Literature / Witch King

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Witch King is a 2023 fantasy novel by Martha Wells. It is the first volume in the Rising World series, with the sequel Queen Demon released in late 2025.

Not long ago, barely a mortal lifetime, the known world was conquered by the Hierarchs: mages as powerful as their origins are mysterious, who destroyed entire civilizations and changed the course of history forever before their defeat.

Now Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the Underearth, has woken up dead in a waterlogged tomb with no memory as to how he got there. But Kai is a life-devouring demon, able to possess the corpses of freshly dead mortals, and lucky for him, there happens to be a convenient corpse nearby. Less fortunately, there's also a necromantic "Expositor" and his entourage nearby, and it seems they've woken him up from his year-long death to try and bind him to do their bidding.

Thus begins Witch King. Now Kai, along with his also mysteriously-imprisoned friend, the witch Ziede Daiyahah, must find out who put them in that tomb, why, and what's happened to Ziede's wife Tahren in their absence.

Interspersed between the current day mystery are scenes from the past, explaining where Kai came from, how he, Ziede, Tahren, and Tahren's brother Dahin met, his introduction to the great Bashasa, and the beginning of the Hierarchs' fall.

Witch King provides examples of:

• Ability Mixing: Kai can use his own pain to fuel some of his magic, and his demonic Healing Factor trivializes most physical injuries, giving him a huge advantage over mortal Expositors.
• All for Nothing:
  • In Witch King, Ramad is crushed to realize that Kai foiled Bashat's plans to become Emperor years before Bashat ever moved against Kai, making Bashat's betrayal of Kai an utter waste. In Queen Demon it turns out Bashat might not have had the necessary support regardless, and that is why he was willing to risk the conspiracy to help improve his odds despite how it would ruin his relationship with Kai and the others, if not outright get them murdered. As it stands, while Kai makes clear he has no intent on exposing Bashat, if the true story ever did get out, Bashat would likely be stripped of his title as prince-heir by his own people.
  • It is particularly painful, as growing up, Kai had helped raise Bashat, and they had been quite close at the time. However, Kai leaving the Arike due to his grief over Bashasa's death unwittingly damaged their relationship.
  • In Queen Demon, the Hierarchs sent as many of their people back to their ancient homeland as possible, planning for their revenge against the Rising World. Including turning an Expositor into a Hierarch, to create the strongest Hierarch ever. The plan being to bide their time and emerge from hiding once more with the power of the Hierarchs' Well at their side. Except they were only ever able to create the one, and the vast majority of the Hierarch's followers abandoned him and his abusive behaviour, leaving him with nothing but mindless creatures of his own creation while he waited decade after decade. By the time the Rising World learns there might be a Hierarch and the Well there, he is an old, wizened man, and while he still spews out the usual vitriol and proclamations of superiority, he is grateful they are finally going to just kill him.
• Amazon Brigade: Amongst the Arike, their women make up the majority of their soldiers.
• And I Must Scream: Expositors, since they draw their power from the pain and suffering of others, like to set up "pain wells" to keep themselves supplied. Kai and others are disgusted but not shocked to find that Aclines has jammed his ship with captured legionaries pressed cheek-to-jowl and frozen in place, The Needless but aware, since mental anguish works just as well as physical pain. When he takes over the ship, Kai shifts the intention so that they 'sleep' until he can free them somewhere with the resources and space required to help them recover.
• Authority in Name Only: Kaiisteron's title is the 'Witch King,' but in practice he has no official authority over any of the Witches, the title serving more as a Red Baron status, and a tool invented by Bashasa. To win against the Hierarchs, the Witches were essential, and they all had their own reasons to want the Hierarchs dead. However, Witches hold no hierarchy amongst themselves, and would never accept being subordinate to a mortal as necessary for a military chain of command. Agreeing to follow the orders of a Demon like the Fourth-Prince Kaiisteron, especially with their instinctive trust in Demons, was another matter entirely. Even then, Kai had no illusions that he held true leadership over them, and any witch could leave whenever they wanted to, and they largely settled their own internal disputes without him. Nevertheless, while the idea he is their ruler is seen as amusing to witches, they nearly collectively hold immense respect for him, and treat him as a celebrity and hero.
• Back from the Dead: Kai's chief ability as a demon is to possess corpses, provided they still have the warmth of life. The book opens with Kai's spirit hovering around his old corpse, then possessing a body nearby. He does make it clear in Queen Demon he was effectively murdered though at the beginning of the first book, and only sheer fortune gave him a second chance.
• Bait the Dog: When Kai possesses his newest body and sees its last memories, he sees that one of the man's kidnappers acted friendly at first just to make the betrayal hurt that much more. Kai makes a point of tearing that kidnapper's soul out.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Kai, Ziede, Dahin, and Tahren are all far older than any humans they encounter, and they were all present during the war that eliminated the Hierarchs' rule and founded the Rising World Coalition Council. To the point that a lot of the events from that time are considered legend despite being from about seventy years ago. Ramad the historian is constantly trying to get information from Kai about the past and the heroic founder of the Coalition, Bashasa. When the group needs to travel to the Summer Halls, the flooded ruins of a city once owned by the Hierarchs, we are treated to this exchange:
    Ramad: So the interior really is flooded, the way the stories say?
    Ziede: Oh, it's flooded all right. Kai did it.
    Kai: It was an accident.
    Ramad was staring at him now, he had no idea why.
  • Kai's companions also engineered the dissolution of the Rising World from an empire and back into a coalition, as they knew that was what Bashasa would have wanted.
  • The Tescai-Lin of the Enalin is really a person who reincarnates into a younger body whenever he dies. For most of the history of his people, he served as the ultimate judge, consulted only for thorny moral issues while leaving the politics to others. When the Hierarchs took over, they murdered the political leadership, and assumed his spiritual position was mostly symbolic, if still enough to keep the Enalin in line if they held him hostage. Following Bashasa's successful uprising at the Summer Halls which the Enalin hostages joined in for, the Tescai-Lin rallied his people and assumed command of them until after the war, returning the governance back to the people. While he prefers to remain removed from politics, he is still a formidable force within the Rising Worlds if the need arises.
• Benevolent Demon: Demons are otherworldly, but they're just people, despite their shady reputation in some human circles. Kai is famed as a war hero for his role in overthrowing the Hierarchs' regime.
• Betrayal by Inaction: Bashat Bar Calis wanted Kai and the others out of the way, fearing they would interfere with Rising World Coalition Council negotiations. He knew that the Nient-Arik also wanted Kai and the others out of the way, and had plans to imprison them, but also knew their plan to capture them wouldn't work. Bashat secretly drugged Kai with a special concoction, then left him vulnerable for the Nient-Arik to capture.
• Big Sister Instinct: Despite the difficulties in their relationship, Tahren is highly protective of Dahin and rebelled against the Immortal Blessed because they were going to offer him as a sacrifice to the Hierarchs.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Played with. Demons are readily recognizable even in a new body because of their black eyes, but they generally aren't any more evil than any other people. They have a rather dark reputation, though, partly due to Fantastic Racism and partly because they could steal your body or drain your life with a touch if they wanted to, even if they are just as morally just as opposed to murder as anyone else and consider stealing the body of a living person to be crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
• Black Magic: Expositor magic is powered by pain, death, and domination, so its practitioners tend to become amoral sociopaths in short order if they weren't already. Kai avoids being corrupted by it by using his own pain as a power source.
• Bodyguarding a Badass:
  • Bashasa assigns a cadre to Kai to act as his personal soldiers and protectors. As Kai is a functionally immortal sorcerer, these ladies usually spend most of their time helping him more understanding the Arik culture, handling attempts by Bashasa's political rivals amongst the Arik to discredit or even assassinate Kai, or other mortal affairs. That said, when it comes down to fighting, they are right there alongside their boss, and proving they are very good at killing in their own right, and there is a reason they have lived so long beside the man Bashasa sends to handle his thorniest problems. In turn, Kai is shown to care a lot about them, and always works to be sure they are fine and have all they need, and they in turn clearly come to care for him a lot.
    Ziede: [Bashasa] didn't want anyone to kill you thinking you were an expositor. He also didn't want to hamper you if you woke up and decided to do something else miraculous, so making them your personal guard, subject to your orders, solved both problems.
  • Kai also really wanted to spend most of his time being Bashasa's bodyguard who was a formidable fighter in his own right. He was just not able to shrug off being shot by crossbows like Kai is.
• Born-Again Immortality: The Tescai-Lin, a revered religious figure among the Enalin, is reborn when they die and appears to retain all of their memories and wisdom. In Queen Demon, Kai and the others go to them for aid and find them as a child.
  Dahin: Well, you’ve changed. This seems a little one-sided, going into scholarly battle with a child.
  The Tescai-Lin: You have not changed, sadly. And only a Blessed would consider a scholarly discussion a battle.
  Dahin: [pleased] Oh, there you are. I knew you were still in there.
• Broken Hero: Kai remains a fundamentally good person, but the extermination of his human relatives, enslavement by the Hierarchs, freedom fighting, being abandoned by his fellow Demons, or slaughtering the ones turned into familiars, fighting in a multi-continent war for survival, and subsequent political machinations have left him a self-described ball of razors who prefers to live in isolation alongside his adoptive family. On the subject of powering magic with his pain, he wryly says that he has an inexhaustible supply.
• Cast Full of Gay: Basically every main character whose sexuality is elaborated on is gay; large parts of the plot are spent looking for Ziede's wife, while all of Kai's past and current relationships were with men, even if it is left ambiguous how romantic things are on his part.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Given that Expositor magic relies on enslavement, torment, and murder, every Expositor climbs to power atop a heap of bodies, and every master-apprentice relationship is a betrayal waiting to happen. This is ultimately what helps Kai and Ziede escape captivity on their terms.
• Les Collaborateurs: Karanis Calis, the puppet leader of the Benais-Arik who assassinated the previous leader and was put in charge when the Hierarchs took over. When Bashasa (the proper heir) escapes the Hierarchs' prison and returns, Karanis tries to kill him, too. It is noted that there will be other collaborators, but not out of greed, but because they sincerely believe that surrendering to the Hierarchs is the best way for them and their people to survive.
  • The Immortal Blessed were seen this way by the other nations for seemingly willingly helping the Hierarchs in their conquest. In truth, they actually did try to resist the Hierarchs until their leaders ordered them to capitulate to avoid being destroyed when they were unable to mount a successful defense, and had even been forced to imprison dissenters and turn over a sizeable percentage of the Lesser Blessed as sacrifices to the Hierarchs, but they were too proud to admit they hadn't been able to defend themselves or to consider that mortal people might succeed where they failed until after the Hierarchs had already been defeated, with the Immortal Blessed still standing on the losing side. Only Tahren's defection and prominent role in the rebellion kept them from being written off as just as universally evil as the Hierarchs.
• Co-Dragons: Kaiisteron the Witch-King, Ziede the Scourge of the Temple Halls, and Tahren the Fallen were all Bashasa's closest confidants and advisors, bodyguards, generals, and agents, with a vast amount of experience by the time the war ended.
• Commonality Connection: Kai forms a rapport with a whale that an Expositor was using as a sea transport by sharing his own memories of enslavement.
• Dark Is Not Evil: While the Demons, with their monstrous true forms and Demonic Possession, are treated as evil by the Hierarchs and feared by everyone else, with the Saredi being condemned for performing Human Sacrifice, the truth is more complex; the humans who are offered up as hosts for demons are actually those who are near death (sometimes even recently-deceased). In exchange for getting a body, the demons summoned in this way reveal the last memories and thoughts of the person whose body they were given, then take up the lives of their hosts, fulfill their responsibilities, bear children in their place, and are generally given the same place in Saredi society that the original person held. This keeps Saredi society stable in exchange and maintains ties between the upper and lower world and is considered a sacred tradition by both sides. Unfortunately, this negative portrayal of Demons has continued long after the fall of the Hierarchs, with officers of the Rising World Coalition looking upon Kai fearfully despite his status as a war hero. There are those who even believe his involvement with someone as pure as Bashasa to be a lie.
• Death of Personality: The fate of anyone turned into one of the Hierarchs' temple priests. The process involves giving up their soul and power to the Well of the Hierarchs, so what is left is basically a hollowed-out shell that has no trace of the person they were before. Dahin being chosen for this "honor" was what caused Tahren to rebel against the Blessed to protect him.
• Decapitation Presentation: A rare heroic example: after defeating the Hierarchs, the city of Benais-Arik keeps two preserved Hierarch heads on display in the main square with an honour guard as a public reminder to stay vigilant against the world's darkest enemies.
• Defector from Decadence: Tahren turned against the Immortal Blessed over their capitulation to the Hierarchs. Later, she admits the real catalyst was to save her brother Dahin from being sacrificed, and that she's ashamed that she knew the Blessed were in the wrong but didn't act until her own family was on the chopping block.
• Delirious Misidentification: In Queen Demon, an injured Kai calls Ramad "Bashasa" while being carried by him to safety. It's somewhat awkward when Kai recovers enough to remember, but they don't have time to dwell on the issue.
• Demonic Possession: One of the things Kai and the other demons can do. In the past, before the Hierarchs' destruction, demons and the Saredi people had an arrangement wherein young demons would possess the dead of Saredi households and be raised like family. This gave the demons exposure to new cultures and ideas, built strong relationships between demons and humans, and also gave the Saredi witches — magical offspring of demons and humans. The arrangement had strict rules and respect for the original owner of the body's memory, and it was absolutely forbidden for any demon to possess any living human, even an enemy. During the battle with the Hierarchs, Kai accidentally possesses an Expositor when his host-body is too destroyed to support his spirit, and it's enough to turn the remaining demon survivors against him.
• Demon Sorcerer:
  • Kai, the titular Witch King, is a demon who accidentally learned Expositor magic by possessing a dying Expositor's body. It's a powerful mixture of abilities, as Expositor magic is powered by pain and blood sacrifice, which are trivialized by his demonic Healing Factor. (Despite the epithet, what he is not is a witch.)
  • Witches gain access to their magical powers from a bit of demon ancestry.
• Damsel in Distress: Tahren is on the receiving end of this in the first book, with a mix of the Worf Effect, as she is one of the most dangerous warriors alive, but imprisoned somewhere and needs to be rescued. For the second book, she is shot in the back, and is absent for the climactic fight as she is receiving life-saving medical treatment.
• The Dreaded: Kai, Tahren, and Ziede Daiyahah became that, as Bashasa's most devastating agents.
  • Kai as the Witch-King appears to get the lion's share of this, as he came to command an army of Witches. He self-identifies as the one the Hierarchs came to view as a monster, and after the war there were entire nation-cities who feared his reputation.
    • In Belith, seventy years later he remains feared for how he led the Witches in just breaking through city walls and then every building which got in his way while the Rising World armies spilled in to kill the Legionnaires. Years later the devastation remains.
    • As of the second book, of the Hierarchs, previously believed immortal and killers of an entire armies and cities on their own, he had already killed two and counting.
    • He flatly told Bashat that if had been made into a Familiar by an Expositor, then with his power they could have rebuilt the Hierarchy, which his audience tellingly does not contest.
  • Ziede thus far has been shown as the strongest Witch.
  • As an Immortal Marshal, Tahren is stronger and faster than any regular person, even Demons, and is nearly unkillable. Even so, she also left a trail of her dead kinsmen in her wake, demonstrating she was exceptional even by their standards.
• Drowning My Sorrows: In Queen Demon, Bashasa confesses that he really didn't expect their makeshift army to get so far, and he tries to drink to cope with the stress of it all. Kai takes the flask from him, and it becomes their first real argument.
  Ziede: Did something happen?
  Kai: He was going to drink, I took it away from him.
  Ziede: Oh. Kai, that kind of thing can take up every moment of your time, a whole mortal lifetime.
  Kai: I’ve got a lot of mortal lifetimes to go, I need something to do.
• Divided We Fall: Invoked by the Hierarchs in their genocidal invasion. They hid their true intentions, playing different nations against each other and rewarding Les Collaborateurs, to prevent their targets from uniting against them, then exterminated regions when they could get away with it. Bashasa's coalition only barely turns the tide, and one of the main goals of the Rising World is to make sure the Hierarchs can never get away with it again.
• Elemental Powers: Witches, for the most part, do magic through the use of elemental spirits, and tend to have an affinity for one kind over another. Ziede's magic works with air, while Tenes works with earth and plants.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing Kai does after gaining a physical form is to devour the life forces of the people who'd come to bind him. Then, he takes the shirt from one of the bodies, offers it to the little girl they had been going to sacrifice, and reassures her that he's not going to hurt her.
  Kai: Put that on and get up. I'm not going to eat you, we're friends.
• Familiar: Expositors can magically dominate unlucky witches, demons, or other mages, forcing them into a life of servitude. A common practice among them is to remove the voice of their familiars to prevent them from spreading information, and to periodically remove their memories so they don't know their origins, the details of their enslavement, or anything else that could be inconvenient.
• Familial Body Snatcher: A benign example, this is the traditional method for demon possession. Kai and many other demons are related to the Saredi people through Grandmother, a human who married a demon. An arrangement with the Saredi people permits young demons to possess the bodies of recent dead Saredi relatives and be raised like family. In the early flashback chapters, Kai recalls growing up with his beloved mortal cousins, aunts, and uncles.
• Family of Choice: After losing much of their original families to the Hierarchs, the group at the core of Bashasa's rebellion—Bashasa, Kai, Ziede, Tahren, and Dahin—found a second family in each other. Ziede and Tahren both call Kai their brother, the three of them more or less raised Dahin together, and Ziede's children call Kai and Dahin their uncles. Bashasa's relationship with them is a bit less clearly defined, but while he was closest to Kai, the others clearly still miss him in the present day as well.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Hierarchs consider all other people, beings, and societies below them, with "dross" being their word for anyone who isn't one of the Hierarchs.
  • In Queen Demon, Kai meets a group of dustwitches who seem to go against the peaceful and egalitarian teachings of the other witch groups and instead engage in violence and preach that witches are superior to mortals, and so should be subjugating them.
• The Federation: The Rising World is a coalition of independent states that formed out of liberated territories to fight back the Hierarchs. Queen Demon expands upon this more, revealing how they named Bashasa their emperor for a greater sense of unity to both kill the Hierarchs, and to rebuild after the war was won. This was done though with the intention that it would be a temporary empire, with them doing the Imperial Renewal at a set date to decide if they should continue it. When Bashasa died (implied of old age), rule was passed on to his closest living relative, Prince-Heir Bashat bar Calis. For Witch King, a driving part of the plot is how Bashat wants to make it into a permanent Empire with himself at the helm. Kai and Ziede find themselves on a deadline while searching for Tahren, because they were supposed to be present for a previously long-arranged meeting of the rulers of the various nations to determine whether or not to peacefully dissolve the coalition, or continue it. With the conspirators working against Kai and Co. unaware that Kai had already ensured it would be dismantled. Because while Bashasa had been instrumental in founding it, and leading it, with his closest relatives being the hereditary leaders of it, Bashasa had always hated the notion of unifying everyone together like they had been under the Hierarchs, and while dying had hoped it would eventually be disbanded.
• Finding Judas: Ramad the vanguard was part of the conspiracy to imprison Kai. He had believed the imprisonment would be for the greater good of the Arike people, knew it would be temporary, and he's sincere in his desire to help Kai and Ziede free Tahren. It's not until the end of the novel that he realizes Bashat's betrayal was for nothing: Kai had preemptively ruined the Empire plan years ago, and that all Ramad and Bashat have accomplished is alienating a powerful demon and respected war hero of the Rising World Coalition, and his friends.
• Flashback B-Plot: For the first book, the present-day plot is interspersed with flashback chapters that tell the story of Kai's childhood, captivity among the Hierarchs, and participation in Bashasa's rebellion. The second book depicts the early days of the war against the Hierarchs, as well as Kai's rise to become the Witch-King.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Hierarchs created a lot of their worst enemies.
  • Kai was a cheerful Demon, with no higher ambition than to live amongst the Saredi in peace, have children for them, and live a good, peaceful life. After the near-total genocide of his people, he grew into a monster to terrify the Hierarchs.
  • Ziede Daiyahah was a simple teacher until she returned home to discover her people had been slaughtered—after they had surrendered. She would go on to be feared as the Scourge for the destruction she wrought upon the Hierarchs.
  • Bashasa spent his youth more interested in liquor and fancy clothes, and so when the Hierarchs took over and killed off most of the nobility, he was kept alive as a theoretical hostage under the assumption he was useless and harmless. Instead they stoked a fire of hatred in him, and the motivation to use his sleeping charisma and genius to ensure their destruction. He is also presented as a competent fighter in his own right.
  • In fact, most of the Prince-Heirs and other hostages taken by the Hierarchs were spared in the purges because they were seen as harmless layabouts and underachievers. While none of them became as much of a nightmare for the Hierarchs as Bashasa, by the time Bashasa launched his rebellion, it turned out quite a few of them weren't so harmless or useless anymore and mostly led their people quite competently to join him in rebellion. Though there is also the painful subversion of prince-heir of Renitl-arik, who initially seemed to step up to lead his people but ignored instructions to raise a quiet resistance instead of openly overthrowing the Hierarchs' puppet ruler and got his entire region wiped out by the Hierarchs because the rest of the rebellion didn't have the forces ready to defend them yet.
• Gambit Pileup: Bashat Bar Calis had Kai and the others incapacitated because he knew that the patriarch of the Immortal Blessed had his own plan to kidnap them. A year later, when he no longer wanted Kai and the others out of the way, he send Ramad, his personal vanguard to free them. However, Expositors working for the Immortal Blessed also wanted to get Kai: Menlas because he wanted to try and make Kai his familiar, Aclines because he was trying to clean up Menlas' mess, and Faharin because the Patriarch wanted Kai's knowledge of the location of a magical artifact. Somewhere in the mix, Brehama of the Nient-Arik is also scheming with the the Immortal Patriarch in order to take Benais-Arik's place as the ruling capitol of the Rising World, and want to kill Kai and the others to prevent them from interceding on Benais-Arik's behalf at the Rising World Imperial Renewal negotiations. And finally, Kai himself has a gambit; he knew Bashat was going to try to become emperor, and would likely try something to get him out of the way, and so began negotiating with the independent Enalin leaders years ago to ensure they would not support the creation of the empire. Their withdrawal of support, combined with Bashat's own exposing of the Nient-Arik conspiracy to usurp the potential-imperial throne, resulted in the Imperial Renewal negotiations failing, leaving the Rising World Council as a coalition of independent nation states — just as Bashasa had always wanted it to be. It is later noted there were probably many more competing conspiracies happening around the Imperial Renewal; the whole mess which got Kai and the others out of the way was the one which had the most success.
• Gender-Bender Angst: Demons have their own genders, but are given bodies according to equivalent social status, not the gender of the newly dead mortal. Kai doesn't mind whatsoever that Enna was a girl, and that he's expected to give birth at some point. However, when he ends up taking the body of a male Expositor, Kai feels uncomfortable and wrong in it for some time, and keenly misses being Enna.
• Ghost Memory: Demons get some residual memories from the bodies they possess. The Saredi use this to share some memories from their lost loved ones and, in rare cases, to expose murderers; Kai also inadvertently learns Expositor magic by possessing an Expositor.
• Good Is Not Soft:
  • Kai and his adoptive family are firmly on the side of good, but they are also very, very good at killing people.
  • The Arike liked to boast how they were so good at killing that they had turned to peace and settling things with raucous discourse lest they wipe themselves out. And even before then, their wars were very formalised with set rules. So while they still trained their soldiers, they had not fought for generations, which made it easier for them to surrender to the might of Hierarchs, especially when the entirety of one of their city-states was ultimately wiped out. Once they learnt that surrender really entailed a slow genocide though and rebelled under Bashasa and the growing Rising World Coalition, they proceeded to demonstrate that their boasts about their cavalry was Not Hyperbole.
  • The Enalin were another people who had largely lived in peace, and were initially willing to negotiate with the Hierarchy. As noted however, they were a major power neighbouring the Immortal Blessed and had never been truly pressured by them. The reason being that warfare and fighting remained part of their regular curriculums, and once they rose up their own soldiers were decisive in the following war. By the time of the Rising World Coalition, they are one of the two major military superpowers.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Hierarchs are indisputably evil — an empire of sociopathic slavers whose magic is fueled by pain and who want to take over the world — but the resistance opposing them has a wide variety of factions with different approaches to doing so; some of them are much more gray, wanting to create an empire of their own. The heroes, on the other hand, while not completely without self-doubts and flaws, are clearly presented as on the side of good.
  • While not explicit, references to the history of these nations shows that while there was some conflict, and definite prejudices, the majority of the major powers were living in peace with no real wars until the Hierarchs arrived.
• Grand Theft Me: In a twist, Kai is the one who steals others' bodies to possess. His last long-term body belonged to an enemy slain in battle. The current one was an unwilling victim of the Expositors, and Kai is angered by the fact that he can't even learn the young man's name. This is in fact a considerable taboo amongst Demons, arguably the worst they can commit.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In Queen Demon, Kai and the others learn that this is what is necessary to destroy a Hierarch's well of power. An immortal being must willingly allow themselves to be tossed inside.
• Horse of a Different Color: Though they're explicitly identified as "horses" the ones in Kai's world have fangs and claws for starters. There are also Wall Walkers, which stand three times the height of a man and have rat like heads.
• Human-Demon Hybrid: Witches are the descendants of Demons who procreated while inhabiting human bodies, granting them magical powers. The closer a Witch is to their Demon ancestor, generation-wise, generally the stronger their power.
• Human Sacrifice: Much of Expositor magic requires the death, pain, or life-force of other people. Their "wells" of power draw on imprisoned humans, using them like batteries. More specifically, the Expositor Menlas intended to sacrifice Sanja and the unnamed youth to bind Kai's spirit.
• Identity Amnesia: Tenes has no memories of who she was before an expositor made her his familiar, wiping her memories and taking her voice in the process. In fact, since expositors wipe their familiars' memories repeatedly, she doesn't even know where he picked her up, leaving them little hope of finding out who she originally was except by guessing at her people of origin based on her looks and skills and seeking them out in hopes that someone will recognize her.
• Implied Love Interest: The nature of Kai's relationship with Bashasa is never put into words, but they were close lifelong companions, Kai helped to raise Bashasa's heir, and Bashasa's death devastated Kai.
• Kill the Host Body: Demons can only reach the human world by projecting their spirits into newly dead hosts, so (re-)killing the host only forces them back to the Underearth or leaves their spirit wandering the earth ineffectually. Though it's not the end of the demon, it's a major inconvenience and a mental ordeal; Kai doesn't consider it any less of a murder just because his spirit was able to escape into a new body.
• Life Drinker: Infamously, Demons can drain living or recently living beings with skin-to-skin contact, absorbing their power and withering them into husks. Kai uses this as a magical fuel source and a weapon in combat, but there's evidence that it can be used to restore life as well.
• The Magocracy: Expositor magic is perfectly suited to allow the few to oppress the many. At the top are the Hierarchs themselves, who control the full power of their Wells. Lesser Expositors fill in the tiers below them. Finally, at the bottom are various servants, indoctrinated thralls, collaborators, and upcoming sacrifices to the Wells, with no guarantee whatsoever which category they're in.
• Make Them Rot: Kai can also use his life-draining touch to wither away organic materials like wood.
• Micro Monarchy: The Hierarchs wiped out a significant number of the continent's population, leaving entire kingdoms empty. By the time of the present day, at least one human lifetime later, the majority of nations left are micro-monarchies simply due to their lack of population. One of the key elements of the Rising World Coalition Council is that it's trying to connect these tiny nations together.
• Mind Link Mates: Ziede and Tahren have heart pearls from each other, allowing them to speak silently and sense each other's presence even at a distance.
• More than Mind Control: The Doyen of the dustwitches was doing something to them to brainwash and control them, leading the usually peaceful and egalitarian witch clan to preach violence and witch superiority. Kai and the others aren't exactly sure what, and guess that she must have had some recent and strong demon blood in her to be able to make so many people act against their own natures.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
  • Tahren ultimately rebelled against her people the Immortal Blessed when the Patriarchs were planning to sacrifice her little brother Dahin to them. This forced her to confront the hypocrisy of her culture, and side with the mortals; something she admitted to Kai she likely would not have done if it had not been something so personal opening her eyes. In modern times, she is considered an apostate to her people...even as they are desperate for her to continue speaking on her behalf before the Rising World, as it is solely the goodwill she earned amongst the mortals keeping the Rising World from coming down much more harshly on them. Nevertheless, there are still parts of her culture that she considers sacred, and steps too far in wanting to change things.
  • Dahin was much more bitter as a child than his sister, as the Patriarchs were very much opposed to his curiosity and questions, and he was unsurprised he was chosen as the next sacrifice to be given. However when he was captured and tortured by his own people for information, it turned into a dark and universal hatred of the Immortal Blessed; this extends to his own sister, who while he still loves he also cannot stand being around her long, and constantly argues with her.
  • It is shown in Queen Demon there is a growing number of the Immortal Blessed who resent what their people have become, immigrating to live elsewhere in the world, including some living with Kai and the others as well. The antagonist of the book ends up being a radical Immortal Blessed seeking to act against the Patriarchs.
  • While Kai understands why his fellow Demons rejected him, he is still very angry and bitter that it still led them to abandon him, functionally an adolescent, with the mortals and a highly uncertain future.
• Not Quite Flight: Ziede can't fly, but she can control air elemental spirits that create wind around her and one or two companions, carrying them to where they need to go.
• Our Demons Are Different: They're the denizens of Underearth, a mutable otherworld that can only be reached via Astral Projection. On earth, they need human host bodies to interact with the world, giving them a shady reputation in some cultures even though they're not inherently evil or malicious.
• Our Nudity Is Different: Saredi and Arike cultural mores for what is "clothed" seem to differ. At one point in the past, Kai took off his skirt and coat to figure out how to destroy a bridge properly, figuring he could still move well enough and be covered while wearing his tunic and leggings. His female guards all reacted like he had stripped naked or at least down to his underwear and refused to look at him, and Bashasa was unable to meet his eyes, leading to the head of Kai's bodyguards insisting Kai at least put the skirt back on.
• Our Witches Are Different: They're human-demon hybrids whose ancestry allows them to work magic through Nature Spirits. Ziede is also Long-Lived compared to a human, but it's not specified whether this is a common trait of witches.
• Out-Gambitted: The reason Kai, Ziede, and Tahren were imprisoned was so Bashasa's descendant, Bashat Bar Calis, could convince the other rulers to form an expansive empire, with Bashat in charge as the new emperor — something he knew Kai would resist. However, Kai had anticipated Bashat's imperial aspirations years ago, and had gone to the independent Enalin leaders to convince them not to join the empire, thus losing pivotal support Bashat needed and preventing the empire from being formed.
• Parental Abandonment: Queen Demon reveals that Kai was tasked with keeping Bashat safe when he was a child, but after Bashasa's death, Kai left in grief and didn't return until Bashat was grown, something that still stings.
  “Nothing has changed. You left.” Behind him, Bashat’s voice was flat. “He died, and you left.”
• Parental Denial: Midway through the second book, Kai has to clarify to a third party that he isn't the father (nor mother, via Body Surf) of Prince-heir Bashasa's successor Bashat. It's an understandable error, given that Kai was Bashasa's Implied Love Interest and helped raise Bashat.
• Person of Mass Destruction: The Voice of the Hierarchs, focused through an Expositor, was capable of casually wiping out entire armies and even cities. Thus killing them was not only of great symbolic importance, proving they were not invincible, but also essential for winning the war so the growing coalition would risk amassing their own armies to fight the Legionnaires.
• The Peter Principle: Fortunately largely avoided by the people who would become the leaders of the Rising World coalition. The Hierarchy killed off the leaders of most of the other nations, and the hostages taken to the Summer Court were those considered harmless as threats even if they did rebel. Instead, most of them rose to the occasion, or had successfully hid how dangerous they really were. Although there was a painful exception with the prince-heir of Renitl-arik who was supposed to raise a quiet, hidden insurrection, but instead the city rose up entirely in rebellion, and the rest of the rebel leaders knew painfully well that the Hierarchy would move to wipe out the entire Renitl-arik region, and they lacked the strength yet to face them in open combat to save the place...
• Platonic Life-Partners: Kai and Ziede are incredibly close, even to the point of having a heart pearl connection. They're both gay, though, essentially making them the gay version of Heterosexual Life-Partners. Meanwhile, Tahren (also gay) regards Kai as a sibling, which he reciprocates.
• Possessing a Dead Body: Demons have no physical form on the surface world but can inhabit freshly deceased bodies — older corpses don't do. The body enters a Mortality Grey Area with a Healing Factor and minimal physical needs. Their old treaty with the Saredi was a consensual, respectful framework to do so by those dying, or murdered so the Demon could identify the killer, but Kai also makes do in an emergency by jumping into a stranger who died nearby.
• Powers via Possession: Inverted when Kai learns Expositor magic through the residual memories of an Expositor he possesses. The powers remain when he leaves the Expositor's body.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Bashasa notes the Hierarchs actually subscribed to this a lot in their dealings. The problem was that their empire was literally powered by the pain and deaths of others, making committing mass genocide one of their ruthlessly pragmatic decisions. They also indoctrinated entire armies into blind fanaticism at best, or the belief that the Hierarchs were impossible to stop and thus blind obedience was the best way to survive.
• Promotion to Parent: Tahren had to step up to raise Dahin after fleeing the Blessed with him when he was still an adolescent, though luckily she found a Family of Choice who were able to help.
• Properly Paranoid: Kai, in regards to Bashat. He had known far in advance that Bashat would likely try to make a play for being emperor, and so preemptively ruined his chances by convincing the myriad of small city states against forming an empire. He hadn't expected Bashat to actually take him out of the picture by allowing other conspirators to imprison him, but he isn't surprised that it happened, only very angry.
• Psychic Link: Kai can telepathically communicate with Ziede because of a magical pearl in her heart. Ziede and Tahren have one too, though they are too far apart for the duration of the novel to use it. Ziede's inability to contact Tahren upon waking in the water tomb is what clues them in that Tahren is likely also in trouble.
• Puppet King: When it became clear to the nations of the world that the Hierarchs could and would destroy them utterly if they resisted, it was common for existing rulers to be overthrown or assassinated by their family members and for the new ruler to be a puppet for the Hierarchs in exchange for their personal safety. The Nient-Arik were the first Arike kingdom to do so, and were the first kingdom conquered by the Hierarchs. The Benais-Arik also had a puppet king installed, but only after the majority of the royal family had been murdered.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old:
  • As a Demon, whatever body Kai is currently residing within does not age or change in any way.
  • Immortal Marshals, including Tahren, function similar to Elves in that while they do age, they only grow into young adulthood and perpetually remain that way. They also can only be killed by weapons of their own creation. The Lesser Blessed like Dahin do age, but far slower than mortals, making them close enough to immortal for most to count.
  • Witches have such long lifespans that they are considered functionally immortal. The degree to which the process is slowed tends to depend on how recent their Demon ancestry is. In the case of Ziede, she appears not to have aged at all in nearly a century, while in contrast Ablre had gained grey hair and lines around her eyes.
  • The Tescai-Lin of the Enalin is really a person who reincarnates into a younger body whenever he dies. Thus by the current era he is one of the oldest persons on the surface world. The Enalin in general also tend to be long-lived.
• Red Baron:
  • Since his role in Bashasa's revolution, Kai is Famed in Story as the Witch King. It's something of a Non-Indicative Name as he's neither a Witch nor a King. Instead it is a title Bashasa invented to justify Kai leading them.
  • Ziede Daiyahah, the Scourge of the Temple Halls.
  • Tahren, the Fallen.
• The Red Mage: As a result of his complicated backstory, Kai is a master of most of the setting's magic systems at once — he was born a demon, gained knowledge of the Hierarchs' Expositor magic by possessing one of them, and was then able to learn witchcraft from Ziede due to this mixed heritage. He's unwilling to draw on the normal source of power the Expositors use (the suffering of others), but his regeneration as a demon makes it simple for him to power it with his own suffering instead.
• Secret Stab Wound: While the audience knows Kai hurts himself to power his magic, Bashasa initially doesn't. Partway through Queen Demon, he's horrified to see that Kai had been hiding a nasty stab wound— which Kai assures him has already healed.
• Self-Harm–Induced Superpower: Kai is able to use Expositor magic like this; instead of harming others to draw from their pain, he damages himself to power it with his own pain. Fortunately his Healing Factor means that the damage rarely matters.
• Sequel Hook: Dahin's research indicates that the Hierarchs may have more resources than everyone believed and that they're likely to come back very soon to continue the war of conquest that was thwarted in the backstory... but not in this book, at least. At the very least he figured out where they came from, and that they had gone to a lot of effort to hide this.
• She Is the King: The Arike city-states refer to their rulers as Princes or Prince-Heirs, regardless of gender. Kai's demon mother is also referred to as Overlord, despite being female. Relatedly, Demons don't care about matching age or gender when possessing dead bodies, and so Kai-Enna causes a little confusion when Bashasa finds out he's a male prince.
• Skull Cups: Demons in the underearth respect their dead differently than humans.
  Mother and Grandmother sat nearby, having tea out of the skulls of favored ancestors.
• Supernatural Suffocation: The dust witches' signature attack spell fills the victim's airway with dirt, fitting their elemental affinity, their preference for ambush tactics, and their overall Lack of Empathy.
• Tagalong Kid: Sanja is a downplayed example, as a young girl brought along on the adventure for lack of someplace safe to leave her and because she doesn't want to be left behind, but generally kept as far from danger as possible. She's got fairly good survival instincts and isn't much of The Load, but mostly she serves as The Watson for people to explain things to, though in Queen Demon she manages to derail Dahin's plan to sacrifice himself to destroy the Hierarch's Well by spotting him stealing a key and telling Kai.
• Tailor-Made Prison:
  • While the underwater tower holding Kai and Ziede wasn't originally made for them, there had been serious magical retrofitting done to transform it into a prison that would keep Kai's spirit bound, even after his host body died.
  • The "Cageling Demon Court" was a prison made by the Hierarchs specifically to hold demons. They were chained to the ground in a huge pavilion with magical rain pouring down on them constantly, preventing their spirits from leaving even after their host bodies had died.
• Touch of Death: Demons can drain life with a touch. Being generally benevolent and opposed to excessive force, Kai usually dials it down to stagger or stun, but his full power can reduce someone to a desiccated husk in an instant.
• Touch the Intangible: Kai's combination of demonic abilities and human magic lets him handle magic in unusual ways, like physically picking up a stray spell to save for later.
• Transformation of the Possessed: Demons in human bodies always gain monochromatic black eyes. It's enough of a giveaway that Kai obtains some decoy eyeballs when he needs to hide his true nature.
• Underestimating Badassery: The other reason some fairly dangerous people survived the Hierarchs' initial purges and went on to lead their people in rebellion is because the Hierarchs mistook them for harmless. The Tescai-Lin is a prime example, dismissed as a harmless spiritual figure whose presence would help keep the Enalin pacified. Instead, they bided their time until Bashasa's uprising freed the Enalin hostages and provided an opportunity, then they rallied their people and led them through the war until it was possible to step back from governance again in peacetime.
• Undying Loyalty:
  • Kai to Bashasa. Bashasa was the Benais-Arik prince heir who freed Kai from the Hierarchs' torturous prison and led the revolution against them. He founded the Rising World Coalition Council after the Hierarchs' defeat and is implied to have been in a romantic relationship with Kai at some point. Regardless of whether there was romance or not, Kai remains fiercely loyal to Bashasa's memory and his vision for the new world, going so far as to sabotage Bashasa's relative's descendant's attempt to create an empire similar to the Hierarchs'. This loyalty holds true for Ziede and Tahren as well, if not quite to the close degree Kai had with Bashasa. They all find it irritating though when modern members of the Rising World dare question if they were ever loyal to the man.
  • Kai works to keep Sanja away from the military, because he can tell that from her painful childhood, any signs of kindness from them would leave her fanatically loyal to them. While she tends to hang around him more, he aims her towards Ziede to help her develop a healthier attitude and own independence.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Before their uprising at the Summer Halls, Bashasa laid out a clear, orderly plan in which Kai was to free the surviving demons as the Cageling Demon Court as a distraction while a group of volunteers led by Bashasa himself killed the four Hierarchs and everyone else escaped to spread word of what they did and inspire a broader rebellion. The plan goes off the rails before they can even start when an expositor comes looking for Dahin and Kai has to kill him, forcing them to move immediately before the expositor's disappearance can be noted, even though two of the Hierarchs they are supposed to kill haven't arrived yet.
• The Unifier: Bashasa bar Calis started out as a hedonistic noble of no particular consequence, but after some time as a hostage of the Hierarchs, he used his charisma to do what no one else was able to: unite a coalition of nations that could defeat the Hierarchs. That alliance lasted into peacetime as the Rising World, and after Bashasa's death, Kai fiercely protects his legacy.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Demons are weak to water, especially running water, as it burns them and leaves them vulnerable. However Kai is old and experienced enough by now to push through this weakness to an extent he can even swim through water to boats when those aboard 'know' he cannot. One of the few ways to properly kill a Demon however remains to kill their body in or on water.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Bashasa's specialty, as he calmly adapts to whatever is thrown at him.
• You Are Too Late: Rare heroic example. The entire plot focuses on an elaborate scheme by the villains to get the heroes out of the way for a vital political meeting where they would oppose attempts to turn the coalition into an empire... except that, as he reveals at the end, Kai already convinced the important parties to dissolve the nascent empire five years before the events of the book.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Kai's got a lot of this.
  • The Hierarchs used their Well to seal off the underworld from the rest of the world. Demons could no longer go to the underworld, and any Witches down there were stuck as well. Meanwhile, the Demons moving around in bodies were stuck above, with their true bodies below withering and dying. Later it is possible to commune with the underworld, but it is believed true travel will never be possible again.
  • For the communing, early in the book, Kai visits the realm of the demons in spirit, which he has to do because the demon body that he was born in was burned. Because it was lost, he can't see the place as it looks to demons anymore. His mother is antagonized by his very existence, and because Kai is so hated by other demons she sometimes acts hatefully towards him as well. She doesn't understand that offering to bring his human body down and marrying him off to someone she's persuaded to take him isn't a good favor, since it would be loveless and he'd have to suffer constant assassination attempts.
  • In prequel chapters we see that Kai was very happy as Kai-Enna, with the Saredi, but he lost them when the Hierachs invaded, as well as his connection to home. From the present day chapters we see that a way back to the underworld ends up re-established, but it's never as easy as it used to be. Also, by taking the body of an unwilling person as his own Kai alienates all of his fellow demons, which explains why they hate him later.
• You Remind Me of X: Both Kai and Ziede privately reflect that Ramad reminds them of Bashasa, though they don't say so in front of Ramad. This contrasts Bashat, who despite being Bashasa's relative and heir gets unspoken comments on how little he is like Bashasa.