguing that Kassia would have killed him for attacking Leon. Albion attacks her with a dagger tipped with gorgon poison. Jorah suddenly appears and tackles Albion but is knocked down. During the fight, Arvelle’s griffon shield briefly manifests. She urges Jorah to get help, and he flees. After the shield fades, Albion stabs Arvelle in the back, and the poison paralyzes her. As Albion begins his ritual chant, she repeatedly loses consciousness. Jorah returns and stabs Albion in the shoulder, enabling Arvelle to slash Albion’s throat with her dagger. As Albion dies, an ancient voice in Arvelle’s head says that this sacrifice is delicious. She realizes with horror that she has inadvertently sacrificed Albion to Mortuus. Tiernon arrives in a panic, and Arvelle praises Jorah’s heroism.
Chapter 38 Summary
After receiving medical treatment, Arvelle rests with her brothers in Tiernon’s quarters. She tells them about her griffon shield and resolves to learn control. When she reveals that she must still kill the emperor, Gerith is horrified. Evren mentions reading about a sect dedicated to freeing Mortuus. Maeva arrives, and they prepare for the Novice Presentation.
At the arena, the emperor forces prisoners from two enemy kingdoms to fight. As Arvelle watches in rage, vampire rebels suddenly attack with aether bombs, killing thousands. She spots a familiar rebel vampire who previously escaped Rorrik. Recognizing an opportunity to save the trapped maginari, Arvelle and Maeva go to the prison together and help the maginari escape through a gate that Maeva previously weakened. Linaros, the centaur, thanks Maeva and calls her a daughter of Tharwyn, revealing her faith in the maginari’s god.
Arvelle returns to the ruined arena and arms herself with a dead rebel’s crossbow and aether bombs. She climbs the broken stands, intending to shoot the emperor as he crosses the arena floor. Calena is secretly using her own power to disrupt the guards’ shields. As Arvelle aims, Neris joins the emperor’s escort. Unwilling to kill Neris, Arvelle lowers her weapon, resisting the compulsion of Bran’s bond, which seeks to force her to kill the emperor. Suddenly, Bran appears and reveals that he is the emperor’s unacknowledged “bastard” son: the one who orchestrated the entire attack. He has been attempting to frame Tiernon and Rorrik for the emperor’s assassination, knowing that tarnishing their reputations would allow him to seize the throne. He confesses to engineering Tiernon’s torture years ago. As Bran prepares to kill her, Rorrik arrives on his wyvern and demands a red book from Bran, who surrenders it. With Arvelle’s consent, Rorrik kills Bran, breaking the bond and freeing her from its influence. When a rebel vampire suddenly attacks Rorrik with an aether bomb, Arvelle instinctively throws herself in front of him and kills the rebel. Her act enrages Rorrik.
Chapter 39 Summary
Rorrik kills other rebels with the captured aether bomb. He furiously explains that the vampire Arvelle killed was blessed with the ability to read divine languages and could translate the red book. Testing Arvelle, Rorrik shows her the book’s script. Though it causes her pain, she can read it. Rorrik declares that she will work for him. When she refuses and begs to leave with her brothers, he insists that she has no choice.
Tiernon arrives and confronts his brother. Rorrik proposes that they train Arvelle together in exchange for her translation services, arguing that they can better protect her as allies. He reveals that Mortuus is breaking free from his prison permanently; the book holds the key to stopping the god of ruin. Tiernon accuses Rorrik of ulterior motives. Rorrik cruelly taunts him, saying that he should have fled with Arvelle years ago. Seeing Tiernon’s pain, Arvelle takes his hand and proposes a different deal: She will help translate the book if they will train her to control her powers. She will help stop Mortuus, but afterward, she and her family will leave in peace. Rorrik agrees with a malevolent smile.
Chapters 33-39 Analysis
Arvelle’s character arc pivots dramatically in these chapters as she finally regains her moral agency. Previously, her actions were dictated almost entirely by her coercive bond with Bran, but the rebel attack provides a catalyst for the development of her own ethical framework. Rorrik’s earlier Socratic probing about whether people are “entirely good or entirely evil” becomes a central question that Arvelle must answer through her actions (366). Thus, with her refusal to assassinate the emperor at the cost of killing Neris, she asserts her personal moral line, overriding the bond’s compulsion and gaining a new measure of independence in the process.
On an emotional level, Arvelle also finds new ways to overcome The Enduring Weight of Unresolved Grief. Her confession to Maeva about Kassia’s death reveals that her emotional numbness was a defense mechanism born of the fear that actively mourning Kassia’s loss and moving on would be tantamount to willingly forgetting about her entirely. As she finally opens up to Maeva, her vulnerability allows her to forge a genuine alliance, and she takes the first concrete steps toward an emotionally healthy existence.
In stark contrast, Albion’s grief for his son made him vulnerable to Tiberius’s exploitations, and he ends the novel as a fanatical follower of a deadly god, using his grief as a justification for vicious murders in Mortuus’s name. When he even goes so far as to betray Leon, his closest friend in the ludus, this heinous decision shows the degree to which he has been corrupted by his own dark desires. In this way, Stark presents grief as an active force that can either foster connection or fuel violence.
On a symbolic level, the narrative consistently juxtaposes the life-giving nature of blood with its role in coercion and dark rituals. Tiernon’s blood offers healing to Arvelle and Maeva, but this gesture stands in direct opposition to Bran’s coercive magical bond with Arvelle, which functions as a parasitic instrument of control. Albion’s murders represent the ultimate corruption of this motif, as the blood he sheds is offered in an unholy ritual sacrifice to a malevolent god. Arvelle is drawn into this dark economy when she kills Albion in the ritual space, inadvertently sacrificing him to his own dark deity and becoming a tool in Mortuus’s rise from his subterranean prison. This moment illustrates that in her world, even justified violence carries a spiritual cost.
Despite these setbacks, the novel’s climax establishes a new, more expansive conflict that will play out in subsequent installments. The fast-paced sequence of events—the unmasking of Albion, the freeing of the maginari, the assault on the arena, and the death of Bran—are all designed to resolve the primary narrative threads of the ludus murders and Bran’s blackmail. The physical destruction of the arena thus represents the collapse of the established political order, and in the ensuing chaos, Bran’s identity as the emperor’s unacknowledged son raises the series’ political stakes, just as the overarching threat posed by Mortuus intensifies the supernatural conflicts to come. The plot consequently pivots from a political assassination attempt to a broader tale of cosmic horror, forcing a dramatic realignment of character allegiances.
As Rorrik and Tiernon band together to train Arvelle for the fight to come, they both offer her divergent models of power. Rorrik’s pragmatic and often brutal worldview makes him frame his proposal as a transaction, and he uses the threat of Mortuus to secure Arvelle’s cooperation. However, Tiernon displays a conflicted form of idealism, prioritizing Arvelle’s freedom and safety over any strategic advantage that she might be able to offer. The tension culminates in Rorrik’s pointed psychoanalysis of their relationship when he claims that Tiernon is “still trying to save” Arvelle, who is “still trying to be his escape” (420). This accusation exposes the core of their dynamic, but Arvelle’s decision to broker a three-way deal of her own terms signifies her new sense of independence. In the novel’s conclusion, she pointedly refuses to be a pawn in their fraternal conflict and instead positions herself as an essential third point of power in this fragile new alliance.
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