by Martha Wells
Martha Wells has been around the Sci-Fi/Fantasy community for a long time, but it was only relatively recently that she burst into super-stardom (relatively speaking, at least . . . I mean . . . books) with the publication of her Murderbot series. In Witch King, Wells returns to her swords and sorcery roots, and gives the sentient spaceships and alien artifacts a rest.
Kai is one of the last of demon-kind left inhabiting a mortal body on the material plane – hundreds of years after the conquering hierophants were defeated by an alliance of every city-state and tribe on the continent. After being murdered by conspirators unknown, Kai wakes up in a tomb hundreds of meters under the ocean. His consciousness has just been ejected from the mortal shell in which he had resided for several hundreds of years, and a lesser mage with delusions of grandeur is trying to trap him in a new vessel. with the intention of binding the Witch King to servitude. After tearing the life from the mage and his henchmen, Kai sets off to reunite the surviving members of his chosen family and uncover the root of the conspiracy against him.
Martha Wells is a genius. Her characters are complex and unique, and her world-building is unparalleled. However, the imagination she uses to describe magic systems and mythology couldn’t quite make up for the fact that the story . . . doesn’t really go anywhere. The whole thing read like a novella-length prologue to a new epic fantasy series she’s about to roll out. It’s an epic fantasy series that I would happily dive into, but as a stand-alone novel, Witch King left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied.
