The Will of the Many Recap: What Vis Discovers Before The Strength of the Few

Spoiler warning: This recap covers all of The Will of the Many, including its epilogue.

Vis wins the Academy’s final contest, loses his closest friend, and wakes up without his left arm. Then the epilogue sends us back to the chamber beneath Solivagus, where two other versions of him wake up in two other worlds. One of them comes face to face with the man he was sent to investigate.

If you’re picking up The Strength of the Few, the scene I’d go back to is the one where words cut themselves into Vis’s arm. The first time through, they look like instructions from someone who knows the ruins. By the end, there’s a reason to ask whether another Vis had a hand in getting the warning to him.

Why Vis goes to the Catenan Academy

Vis is really Diago, the surviving prince of Suus. Caten conquered his island and killed his family, so he hides his name and refuses to cede his Will. In the Catenan Republic, people at the lower ranks surrender a portion of their life force to those above them. That transfer gives the people at the top extraordinary power and makes Vis’s refusal a risk he takes every day.

Military senator Ulciscor Telimus adopts him and sends him to the Catenan Academy on Solivagus to investigate what happened to his brother, Caeror. The official story says Caeror died by suicide during an earlier Iudicium, the Academy’s final competition. Ulciscor suspects the head of the Academy, Veridius Julii, knows more than he’s saying. Lanistia, who lost her eyes in the same incident, trains Vis before he enrolls. When Vis finds corpses in the ruins with wounds like hers, the investigation starts to look much bigger than a cover-up at a school.

What Vis discovers about the Anguis on Suus

During a school break, Vis returns to Suus as a guest of his classmate Indol. There he discovers that leaders within Military have secretly backed the Anguis, the resistance group fighting Caten. Their support helped enable the massacre at the festival earlier in the book. The attack gives Military leaders a reason to demand more power in the name of security.

Vis also learns that Sedotia, the Anguis figure who has been pressuring him, is Ulciscor’s wife, Relucia. She wants Vis to win the Iudicium so he can take a government post and serve the Anguis from inside the Republic. That puts a different spin on his rise through the Academy. Every time Vis moves up a class, he gets closer to the job Relucia wants him to have.

What happens in the Labyrinth and the Iudicium?

Vis and his teammates, Callidus and Aequa, are trying to return the Heart of Jovan to its statue. During the contest, Vis slips away to run the original Labyrinth in the western ruins. The Academy has a training version. Inside the real one, Vis finds Belli’s body.

Beyond the Labyrinth, Vis steps into a ring of bronze blades and blacks out. He wakes surrounded by figures in the dark. Two words cut into his arm, first Wait, then Run. He follows the warning, but one of the figures bites his left arm during his escape. The wound begins to blacken.

Back in the Iudicium, the Anguis have killed and replaced the safety teams. At the tower, Emissa sees Vis’s wound, stabs him, and throws him into the river. He survives. Veridius later says Emissa believed the wound meant Vis was tainted beyond saving. There’s still a question worth carrying into book two: how did Emissa know what the wound meant, and what explains her eyes turning black?

Vis finds Callidus mortally wounded. Callidus asks him to tell his father why he was demoted, then dies before Vis can get him to safety. Vis carries him back to the Academy, returns the Heart of Jovan, and wins the Iudicium.

Why Vis chooses Governance

Vis wakes in the infirmary to find that his left arm has been amputated. Veridius urges him to take a post in Religion and claims he’s trying to prevent another Cataclysm. Vis chooses Governance, where he can work under Callidus’s father. The post gives him access to information and a chance to keep his promise to his friend.

Then Vis notices a wooden ship by his bed. He carved it for his father when he was a child. His real name, Diago, is on it. Whoever left it knows something about the life Vis has kept hidden from Caten.

The ending explained: Res, Luceum, and Obiteum

The device beyond the Labyrinth creates three versions of Vis across three worlds. The epilogue shows the other two awakenings, while the main story has been following the Vis who remains in Res.

That last image changes how I read the escape from the Labyrinth. One Vis looked down and saw instructions appear on his arm just in time. Now we see Caeror reaching for the same arm on another Vis, urgently trying to help the first. The epilogue gives us enough to connect those scenes while leaving the rules of Synchronism for the sequel.

For a refresher on names or places as you read, see James Islington’s Hierarchy glossaries and map.

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• Find The Will of the Many in hardcover on Amazon.
• Continue with The Strength of the Few in hardcover on Amazon.

Once you’ve finished book two, read our The Strength of the Few recap before The Justice of One. It covers the second book’s ending.

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