Witch King
Structure
The novel alternates between two timelines:
- Present: Chapters numbered One through Sixteen, following Kai (a Saredi demon) and Ziede (an Immortal Marshall who commands wind-spirits) as they investigate a conspiracy threatening the post-Hierarch world.
- Past: Sections titled “The Past: [The Beginning / The Fall / The Meeting / The Plan / The Battle / The Changing / The Becoming / The Exodus / The Journey / The Beginning (reprise)]”, which tell the story of the war against the Hierarchs, decades or centuries before the present action.
Key terms and context:
- Hierarchs: A now-fallen empire that enslaved demons and Witches to power their rule. Their defeat is the defining historical event.
- Saredi demons: Can drain the life from a mortal body and inhabit it, switching bodies when their current form is destroyed or worn out.
- Immortal Marshalls/Blessed: Long-lived human-adjacent beings with various magical abilities. Some were allies during the Hierarch war; others are political actors in the present.
- Witches: Human magic-users who fought with Kai and Ziede against the Hierarchs.
- Bashasa: An Arike Prince-heir who led the rebel alliance; deceased by the present day.
- The Rising World: A present-day movement attempting to revive Hierarch-era power structures.
Chapter 1 — Waking in the Tomb, Taking a Body
Kai wakes. He has been imprisoned inside a tomb — or something like a tomb, because the world he wakes into is soft and dark and waterlogged. Getting out requires taking a body that still has life in it; there is one nearby, trapped in the same burial site. The details of how Kai does this are viscerally specific. Kai is not comfortable about it, but comfort is not the point.
Outside, the world has changed. The Hierarchs fell long ago. The post-Hierarch world has its own politics, its own factions, its own ways of pretending the past didn’t happen. Kai and Ziede — who has also been imprisoned but is free — must figure out where they are, why they were sealed in, and whether the people who did it are still a threat.
Chapter 2 — Finding Ziede, Meeting Sanja
The best thing about draining the life from a mortal body is that it leaves no room for hesitation. Kai takes a new body efficiently and without ceremony. He finds Ziede in the ruins of the structure that held them, alive and sharp-tempered and quietly furious about the length of their imprisonment. They do not know exactly how long it has been. Long enough for the geography to have changed.
They also find Sanja, a young girl who was in the vicinity of their imprisonment for her own reasons — reasons she is not immediately forthcoming about. She is street-smart and non-hysterical, which Kai values.
Chapter 3 — Regaining Consciousness, Group Forms
Kai regains consciousness after a disorienting episode. Someone has found him — not an enemy, someone who knows what he is and is not afraid of it. This chapter establishes the group dynamic: Kai and Ziede together, Sanja attached to them by circumstance, and contact with others who operate in the cracks of the present world’s politics.
Chapter 4 — Investigating the Imprisonment Site
Leaving Sanja with Ziede for safety, Kai investigates the immediate area around their awakening site. What he finds begins to clarify the conspiracy: someone deliberately imprisoned them, in a specific location, using methods that drew on old Hierarch knowledge. The question is which of the present-day factions had both the knowledge and the motivation.
Chapter 5 — Murder Later, Escape from Danger
Ziede’s instruction — “murder later, we need to get out” — drives Chapter Five. They are in a position where staying means capture or death. Kai and Ziede exit through a route that requires using everything they have: Kai’s ability to inhabit bodies and access intentions, Ziede’s wind-spirits pulling them through sealed spaces. The escape is effective and ugly.
Chapter 6 — Firelight and Rest, Rising World Theory
Firelight. Rest. Kai wakes to warmth for the first time in however long they were imprisoned. This chapter is lower-energy: the group catches its breath, assesses what they have, and begins planning what to do next. Kai and Ziede discuss who imprisoned them and what they want now. The Rising World faction — an organization working to restore the Hierarch-era power structures — is the primary candidate.
Chapter 7 — City Approach, Reading Alignments
Dawn, outside a city. Kai stands at the edge of a settled zone, observing it before entering. Cities in the post-Hierarch world have their own complicated political structures. Some openly or quietly support the Rising World; others are hostile to anything that smells of Hierarch revival; most are trying to survive politically while hedging their bets. Entering this one requires reading its current alignment quickly and correctly.
Chapter 8 — Orintukk, Dahin and Ramad Acquired
The white walls of Orintukk gleam from a distance. Orintukk is a city with a specific relationship to the Hierarch past, and to the Immortal Blessed who are now a significant political force. They also acquire Dahin, a sardonic and highly competent researcher/archivist who has his own complicated relationship to Hierarch-era history and who knows far too much about things he should not know.
Ramad is introduced as well — an Immortal Blessed historian who is genuinely interested in the actual history of the Hierarch era rather than a political version of it, and who treats Kai with the careful attention of someone who knows they are in the presence of a primary source.
Chapter 9 — Tahren Missing, Summer Halls Implicated
On the way back from something Kai won’t fully narrate, he stops at the edge of an important location. The investigation has clarified: Tahren — someone Ziede loves, possibly an Immortal Marshall — was captured or imprisoned separately from Kai and Ziede, by the same or related parties. Finding Tahren becomes the urgent goal. The Summer Halls (the Hierarchs’ former seat of power, now in ruins) is implicated.
Chapter 10 — Summer Halls, Amalgam Pursuit
Ziede draws on a host of wind-spirits, pulling the group into the air. The Summer Halls are enormous, ruinous, and dangerous — still full of amalgams, chimeric horrors built from assembled body parts that were a staple of Hierarch defensive strategy. Amalgams can’t be drained of life the way mortals can; they have to be unraveled by finding and destroying the intentions that animate them.
The investigation inside the Summer Halls makes the conspiracy’s shape clearer. The Rising World is not operating from outside the existing power structures — it has people inside them, including among the Immortal Blessed.
Chapter 11 — Safe Position, Conspiracy’s Full Shape
Dawn, cloudy sky. After the Summer Halls, the group manages a temporary safe position. Kai and Ziede assess their intelligence. They now know where Tahren is being held and by whom. They also understand that the conspiracy is larger than a single imprisoned person: the Rising World faction is attempting to use old Hierarch infrastructure — the Wells, the amalgam-making techniques, the demon-enslaving methods — to rebuild something resembling the old empire under new management.
Chapter 12 — Dahin Confronted, Hidden Knowledge
Dahin, confronted with specific information, is more affronted than frightened. His affrontedness is pointed: he knows more than he has said, and he finds the suggestion that he is in any way responsible for or complicit in what is happening to be deeply incorrect. The conversation is contentious and reveals that Dahin’s knowledge of Hierarch-era systems is not theoretical. He has been protecting something.
Chapter 13 — Summer Halls Core, Maintained Amalgams
Kai keeps the internal snarl of rage to himself because losing it would not help. They are inside or adjacent to the Summer Halls’ core, and the next confrontation requires precision rather than force. The amalgams in this section are more complex and better-preserved than the ones in the outer ruins — someone has been maintaining them. The Rising World has access to Hierarch-era constructs.
Chapter 14 — Captured, Arnsterath Revealed
An intention — a focused, designed magical attack — wraps around Kai and freezes him mid-movement. He is captured. The quality of the intention tells him something: no expositor (a trained human magic-user) could have done this. Only a demon could find the underearth-rooted part of him and lock it. Which means the faction holding Tahren has a demon working with them.
The prisoner’s veil is removed. The demon facing Kai has Saredi-dark eyes like his. Kai does not recognize the body — demons switch bodies — but recognizes the demon. She was in the Temple Halls during the war. She is old, older than Kai, and she should not be here doing what she appears to be doing. Kai tells Ziede, through their connection: It’s not a Witch. It’s still a shock, no matter how I prepared. This other Saredi demon is Arnsterath, and her presence changes everything the group thought they understood about the conspiracy.
Chapter 15 — Fleeing Summer Halls, Heading to Kagala
The ascension raft flees the Summer Halls, carrying the group across the plains toward the old border territory — specifically toward a system of old forts in the Benais-arik region called the Kagala. Ziede’s finding stone, tracking Tahren’s location, points there. It is the same direction that Bashasa led the rebels after their escape from the Summer Halls, long ago. Kai finds this unsettling in the way of things that feel like omens.
On the raft, Kai and Ziede discuss Arnsterath. Ziede is inexorable: Arnsterath abandoned Kai when he was young, during the war, when a Saredi demon who was older and more experienced had a responsibility to help younger ones. Kai has spent a long time not thinking about this. The revelation that Arnsterath exists and has been imprisoned somewhere in Hierarch-controlled conditions for the entire span of their post-Hierarch lives makes the abandonment more complicated, not less.
Chapter 16 — Tahren Rescued, Kagala Resolution
The Kagala. Tahren is here, held in one of the old “Witch cells” — a preservation device, originally designed by borderlanders, that keeps a person alive and unconscious indefinitely. She is found. She is not maddened. When she wakes, she describes the experience as dreamlike — nothing clear, nothing cruel. Kai believes her.
Arnsterath, whose circumstances and alignment are now more complex than either enemy or ally, is present. Saadrin (a Lesser Immortal Blessed who has been both antagonist and complicated instrument throughout the book) is here to take a prisoner back to the Blessed Lands as a witness. Dahin is told to come back to Avagantrum with the group. He does not say no.
Kai sits in the stone chair on the viewing platform above the courtyard, aware there is much still to do: destroy the Witch cells so the Rising World can’t use them, deal with Arnsterath, figure out the next step. He does not do any of these things right now. He sits. Ziede and Tahren emerge, holding hands. Dahin offers to have Tenes knock the fort down. Kai says it should stay. They step into the air together.
The Past: The Beginning — Pre-War Life in the Saredi Clan
(Appears after Chapter 2 in reading order)
The earliest chronological flashback. Kai has been in the recently deceased Enna’s body for two full seasons — a young demon newly arrived in the mortal world, learning what it means to inhabit a human life. He wakes his cousin Adeni before dawn to go practice archery on the river flats. The morning routine of the Kentdessa Saredi clan: the great tent with its painted canvas walls, the outdoor kitchen with clay ovens and cooking fires, the herds of horses and goats on the plain.
The Saredi haven’t encountered the Hierarchs yet. The world Kai inhabits is pastoral and close: clan gossip, breakfast millet porridge, arguments about who woke the herder shift. Adeni, half a season older than Enna’s body and Kai’s primary companion since the awakening ceremony, mentions — shyly, by his standards — that he’d like Kai to marry him, along with their cousins Varra and Iludi. Kai isn’t sure if he’s joking. The horses still distrust demon-scent.
This section establishes what Kai was before all of it changed: young, curious, embedded in a family that accepted him, in a world that hadn’t been invaded yet.
The Past: The Fall — The Hierarchs Arrive, the World Breaks
(Appears after Chapter 3 in reading order)
The Hierarch invasion reaches the mountain and hill lands surrounding the great river valleys. This section establishes the scope and method of the Hierarchs’ conquest: not a single overwhelming military advance but a systematic process of assassination of leadership, manipulation of local power structures, and then the introduction of legionary forces once resistance had been softened. The Hierarchs were preparing for this for at least a generation before anyone in the northern lands realized it.
For the Saredi and the borderlander peoples, the invasion ended the long peace of the grassplains. Kai’s understanding of the world — the Saredi as nomadic cattle-keepers and arbiters of borderlander disputes, the Witches as mediators, the distant Immortal Blessed as half-legendary — is shattered. The legionaries bring expositors: practitioners who draw power from mass death, who can shape that power into intentions capable of destroying Witch workings and overcoming demonic defenses.
The Hierarchs take the Arike city-states — Bashasa’s homeland — through a combination of treaties that trap local princes as hostages and then execution of leadership when resistance emerges. Bashasa’s family: his mother poisoned, his father and cousin and maternal relative taken to a negotiation from which they never returned.
The Past: The Meeting — Arike Hospitality, the Alliance Forms
(Appears after Chapter 4 in reading order)
The first meeting between Kai and Bashasa Calis, Prince-heir of the Arike. The Arike are described as hospitable by nature: the encounter happens under conditions that require trust from both sides, and the Arike protocols of hospitality make a neutral space possible.
Kai at this point is a young demon who has seen the war from the grassplains side — Saredi scouts, borderlander fighters, distant signals of atrocity. He has not been inside a Hierarch-controlled city before. Bashasa is a hostage held in the Hierarch palace, allowed a degree of movement and a small household, watched closely.
The meeting establishes the dynamic that will define the rest of the war storyline: Bashasa’s strategic intelligence, Kai’s demon capabilities, and the beginning of the coalition that eventually attempts the assault on the Summer Halls. Ziede Daiyahah is also present — an Immortal Marshall who has broken with the Blessed Lands, whose reason for fighting is practical and her capabilities formidable.
The Past: The Plan — Bashasa’s Assassination Plot, Dahin Introduced
(Appears after Chapter 6 in reading order)
In a room off the Hostage Courts, Bashasa lays out the plan. In two days, four of the High Hierarchs will be gathered in the Imperial Halls for an investiture ceremony. The plan: free the demons imprisoned in the Cageling Demon Court (a flooded chamber where the Hierarchs have been holding and using demons) by disrupting the magical rain that keeps it inundated; use the freed demons to create chaos and distraction in the Imperial Halls; kill the four Hierarchs directly while the building is in confusion.
Bashasa’s personal guard are the only mortal allies, with the other Arike hostages potentially joining when the attempt begins. The survival odds are acknowledged as poor. Bashasa’s motivation: the Hierarchs plan eventually to slaughter everyone, from the eastern sea to the western. This is not vengeance — it is buying a chance for everyone who comes after.
Dahin is introduced here: Tahren’s younger brother, pale and freckled and completely unbothered by sitting next to a demon. He is a Lesser Blessed — long-lived, capable of using items made from the Well of Thosaren, but unable to draw from the Well himself, which made him and others like him expendable to the Hierarch-Immortal Blessed agreement. The Blessed Patriarchs had agreed to turn over some Lesser Blessed to become Hierarch temple priests — a process that hollows out the soul entirely, destroying the person. This is why Tahren broke her sworn allegiance and turned against the Hierarchs.
Dahin’s first question to Kai: will he die if he touches a demon? He is told no, but not to. He immediately folds his hands in his lap.
The Past: The Battle — Assault on the Summer Halls
(Appears after Chapter 8 in reading order)
The assault begins. Tahren moves first through the Hostage Courts, killing the legionary guards with efficient brutality — a single stroke of her sword, two heads at once, before they register her as a threat. The plan is in motion.
The Immortal Marshalls’ role in the battle is force projection: Tahren as a fighter operating at a level no mortal soldier can match, Ziede controlling wind-spirits to clear corridors and disrupt expositor defenses. The legionaries are formidable in conventional engagements but were not prepared for a combined assault by demons, freed Witches, an Immortal Marshall who has turned against the Hierarchs, and an Arike prince-heir who has been planning this from inside their walls.
The flooding of the Cageling Demon Court begins. The intention Kai found has been activated. Whether this was intended or accidental — Kai being Kai, it is probably somewhere in between — the resulting flood begins to spread through the lower levels of the Summer Halls, creating chaos that the assault team did not entirely plan for but is prepared to exploit.
The Past: The Changing — Demonic Body-Stealing, Talamines Explained
(Appears after Chapter 9 in reading order)
A section that explains the mechanics of what Kai is and what the Hierarchs were trying to do with demons. Saredi demons exist in the underearth in their natural form — long-bodied, scaled, suited to the dark pressures of the deep earth. Coming to the mortal world requires a mortal body: a willing host, with the demon living alongside the host’s soul and the host’s death eventually requiring the demon to find a new body, or one that has died at the moment of transfer. The process preserves the host’s appearance and physical form while the demon inhabits it. Grandmother made a treaty with the underearth to formalize this, allowing Saredi demons safe passage into mortal life in exchange for terms that are not fully specified.
What the Hierarchs discovered: if an expositor could be forced to give up their body to a demon as they died, the demon gained not just the body but the expositor’s accumulated learning — their knowledge of intentions and designs, their trained eye for power structures, their ability to read and use the Hierarch’s system of written magic. Kai, inhabiting the body of the Hierarch expositor Talamines (whose death Kai arranged after a confrontation in the Cageling Court), now has Talamines’ abilities layered on top of his own. Ziede tells him he is now an expositor as well as a demon.
The Hierarchs had been experimenting with this: they wanted demons as willing or coerced vessels, believing a demon with expositor training and demon capabilities would be an unbeatable weapon. The Cageling Demon Court was the infrastructure for this program.
The Past: The Becoming — The Water Intention, Kai Absorbs It
(Appears after Chapter 11 in reading order)
Kai and Ziede race back to the Cageling Demon Court to find the controlling intention that keeps it flooded with magical rain — if they can move it, they can flood the Summer Halls and cover the escape. The section opens with context on how the Far South was conquered the same way as the Arik: the Hierarchs raised a generation of soldiers who believed they were destined to rule the world, then pointed them at everyone else.
In the intention chamber above the Court, Kai uses Talamines’ expositor vision — his new ability to see things in the Hierarch’s written language that Ziede and other non-expositors cannot — to find a mark on a stone block: a character in the Hierarchs’ secret script, written in pale liquid light. An intention, or the marker for one.
Acting on impulse before Ziede can stop him, he pulls the intention off the block and presses it to his chest, absorbing it into his body. Ziede is somewhere between horrified and resigned. The intention is now inside him, a cold weight on his breastbone. He tells her he’ll try not to find any more unique ways to destroy himself until after they kill the Hierarch.
The section also reveals: while Kai was unconscious after taking Talamines’ body, Bashasa quietly assigned Salatel and her cadre as Kai’s personal guard, subject to his orders — partly to protect Kai from being killed as an expositor by their own side, partly to give Kai freedom of action if he woke and decided to do something heroic.
The Past: The Exodus — Second Hierarch Killed, Summer Halls Flooded, Everyone Flees
(Appears after Chapter 12 in reading order)
The aftermath of the assault. Kai surfaces from the flood, exhausted, carrying the head of the second Hierarch. He is met by Tescai-Lin, the moral authority of the Enalin people, who is leading an Enalin fighting force in the palace. Tescai-Lin confirms the identification of the head: this Hierarch came to the Enalin’s Water Mountain, and is recognized.
Kai reunites with the group in the Temple Halls. Dahin throws himself into Kai’s arms — the first time Kai has been hugged like that since the Hierarchs destroyed the Saredi — and then immediately drags him toward the others, announcing to everyone that Kai stabbed an expositor and threw him out a window.
Kai shows the group the second Hierarch’s head. Bashasa holds it up and announces: both Hierarchs are dead, the legionaries are running, the Summer Halls are flooding and will continue to flood because the water intention is now unreachable underwater. The Summer Halls must be evacuated immediately. He frames the unstoppable flooding as a deliberate tactical choice — Kai’s “powerful working” — and uses it to keep everyone moving, together, in the same direction.
As they leave, Bashasa says quietly to Kai: how? Kai says it wasn’t anything clever. Just luck, and being fast and vicious, which he doesn’t say in front of the mortals. Bashasa tells him he cannot express what Kai has done. Then he goes back to being the person who keeps everyone organized and moving.
The Past: The Journey — War Coalition, Contacting the Underearth
(Appears after Chapter 14 in reading order)
Before the assault on the Summer Halls — the period when the anti-Hierarch coalition was assembling on the plains. Kai is operating as a Saredi scout, mapping the approaches to the Hierarch camp. With him is Dae-Fera, a younger demon, recently arrived in her first mortal body.
The coalition is extraordinary in scope: Saredi fighters in antelope-sigil leather, borderlanders with hidden face masks, Erathi sailors from destroyed coastal cities, Witches in dark drapery and broad-brimmed hats, translators working in every combination of languages including signed Witchspeak. A Witch asks Kai if he felt anything near the Hierarch camp walls — not expositors, something else. Kai says he could tell there were expositors but nothing beyond that. The Witch needs more information and suggests he contact Grandmother in the underearth.
Kai sits on the ground, closes his eyes, and rides the connection down to his real body — scales and tails coiled in a bubble of water deep in protective rock — and then follows Grandmother’s presence to the underearth council chamber. Mother is there, impatient. Grandmother is there, calm. Several of Kai’s siblings watch from the walls. His brother Veditiron announces his presence with the tone normally used for intruders.
Grandmother relays the Witches’ question about the Hierarch wooden towers in the camp: are they siege engines or something else? The demons in the underearth have been trying to map the Hierarchs’ origin through the deep earth and cannot — the Hierarchs have protections against it. The council believes it might be possible to attack the Hierarch homeland or supply chain through the underearth, as demons had attacked the grassplains in Grandmother’s own war long ago. But the searching is difficult.
Kai passes questions back and forth between the mortal plain and the underearth chamber, serving as a living bridge between the two worlds, which is something only a demon in a mortal body can do.
The Past: The Beginning (II) — Wallwalker Escape, Bashasa’s Plans
(Appears after Chapter 15 in reading order)
Immediately after the Summer Halls: Kai and the coalition are escaping on wallwalkers — enormous multi-legged creatures used as mobile living platforms, each one carrying a palanquin large enough for dozens of people. Bashasa has everyone take the same positions they had the previous day to avoid confusion.
Before dawn. The wallwalkers are moving through the flat river country toward tree-covered hills. Kai, who has not adjusted to the motion, positions himself at the prow rail to look outward rather than inward. Bashasa, watching him, cautions him not to fall.
Kai says: thank you for Enna. Bashasa acknowledges it — he retrieved Enna’s body from where the Hierarchs had placed it, so the spirit could be properly put to rest. He frames it as having been selfish: he needed proof of Hierarch treaty violation to show the other Arike city-states. The truth, he admits, is that his sister was the last of his close family. His mother poisoned not long after the Hierarchs arrived. His father, his sister, his maternal cousin — all disappeared at a negotiation from which they never returned.
He asks Kai about the Saredi: did they know war before the Hierarchs? Kai tells him about Grandmother’s war with the underearth, eleven mortal generations ago. Bashasa is briefly distracted by this history, then returns: the Arik and most of the known world had been peaceful for generations before the Hierarchs. The Hierarchs came without reason. They taught everyone to fight. He hopes they also taught them to work together.
Kai looks at Bashasa and asks: do you really think we’re going to survive this? Bashasa flashes a grin. Ah. If we do, I have plans.
The Past: The Beginning (III) — Epilogue
(Appears after Chapter 16, as a closing coda)
A letter fragment from the Benais-arik archives: I dream of the world as it was — caravans from the north with silks and icewine and amber, canal barges from the archipelagoes. The people, the food, the music, the laughter.
This final Past section is the earliest moment chronologically — Kai’s first full mortal seasons in Enna’s body, before the Hierarchs, before the war, before everything. It returns to the pastoral clan life: the Kentdessa tent, Adeni, the morning archery practice. The same scene as the first Past section, slightly different angle. A reminder of what the world was before the Hierarchs arrived and taught everyone to fight.
The letter says: Salasi the satirist saw what was coming and flushed the birds from their cages in the forum garden. But they all fell from the sky when the voice of the Hierarchs’ Well rose.
The book ends in a before, so the reader carries both timelines forward simultaneously: the world that was lost, and the people still working to salvage something from what came after.
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