payment page
Summary
Chapters 37-39
Chapter 37
A venin leaps from its wyvern and lands on Tairn’s back, taunting Violet and stabbing her in the side with a dripping poisoned dagger. The venin warns Violet that she will wish for death, and threatens to summon a person she calls her Sage. Xaden appears and casts shadows all around them. Disoriented by this, the venin falters. This momentary distraction allows Violet to kill her. Unexpectedly, this causes nearby wyvern to fall as their link is severed. Realizing that killing venin riders eliminates their wyvern, Violet shifts her strategy, targeting the venin leaders. Tairn hesitates to channel more power through Violet, worried she will burn out like his last rider did, but Andarna steps in, freezing time. Violet channels lightning through Andarna’s power, striking a venin with precision and bringing down over half the wyvern. Xaden then kills the last venin, securing victory for the riders. Violet watches this happen and then slides off Tairn’s back into freefall.
Chapter 38
As Violet slides off Tairn, Andarna slows time to catch her fall, scooping her out of the air and bringing her to Xaden on the ground. Xaden realizes she has been poisoned by the venin. Violet slips in and out of consciousness as Xaden urgently takes her somewhere safe for treatment. He tells her she isn’t allowed to make him fall for her and then die. Violet intermittently hears voices she’s unfamiliar with as she fights to recover. The narrative breaks up into short, choppy phrases as Violet slips in and out of consciousness.
Chapter 39
The last chapter suddenly switches to Xaden’s perspective. The reader learns that he has been in love with Violet the entire time he has known her. The beginning of this chapter is a long sequernce of Xaden explaining how he worked through his initial feelings of fear and hatred when Violet joined the Riders Quadrant. He truly wanted to kill her when she first arrived, but quickly realized that part of the intensity of those feelings was because he was falling for her. He’s desperately hopeful that Violet will forgive him for his betrayals of her trust, trying to reason with himself that someone as intelligent as her will be able to see that he was working for the greater good and had obligations beyond his own personal desires.
After three days, Violet awakens, and Xaden, immensely relieved, promises to earn back her trust. They kiss. Realizing she’s in Aretia, a town supposedly destroyed after the Rebellion, Violet begins to understand just how deep the roots of Navarrian corruption and rebel solidarity reach. Aretia was partially burned but is now being rebuilt secretly by the children of the separatists. Xaden asks if Violet will join their fight, and she agrees immediately. He admits he loves her and pledges to restore her trust, even though she says it might take some time to earn it back. Xaden is about to seal the news with a kiss when they’re interrupted by banging on the door.
In the final twist of the novel, Brennan, Violet’s supposedly deceased brother, walks in. He reveals he was the one who Mended her and welcomes her to the revolution.
Analysis
When the cadets team up with the gryphon fliers to fight the venin who attack them, they are literally deciding to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. They willingly put their lives on the line for a cause greater than either themselves or their national identities and enmities. The venin are terrifyingly powerful. They’re even more frightening to Violet, who has only just learned they aren’t just the stuff of horror stories. She realizes that her father was doing more than teaching her about folklore when he made her study Fables of the Barrens. During combat the sacrifices Xaden, Violet and their allies make become literal and immediate. The most tragic of these is the loss of Liam, Violet’s friend and protector. He takes down a venin but loses his dragon, Deigh, in the process. Without the bond that keeps riders alive, Liam succumbs as well, dying in Violet's arms. His last request, asking Violet to look after his sister, speaks to the personal sacrifices riders must make—they risk not just their lives, but their hopes for the future and the well-being of those they care about. Liam’s sacrifice gives Violet the impetus she needs to strike the final blow against the group of venin attackers; it’s the price of victory, because Violet needs the emotional jolt to fling herself fully at her enemies.
Overwhelmed by the advancing wyverns, Violet channels all the power Tairn can offer her, unleashing her lightning in a desperate attempt to protect her comrades. She does this knowing that she’s frightening her dragons and risking their lives, as Tairn’s previous rider Naolin died doing something very similar in trying to Mend her brother Brennan. Violet, who has previously been disgusted by killing, sacrifices her energy, her safety, and a part of her innocence to try and win this battle. When this doesn’t work, true to form Violet uses her intellect to find a solution to a problem physical power is unlikely to solve. After she kills the venin on Tairn’s back, she realizes that the venin’s reliance on a source of power outside of gryphon and dragon channeling is their greatest weakness when on wyvernback. riders and fliers channel their power through their mounts; venin create and provide power for their wyverns. This means that if a venin dies all the wyverns it is channeling power to also fall from the sky. It’s this discovery that allows the riders to win the battle.
These final chapters illustrate that sacrifices are never exclusively grand or noble; despite the ends they achieve, in Fourth Wing there’s always and element of pain and ugliness in the trade-off. Xaden sacrifices his loyalty to Navarre's laws, his safety, and his trust with Violet to protect the marked children and the Poromians fighting the venin. Liam sacrifices his life to ensure the survival of his comrades. Violet sacrifices everything she is to become a rider and uphold her family’s legacy; and then loses all her faith in the integrity of her mother’s single-minded Navarrian aggression. Violet feels horribly betrayed when she realizes that her mother is not the hero she had imagined her to be.
The loss of faith in this family member is mediated by the joy and surprise of discovering her brother Brennan is still alive, and is miraculously also on the right side of the conflict. When she wakes up in Aretia, Violet is initially highly disoriented, as she believes the city to have been destroyed during the Rebellion. It was, partially, but as Xaden explains, the marked population have been quietly rebuilding it. There’s an entirely new side of the war that Violet didn’t know existed, one which opposes corruption in Navarre and the evil of the venin. When Brennan welcomes her to the “revolution,” he’s also welcoming her to a different version of her military life, one based on truth rather than deception and free of the taint of her mother’s influence. Violet realizes that she can go against the destiny that has been pre-ordained for her while still loving Xaden, living as a rider, and supporting this new version of the fight against the dark.
