Reading Witch King and listening to the audio book pointed out some interesting things to me. You don’t really get the full implications of the setting at first. The scope of the destruction is just too big to fit into the frame of what is basically a case fic. (Well, basically a political thriller.) That same sense of “too big for the story” is echoed in the chapters taking place in the past. Only in the case of the past chapters the scope is narrow because of Kai’s relative ignorance due to his youth, inexperience, and just not having experience with the world outside the Saredi Grasslands.
What happens is that the full implications of the setting creep up on you. There is more to this war than you previously thought. You realize it wasn’t just a war, it was an apocalypse. It was a horrifying genocide. In the future chapters you get subtle references to how massively depopulated this part of the world is. You find out that the Hierarchs created a number of creatures and constructs both intended to murder people faster, and creatures intended to process the bodies of their victims so that they would have the supplies on hand to create more constructs. (Yes I’m talking about the body stealing ghoul. The ‘looks completely ordinary except kind of horrible’ ghoul who is apparently some kind of shopkeeper/serial killer hybrid. You really do get the feeling you never, ever want to see what lands that have been under Hierarch control for generations are like.) In the past chapters, we learn about the Hierarchs general strategy, and the propaganda they spread to their population to justify their wars of conquest. (I kind of want to avoid using “their people,” it’s clear that the Hierarchs plans involve killing everyone at some point, including the various peoples under their banner they’ve decided are “useful.”)
It’s strongly implied that the Hierarchs have managed to conquer the entire world, with just this region still free but rapidly getting wrapped up by the Hierarchs and their armies. How aware were the other polities outside the Saredi plains of this juggernaut? We don’t know. It’s not relevant to the current political landscape. Kai’s future narrative mentions that the Hierarchs were wiped out, though their “expositers” are still around and presumably teaching other expositers to do extremely horrifying things. Why haven’t they been wiped out by the Alliance? This is possibly relevant, but Kai is too busy being an action hero to let us know what’s going on.
This is a war that would have lasted a really long time, and mostly involved trying to rescue people from being liquidated by the Hierarchs and getting them to some region the Hierarchs weren’t. We don’t entirely know how long the war lasted–it could have been years,it could have been decades. We don’t know yet how long it’s been since the war. (I will guess not too long since the war. Just enough for things to settled down and for people to start getting ambitious and territorial. At least a generation or too, since memory of the Hierarchs is starting to become hazy “scary campfire tales.”) This is a war we can’t see the shape or size of because we are reading a political thriller/case fic, and none of these details are very relevant too the case fic, except that a relative of Kai’s mentor/friend is trying to turn a coalition of polities into an Empire, something Kai knows his mentor/friend would never have wanted. (And which he also thinks is a really terrible idea.)
What we know about the current state of the world is that a) it’s extremely depopulated b) part of the reason it’s depopulated was a genocidal invasion that involved construct killing machines c) out side of the Alliance territories, there is no organization above the “small village or medium-sized town” level. We see people squatting in the ruins or larger communities struggling to maintain some kind of cohesiveness, but no overarching government. This slow motion reveal of the extent of the apocalypse, when the focus is so narrow that it makes it harder to see or comprehend the sheer scale of the wider, still present devastation. Within the case fic we get mostly hints and asides and descriptions in Wells’ usual “reveal by implication and selective absence,” where reader must figure out for themselves what’s going on.
It’s in the epigraphs and the chapters taking place in the past where we learn about the Hierarchs–but not really all of what they did. Kai, being a traumatized kid at this point does not yet have all the information. His Future Self has all of the information, but he’s kind of focused on solving the case of his own murder and the disappearance of his best friend’s wife. The epigraphs give us hard facts that Younger Kai cannot provide due to his relative ignorance and lack of experience. Older Kai gives us brief views of the world formed in the aftermath of the war.
This results in a much darker tone that you don’t at first notice. On the surface, it’s a fantasy-mystery with strong found family/accidental child acquisition themes. Then the story goes deeper. You learn a little bit more about the setting. You learn details about the war and the destruction it caused. Then you start to get an idea of how hard won Kai’s current equilibrium is. How much trauma he and Ziede must have experienced. You see how it effects their actions and reactions throughout the story. There are some very dark things here, but at the same time there is a great deal of hope in the setting. This is not a “doomed and dying” apocalyptic fantasy, it’s a “we are rebuilding what was destroyed and protecting what we can of what’s left” apocalyptic fantasy.
So, as stealth “dark fic” it really does a good job. Granted, we should have realized it was going to get dark. I mean, Our Protagonist was very dead. And the magic user who showed up was clearly up to No Good. Also, we know that Martha Wells loves to write Implied Post Apocalyptic or Overt Apocalyptic settings. However, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sheer fridge horror of some of the things implied in the story. I am really looking forward to what Wells does with future books in this setting.
Note: This does not mean that it’s too disturbing to read. I found Witch King to be very readable, and pretty much devoured it. Then I immediately got the audiobook and listened to that. There’s a lot of darker themes under the surface but there’s also a lot of humor and of course lots of found family vibes. (There are also “oh god my in-laws are horrible” vibes due to Ziede’s in-laws being kind of terrible that are very funny.)
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