Most Deathmatches stand on their own: two champions, one arena, a lot of blood and at least one grandmother thrown from the stands. Underneath them, though, a longer story has been unfolding since before the first match. It is about a Grandmaster who learned to celebrate death, the servant who kept trying to steal her throne, an uncle who would not stay dead, and a god who is coming to collect a debt. This page follows that story in order, keeping to the parts that matter for the big picture. Each section links to its story arc pages, where every episode is told in full.
Spoilers
This page covers everything through S7E10 — Thea’s Adventure.
The short version
Centuries ago, Elusia came home from exile to kill her uncle, The Shadow King, and took the throne of The Void. Her ally Vythorn bound the dead king’s soul into a box and began the Deathmatches beside her. The box slowly turned him against her. He secretly raised an army of fallen champions, staged his own kidnapping, and lost a war for her crown. Then the Shadow King rebuilt himself from the box, killed the Arbiter and ruled the Void with the Grandmaster as his prisoner. The Arbiter fought his way back from the dead with the help of a true god, Fil, destroyed the King’s body, and chose to stand at Elusia’s side instead of taking her place. Since then the Void has been building armies, hunting the scattered pieces of the Shadow King, and waiting for Fil to come and collect. Most recently, the Arbiter learned that his own assistant, Thea, is a worm sent to kill him, and that she has made a deal with Fil too.
Before the Arena
The Night of the Long Shadow
About seven hundred years before the first Season 1 Deathmatch, the Golden King, Faucius Golden Shield, ruled the Void from The Dread Fortress. His brother Agdrel, a great warrior with the Dragon Knights at his back, murdered him and took the throne as The Shadow King. That night the Knights of Chaos saved Faucius’s young daughter, Elusia. They spilled their own blood to open a portal and sent her out of the Void altogether, to the distant realm of Cor’thun. Agdrel ruled for three hundred years. His right hand through all of it was a winged scholar of chaos magic named Vythorn.
Skypiercer
Elusia grew up a warrior in Cor’thun, trained by its empress and fighting beside her closest companions, the death-touched Kaja and the soldier Atalantos. Then Vythorn stepped out of a portal and told her who had killed her father. In the three-part prequel Skypiercer, the three came back with him, raised an army in the Shadowlands with the resistance of the leonin Craven Eldonbridge, and stormed the Fortress while Vythorn smuggled them inside. In the throne room, Agdrel told her he had been more of a father to her than Faucius ever was. Elusia answered by stabbing him with an arrow until he was dead, and only afterward realized she had killed the last of her family.
That moment set the shape of everything that followed. Kaja and Atalantos had taught her that death is “simply a path,” something to be celebrated rather than feared. Elusia was crowned Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer, named Vythorn “the arbiter of all things,” knighted her friends as the new Knights of Chaos, and called for “a day of remembrance.” That became the first Deathmatch.
But Vythorn could not let go of Agdrel’s power. Deep in his laboratory he tore the dead king’s soul out, wrote its name, AGDREL, rearranged the letters into GERALD, and sealed it in a box. That was the birth of The Box of Chaos. Whatever was in that box would whisper to him for centuries.
The Arbiter’s Long Game
The first Deathmatches
By the time the show begins, about four hundred years later, the Grandmaster is bored, the Deathmatches are weekly, and the Arbiter is her long-suffering, unpaid assistant. In the Playtests and Season 1, champions are ripped from across time and space to die for her entertainment, and the Arbiter quietly collects the bodies. Starting with Bromir, he secretly revives fallen champions in a hidden laboratory under the Fortress: Eshrinn, Amren, Zayliss, Ivanna Kishu, Milliac and others. “This entire castle will be mine,” he gloats when he thinks no one is listening.
Two other threads from Season 1 matter later. In S1E3 the Grandmaster ordered the Arbiter to tear out his own shadow and make it fight. The Shadow of the Arbiter spoke openly against the Grandmaster, and in S1E9, as the Hollow Dragon, it promised that it and the Arbiter would one day “kill all of you.” And in S1E7, on an asteroid in The Ether Drifts, the champion Strako got out of a game of space tag by grabbing a small glowing worm and throwing it. The worm exploded. It was Timothy, the beloved mayor of a tiny worm civilization. The hosts mourned him, half joking, for years. The worms did not find it funny.
Season 1 ended with an invading army and a Tarrasque crashing into the Grand Coliseum. The Tarrasque swallowed the Arbiter whole and carried him away.
The mask slips
In Fate of the Arbiter, the Grandmaster sent three champions, Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry, to rescue him. They found him unharmed, waiting for them, and furious that they had gotten in so easily. He had kidnapped himself. He offered them thrones in his new order, killed the loyal werebear commander Orin in front of them, and when they survived, branded them traitors across the Void. Orin’s son, Lyrus, gathered his father’s soldiers into a secret resistance, the Faithful, sworn to save the Grandmaster from the Arbiter’s influence.
Back at the Fortress through Season 2, the Arbiter played the loyal servant while building his army in his own private arena. He revived Ralzamon as his general, sewed Carn’s head back on, put Baron Voltágè’s soul into a golem body and fished Mcswiggins out of the depths. Over drinks he admitted he had “been trying to overthrow the Grandmaster for years.” Meanwhile the Box of Chaos grew a personality and a name, Gerald, and even fell in love. In the Fate of the Faithful crossover, heroes from another world helped Lyrus and the Faithful break part of the Arbiter’s grip on Ralzamon, and saw how far his reach extended across the Void. The Arbiter shrugged it off: “the next phase of my plan has begun.”
The friends finally reached the Grandmaster through the sewers and the Hall of Fates, a corridor of living mirrors that swallowed Lyrus. In front of her the Arbiter confessed everything: “The Tarrasque, the attack on the arena, it was me. I kidnapped myself.” The Grandmaster answered with a wager instead of a sword.
Battle for the Crown
Battle for the Crown was a three-round war tournament for the throne of the Void, the Grandmaster’s champions against the Arbiter’s revived army, with every death declared permanent. Ralzamon and Glub Glub died for good in the first round. In the third, Flynry was killed by a meteor swarm. The Grandmaster won on points, four to two, and kept her crown. She also kept the Arbiter, but “not in the same capacity.” Doug led him around the arena on a leash.
The Fall
The Arbiter in chains
Through Season 3, the Arbiter wore sackcloth and chains, did the taxes and lost dice rolls to a pug. During that sentence he also sent Flynry’s friends after Flynry. In Into the Mirror, he led Toddleheim, Locket and the Grandmaster’s assistant Elianna down to the Hall of Fates and unmade them so they could follow Flynry’s soul into The Sands of Eternity, a realm of the dead where dying a second time is final. They found Flynry there. Locket was killed by an arrow and is gone forever.
Season 3 ended with the Grandmaster declaring the Arbiter’s sentence served. Then the Box of Chaos burned red and black, and a shadow tore itself out of the Arbiter and into the box. The Shadow King stepped out. The piece of him that Vythorn had kept had been clouding Vythorn’s mind against Elusia all along, and he had rebuilt his body from the season’s offerings to the box: “A toe, a hand, a foot, cryptocurrency.” When he struck at Doug, the Arbiter stepped in front of the blade and died at the foot of the throne. His last words to Elusia: he was sorry “for so many things,” and he had done it “for knowledge.”
The Shadow King’s reign
Season 4 belonged to Agdrel. He kept the Grandmaster chained in gold runes as “the Grandmaster, but only a name,” and made her open every arena with an amulet that cut her hands. He opened the season by raising Kaja and Atalantos from their graves to fight each other for her birthday, then tore off Kaja’s head. Almost every champion who won that season was killed by the King anyway, and deaths under his rule stayed permanent. Along the way he let slip pieces of family history Elusia never wanted to hear: the Bop-It he gave her as a child, and the fact that he had loved her mother. “You’re like a daughter to me.”
Vythorn’s Return
The Arbiter’s soul went to the Sands of Eternity, where Flynry’s friends found him in Into the Mirror. He told them the truth about the box (“a small miscalculation”), joined them, and at the end used the Orrery of Dreams to escape the Sands alone. “Nothing personal, the Grandmaster has to be saved.” Flynry, Toddleheim, Elianna and the aasimar Cerys were left behind in the Sands.
In Vythorn’s Return, he fell into the in-between and met Fil, the God of Fate, a true god far more powerful than the Grandmaster, the Arbiter or anything in the Void. Fil showed him his childhood, and pried out of him what he really wanted: “I want to control fate.” She offered him a bet. If he could find the Testaments of Morir’s Cataclysm, he could hold the fates of everyone in the Void. On the way he learned from the changeling Ise that Agdrel had murdered his parents, something he had blamed on his own runaway chaos his whole life.
He came home with the Cataclysm burned into his skin and tore the Shadow King’s body apart in the arena. Agdrel’s soul escaped. Then, with Elusia at his feet, Fil asked who he would become, and he answered: “I am the Lord of Fate.”
The Season of Fate, and the longest breath
The Season of Fate showed what came next. The Lord of Fate imprisoned the Grandmaster, made himself an imp assistant out of a worm, and spent sixteen weeks discovering that nobody liked him and nothing went the way it was supposed to.
None of it was real. In the secret fourth part of Vythorn’s Return, the whole season turned out to be a vision lived in a single breath, the moment Fil asked her question. Only Vythorn lived through it. Back in the storm, with the knife at Elusia’s throat, he gave a different answer: “I am the arbiter of the Grandmaster. I am the other side of her coin. And together we will overcome fate.” He shattered her choker, and for the first time the two of them were truly on the same side. Fil left with a warning: “We will have to come to collect.” Vythorn has since told the Grandmaster everything he saw, including the threat Fil poses.
The Void Prepares
The Season of the Trials
With the Grandmaster back on her throne and the Shadow King’s soul “torn asunder,” his pieces scattered around the Void, Season 6 changed the Deathmatches. Champions now came in teams of three, proved themselves on missions, and fought for the right to lead. The Grandmaster was building an army. By the end she had three teams, led by Robbie Clark and the Hunger, Richard S. Skelman and Bob the Barbarian.
The Box of Chaos had a new resident by then. With Agdrel’s soul gone from it, the Arbiter’s own shadow, the same one he tore out in Season 1, now lives in the box.
Two smaller moments from that season matter now. At the opening feast, the Arbiter raised the real-world Thea from a lowly worm that had “sucked up the blood of the arena,” and made her his assistant. And on a mission to the Ether Drifts, the champions the Arbiter sent smashed a door belonging to the same worm people whose mayor Strako had killed, and took the “vital mineral” from beside their home, the Hollow. It turned out to be salt for the Arbiter’s fries.
Pieces of a King
While the Grandmaster and the Arbiter were away dealing with “something big that could kill us all,” meaning Fil, three Knights of the Void set out in Pieces of a King. On the world of Dämmerung, Grimnar Stormclaw, Nehebka and Muffy found a ten-year war powered by a fragment of the Shadow King: one of his finger bones, fed to a monstrous Warmind. They ended the war and took the bone from rival knights of the Order of the Ascendant Shadow, the Shadow King’s old Dragon Knights. Through it Grimnar saw Agdrel studying how to bind chaos into his own bones, and musing about sacrificing his niece.
Grimnar was no longer sure the Grandmaster should have it either. Nehebka hid the bone inside her own chest, and the three set off for Umbracor to meet the order’s leader, Grandmaster Payne. A second Grandmaster, whose order already holds “at least five” pieces of the Shadow King. As Grimnar put it: “This could possibly be treason.”
The Season of Vigilance
Season 7 brought back the weekly Deathmatches under a new name and a warning from the Grandmaster that “danger is edging along.” The Arbiter became “upper management,” handed champion-finding to Thea, and took a wizard’s tower for himself by killing the wizard who had just won its lease. The Fortress’s skull, Seavold, spoke for the first time. And the worms kept suffering: tiny worms dragged a fallen champion underground on their asteroid, and a later fight crushed sixty of them in their crater.
Thea’s Revenge
In S7E10 — Thea’s Adventure, the worms finally answered. On her first-ever day off, in the candy land of Sugar Hills, Thea ran over a badly built robot walking backwards and found her little brother, Theo, inside it. The truth came out. Thea is a worm of the Hollow. Her people had sent her to kill the Arbiter for Timothy’s death, and she had sworn a blood oath to do it, then forgotten some things and come to love her job. The Arbiter believed he had picked a random worm. He had not. Thea had made an offering to Fil, who gave her “control of that moment” in exchange for a handshake once she had hands. The Arbiter’s reaction: “You fucking idiot! You’ve been talking to Fil!”
The siblings’ attempt on his life ended with Theo’s self-destruct vaporizing them both, the Arbiter rewinding time, and a deal. The Arbiter admitted to the worms’ destroyed cities and the salt, delivered Strako to them by portal, gave the worms front-row seats and royalties, and named Thea his ambassador to the Hollow. Theo blew himself up a second time and took Strako with him. Back at the Hollow, the worms’ council heard Thea’s report and thanked her for her service. Once she and her ghostly brother had gone, Old Todd called them “handed traitors” and opened Mayor Timothy’s plan to its next page:
Step 20: Call Fil.
The Cat’s Meow
The deal put the Deathmatches back on the worms’ doorstep. The first fight of the new era, S7E11 — The Cat’s Meow, was held at the Ether Drifts with the worm delegation, Old Todd included, in the front row. Thea’s two finds were a half-orc barbarian, Zhora Bloodfang, and a foot-tall winged cat, Bezil. Bezil killed Zhora with a flaming hairball, Thea duct-taped her back together, and Zhora hugged him to death.
Threads Still Open
- Fil is coming to collect. The god who gave Vythorn the Cataclysm has promised to return. She also has a handshake owed by Thea, and the worms of the Hollow are about to call her themselves.
- The pieces of the Shadow King. Agdrel’s soul escaped in Vythorn’s Return and broke apart across the Void. Payne’s order holds at least five pieces. One finger bone is hidden inside Nehebka, who is on her way to Umbracor with Grimnar and Muffy.
- Theo’s note. Thea keeps a burning scrap of paper her brother wrote before he died. She cannot read it, and nobody else has.
- The Sands of Eternity. Flynry, Toddleheim, Elianna and Cerys are still stranded in the realm of the dead after Vythorn escaped without them. Lyrus is still lost behind the mirrors of the Hall of Fates.