Martha Wells’s Rising World: Witch King and Queen Demon

I was genuinely excited when Martha Wells announced a new fantasy series. After the well-deserved success of The Murderbot Diaries, it felt like a good time to return to the kind of fiction that first made me love her writing.

My introduction to Wells came sometime in the late 1990s, when I picked up City of Bones after reading a glowing review. Not long afterwards, I stumbled across a used copy of The Death of the Necromancer—my first visit to Ile-Rien—and that was it. I was hooked.

Hooked enough to track down a hardback of The Element of Fire through AbeBooks, back when the site still felt like a treasure map for out-of-print fantasy.

The author’s copies of City of Bones and The Element of Fire by Martha Wells. Photograph by the author; cover artwork shown for purposes of commentary.

My reading pace has been a casualty of life for many years, although it has improved as the children have grown older. Even so, I did not get to Witch King until January 2025, long after buying it near publication. The digital reading pile is tall and competitive.

Witch King: Two Timelines, Uneven Pull

Witch King begins with Kai awakening into immediate chaos, confused about what has happened to him and what has changed during his imprisonment. I felt almost as disoriented as he did.

The story alternates between two timelines:

• the present, following Kai’s return and the conspiracy surrounding his imprisonment; and
• the past, chronicling his role in the rebellion against the Hierarchs.

The contrast is substantial. The timelines differ in pace, tone and scale, and for much of the first half I found the historical narrative more compelling. Its political stakes felt larger, its supporting cast more vivid and its world more fully inhabited.

The present-day mystery took longer to establish the same pull. It only began to command my full attention around the midpoint, when the separate threads started to reveal their relationship to one another.

This imbalance is not necessarily a structural failure. The historical sections explain how the current world was created and why Kai’s relationships matter. The present cannot carry the same weight until the reader understands what has been lost, preserved or betrayed.

By the time I finished the novel, I would happily have continued directly into its sequel. Unfortunately, Queen Demon was still months away—one of the occupational hazards of reading an unfinished series.

When it appeared in October 2025, I finally began it, only to discover that nine months was long enough for half the names and political relationships to retreat into the fog.

Queen Demon: Early Impressions

I am only a few chapters into Queen Demon, so this is not yet a review. So far, however, its structure resembles that of the first novel: a present-day narrative accompanied by substantial excursions into the past.

This time, the present storyline is drawing me in more strongly than the flashbacks. That may be partly because Witch King has already done the difficult work of establishing the world, its conflicts and the relationships among Kai’s companions. The present no longer has to compete with an entirely unfamiliar history.

I would not recommend these novels as the easiest introduction to Martha Wells. They are dense, populated by many characters and built around histories that are not always given much room to breathe. Readers arriving from Murderbot may also find the pace, tone and narrative structure more demanding.

Some supporting characters in the present-day sections of Witch King—Sanja and Tenes, for example—felt less fully realised than the larger figures dominating the historical narrative. Queen Demon may now have the opportunity to bring those characters forward rather than leaving them in the shadow of the rebellion.

Friendship, Identity and the Shape of the World

The series handles Kai particularly well. As a demon, he can survive injuries and changes of body that would destroy an ordinary human. That does not make him invulnerable. He can still be imprisoned, controlled, isolated or forced to watch the people he loves suffer.

The emotional stakes therefore come less from whether Kai himself will survive than from what may happen to his chosen family. His loyalty and willingness to sacrifice himself are central to both novels, and his friendship with Ziede may be the emotional core of the series.

The world also includes queer relationships, nonbinary characters, disability and demons who may inhabit bodies of different genders. None of these things is presented as an anomaly that the setting must explain or resolve. They are simply part of how people live.

I initially expected some of these elements to become more direct sources of conflict or thematic argument. Their relative absence from the central plot may be deliberate. Wells appears less interested in dramatizing whether these identities can be accepted than in imagining a world where that acceptance is already ordinary.

That choice does not make identity irrelevant. It changes where the conflict lies. The characters are not primarily threatened by who they are, but by political power, inherited violence, broken trust and the uses to which institutions put both bodies and magic.

Looking Ahead

Writing this has refreshed my memory enough to make continuing Queen Demon considerably easier. More importantly, it has reminded me what interests me about the series.

The Rising World is not immediately accessible. Its history arrives in fragments, its characters often know more than the reader, and the two timelines do not always exert equal force. But the density is also part of its appeal. The world feels as though it existed before the story began and will continue beyond whichever pieces the novels choose to reveal.

I am curious to see whether the present-day narrative can now step fully out from under the shadow of the past—and whether I can finish the book before its cast once again escapes my memory.