In We Who Will Die, survival inside the empire of Senthara hinges on moral compromises that strip away a person’s ethics and sense of self, and author Stacia Stark invokes the systemic injustices of ancient Rome to create a world built to exploit the desperate, proving that those with everything to lose have no latitude to entertain the rigid, abstract ideals of conventional morality. Arvelle Dacien’s circumstances aptly demonstrate this issue since her efforts to protect her family push her to make choices that utterly shatter her own personal code of ethics, and she finds herself engaging in everything from calculated manipulation to outright killing in order to carve out a better existence for her brothers. Stark presents these moments as the hard cost of living in a world where the powerful target the vulnerable for the sake of sport, and it is clear that in order to survive such a heartless regime, Arvelle must voluntarily sacrifice parts of herself for the sake of her family’s future.

Arvelle’s deal with the vampire Bran stands as the first and most damaging compromise that she makes, as all her subsequent suffering stems from this one fateful decision. In Bran’s first fraught meetings with Arvelle, he offers to help her only if she infiltrates the Sundering and assassinates the emperor. He seals the threat by saying, “A deal is a deal. If you try to run, I will kill both of your brothers” (24). His coercion drives her choice, and in her desperate bid to keep her brother Evren alive, she renders herself vulnerable to Bran’s vampiric bond, a magical form of enslavement with far-reaching effects that only become apparent to her much later when she dares to defy his will. Stark anchors Arvelle’s subsequent shows of violence in her reluctant link to Bran, and as she struggles to chart a clear course through a gauntlet of moral compromises, the empire’s traps force her to exhibit the very brutality that she has always wanted to escape.

Notably, Arvelle’s bargain taints every subsequent interaction that she has, spreading its damage as she drags others into her fight. For example, when she manipulates the bitter Leon, her former mentor and Kassia’s grieving father, into helping her train for the Sundering, her calculated act suggests that her desperation has twisted her into someone whom her deceased friend would not even recognize since she deliberately uses Leon’s pain as leverage to achieve her own ends. She knows that Leon has lived in seclusion for six years and that his grief still governs him, but she needles him by threatening to train with someone whom the narrative implies is an old rival. Recognizing that this tactic will goad him, she ruthlessly employs the strategy because she knows that making use of his experience is the only way to keep herself alive in the arena. Having become desperate enough to wound someone who already lives under the empire’s cruelty and has suffered for her sake in the past, Arvelle must ultimately set her own scruples aside in her bid to survive.

Although Arvelle’s mission grows so toxic and perilous that it drastically compromises what little honor she has left, she nonetheless finds ways to mitigate her sense of guilt over her forced complicity in Bran’s schemes. For example, when she must fight the griffon Antigrus during the Sundering, she quails at the idea of killing such a magnificent creature. However, he links telepathically and understands her reluctance to engage in the violence of the arena, and when he asks her to end his suffering quickly and mercifully, she is relieved of a measure of guilt over the heinous act that the emperor and his regime are forcing her to perform. Although she does slay the griffon, her lingering anguish later inspires her to help the other maginari escape from their confinement below the arena. Thus, Arvelle carves out what moments of redemption she can, even as she remains caught between Rorrik’s and Bran’s morally compromising demands. As she tenaciously negotiates her survival, every path forward requires her to make decisions that reshape her understanding of herself.