Witch King – The Return of the Demon
A common theme in fantasy worldbuilding is that once there was a Golden Age, but now the magic has vanished or is draining away. The Elves have departed. The Gods have been slain. The Mysteries have been forgotten. So prevalent is this trope that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy has a specific term for it: thinning”). It describes that feeling evoked by worlds that used to be fuller or richer, brimming with magic, mystery and wonder. But by some mysterious force or process, they have become emptier, flatter, greyer. In a word: thinner.
We saw thinning at work in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot centred on an attempt to restore a lost magic to England. But the example most fantasy readers will be familiar with is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Middle Earth walked by Frodo and Sam is a world where the most titanic struggles have already been fought, the mightiest empires have risen and fallen, the gods have walked the earth and retreated. Everything in The Lord of the Rings, from Lothlórien and Gondor all the way to Sauron himself, is a shadow of a grander age. The Lord of the Rings is at least in part a novel about how to move on in a world literally set in the ruins of the past.
The world of Martha Well’s Witch King has similarly thinned, but here there is no mystery about why the world is emptier than it once was. It is thinner because invaders from across the sea landed on its shores and massacred everyone and everything. Witch King is not a story of melancholic longing for some imagined but lost Englishness, but a direct reckoning with the effects of genocide, trauma, and loss, and what happens to those left alive to move on from it.
Witch King starts with demon Kaiisteron (Kai) and witch Ziede finding themselves imprisoned, but quickly liberated by the misguided attempts by an ‘expositor’ (i.e., a sorcerer) to enthral Kai. Thus inadvertently freed, Kai and Ziede must discover who betrayed them, and to what end, and what fate has befallen their friends and allies.
This situation creates a great amount of anxiety for both Kai and Ziede, and as the story progresses, we gradually find out why. Both were there when their world first burned, when their friends were slaughtered and their ways of life destroyed. Witch King is structured like braid, with alternating chapters set in the present and the past. It is from the past chapters that we learn that when Kai was young and had only recently crossed into the human world, a people called the Hierarchs came from across the sea and exterminated almost all the societies they encountered, saving only a few to be either subjugated or enslaved. In their war, the Hierarchs have two advantages over their enemies. First, their united forces, arrayed against a fragmented patchwork of city states, tribes and principalities that comprises Kai and Ziede’s world. Second a form of blood magic powered by death and suffering. It is the latter that allows the Hierarchs to wage the magical equivalent of nuclear warfare, making their merciless advance unstoppable.
The Hierarchs’ genocidal invasion has echoes of the Roman conquests of Gaul and Carthage or the arrival of conquistadors in the Americas, and it is probably no coincidence that the Hierarchs’ soldiers are called legionaries. The level of death and destruction is a clear departure from from Wells’ previous Murderbot Diaries series, which despite being set in a dystopian future did tend to see its heroes prevail over their adversaries. Not so in Witch King, where we watch with Kai as his people are massacred, his fellow demons imprisoned, and his connection to the Underearth severed.
Witch King is not a story about heroic resistance, but of loss and how to come to terms with it. The majority of the novel is set after first the invasion and then the defeat of the Hierarchs. The chapters set in the past tell us some of the events of the invasion, but here we are constrained by Kai’s own limited knowledge of what is happening, and that strand of the story terminating before we arrive at the successful counter-offensive against the Hierarchs.
The purpose of the ‘past’ chapters is therefore not to describe heroic battles, but to explain why ‘present’ Kai, Ziede and their allies are the way they are. Our heroes suffer from trauma and survivors guilt that expresses itself in panic, mistrust, and a reflexive tendency to deploy force or violence in defence of self or loved ones. Each of the characters who lived through the war is struggling to recover who they were, restrain the negative impulses they’ve developed due to what they’ve suffered, and to integrate their experiences into a new self that can move forward. There has been a profound break in the world of Witch King, and the novel put me in mind of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which ends on this reflection:
“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
The inhabitants of Witch King were not as innocent or pacifist as the Althesians in Le Guin’s novella, but it is nonetheless implied that before the arrival of the Hierarchs, their communities coexisted mostly peacefully. It is therefore not only our heroes, but their entire society that has to come to terms with trauma and having been fundamentally altered. To defeat the Hierarchs, the fragmented city-states and other political entities that existed before the invasion were forced to unify into the an alliance called the Rising Worlds Coalition. But just as Le Guin’s Althesians could not put murder back into the dream-world, neither can Wells’ societies unlearn domination, autocracy and imperialism.
The search of Well’s characters for a new identity not governed by their traumatic experience is thus mirrored in the search of their communities for a future beyond mass death, war and domination. In both cases it involves internal conflict and work to unlearn reflexes forged in pain and despair. One of Kai’s key motivations is to prevent the Rising Worlds Coalition, which began as an alliance of independent states formed to fight the Hierarchs, from itself turning into a for mof empire. I was reminded of Hannah Proctor’s meditations on collective grief in Burnout, and how communities can be sundered by a trauma that, while shared, is nonetheless experienced uniquely individually. What is clear, is that Wells does not believe that simply putting the King back on the throne of Gondor is going to be a solution to anything.
The absence of the actual war of the Rising Worlds Coalition against the Hierarchs does leave an odd gap in Witch King’s worldbuilding, which is compounded by Kai’s ignorance throughout much of the ‘past’ chapters. We hence only gradually and incompletely discover the world’s lore, with Wells offering little in the form of exposition. The absence of characters launching into lengthy but implausible explanations makes for refreshingly natural reading, but combined with Wells’ creative approach to existing fantasy concepts and her invention of new ones, makes the story and the finer points of the lore hard to follow. Character abilities occasionally emerge just when they are convenient to progress the plot, lending a mild feel of deus ex machina to parts of the story, though unlike in for example Mal Goes to War, this did not impair the overall plausibility for me.
Witch King is an intriguing new direction for Wells, although it shares with the Murderbot Diaries the centrality of found family, the importance of trust, and the almost casual inclusion of diverse representations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability. A crucial difference however is that where Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery starts almost from a blank slate at the point they gain autonomy, Kai’s journey is instead one of recovery after a cataclysmic rupture. It is a courageous decision to write a fantasy that focuses not on the ultimate battle, but the aftermath, with its painful work of reconstruction, reconnection and healing. In a world of ecological breakdown, warfare and genocide, these themes are more valuable than yet another simplistic triumph of good over evil. At the conclusion of Witch King there is therefore clearly more to do, and I am interested to see where Wells takes this story next.
Notes & Suggestions
- Anxiety, grief, loss, anger, and trauma are emotions that will, in varying degrees, be familiar to people organising in activist spaces, from marginalised communities, or who have simply been hurt by the world. Hannah Proctor taught us that none of us can be whole in a broken world, but that collective healing is a process that can sustain us. If you are struggling, seek assistance if it is available to you, but more importantly, reach out to friends, family or comrades that you trust. Readers in England and Wales can access Mind for support. Readers in Scotland can turn to SAMH.
- Readers who enjoyed Wells’ Murderbot Diaries may also enjoy Citizen Sleeper, a relatively short videogame exploring the same themes of community, the autonomy of constructed sentiences, and corporate dystopia.
- Perhaps surprisingly, Marvel’s Loki shares Witch King’s argument that the real work only starts after we defeat our enemies, while similarly engaging with themes of grief, despair, and recovery.
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