How Far Would You Go for the People You Love?: A Guest Post by Stacia Stark

Vampires, danger, magic and romance — this series is just getting started. Arvelle’s destiny is tested when she’s forced to attempt the impossible to protect the ones she loves. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Stacia Stark on writing We Who Will Die.

Fifteen years before I became a published author, I took my first Classics class. I loved learning about Ancient Rome, and it opened the door to my morbid fascination with the brutal lives of the gladiators.

That fascination only deepened when I stepped into the Colosseum for the first time and finally grasped the sheer size of the arena. I vividly remember fixating on what it must have felt like for the gladiators to walk into that space, knowing it was likely they wouldn’t leave it alive. How much courage would that have taken? What were they thinking as they took that first step?

These questions stayed with me, and years later, I learned of the evidence that women also fought as gladiators. One of the most interesting examples comes from a 2012 study which suggests that a two-thousand-year-old bronze statue of a woman thrusting a cleaning implement into the air was much more likely to be a female gladiator holding a short sword while saluting the crowd. And yet, female gladiators have mostly been largely ignored by history and popular culture.

While Ancient Rome influenced much of the world of We Who Will Die, I still didn’t have a story—until one day, while scrolling on TikTok, I came across a woman speaking eloquently about the death of her best friend.

I remember wondering how someone could possibly get out of bed after that kind of loss. As an author drawn to worst-case scenarios, that question led to: “What if your best friend died and you believed you were responsible? How would you live with that grief and guilt?”

From that thought, Arvelle began to take shape—a woman who had endured the loss of her best friend Kassia and carried the terrible weight of that loss every day. I also stripped away almost everything else that had ever mattered to Arvelle, leaving her with only one thing to live for: her brothers. Once I understood her grief, the plot followed naturally, and when a vampire arrives and blackmails Arvelle with her brother’s life, she doesn’t think twice before accepting.

But We Who Will Die isn’t just about survival—it’s also about love. When Arvelle moves into the ludus, she learns that the emperor’s Primus is the same man who abandoned her six years earlier. Second-chance romance isn’t an especially common trope in romantasy, and I loved writing the flashback scenes that reveal Arvelle and Tiernon’s relationship before he left her.

I’ve also always been fascinated by how people change when they’re apart, and what this means for their relationship when they reunite. For Arvelle, this is particularly stark. Her trauma has shaped her into someone she barely recognizes, someone she believes Kassia wouldn’t even like, and most importantly, someone who may never be able to forgive Tiernon for what he did—no matter his reasons.

Writing We Who Will Die also allowed me to incorporate several other themes I’d been wanting to explore, including addiction, the parentification of eldest daughters, female friendship, grief, survival, and forgiveness. But it was important to me to include one central question at the heart of this novel: How far would you go for the people you love?