Martha Wells is releasing a Witch King sequel: Queen Demon is coming in 2025

Fantastic news for fans of Murderbot author Martha Wells! Last year, Wells released a fantasy novel titled Witch King, all about the demon Kaiisteron and his mismatched band of friends unraveling a conspiracy that saw him imprisoned and nearly killed. Witch King was a standalone book, meaning we got a full story about Kai, Ziede and all the rest by the time we finished reading the final pages. I really enjoyed Witch King, and have been pining for more ever since. But because it was marketed as a standalone, I'd made my peace with the fact that I'd probably never get to see more of those characters.

Well, surprise, because this week Tor Books announced that Wells is releasing a sequel to Witch King! (Alright, technically the eagle-eyed Redditors at r/murderbot knew about it a month ago, but for many readers this is the first we're hearing of the sequel.) Titled Queen Demon, the book will release in 2025, which is right around the corner!. We even have a cover for it, which you can see in the tweet below from Tor:

And because that image is pretty small, here's a full-size view of the cover for Queen Demon, the better to gawk at and get hyped:

That's a pretty stunning cover which beautifully matches the one for Witch King. Like the first book, Queen Demon features cover artwork by Cynthia Sheppherd and cover design by Christine Foltzer. The cover reveal also came with some details about what we can expect in the book, which has got me even more excited for it:

"From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes the remarkable sequel to the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling novel, Witch King. A fantasy of epic scope, Queen Demon is a story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose.

Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself.

Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?

And can he trust his companions to do what’s right?"

I'm not going to go into too much detail about that back-of-book description so as not to spoilWitch King, but I do think that "can he trust his companions to do what's right?" is an interesting line. In Witch King, we learned about how Kai had gathered a group of found family around him, friends who were each outcasts in their own way, with their own secrets, who united behind a common purpose and forged strong bonds with one another in the process. But they're not heroic in the traditional sense — again, Kai is a demon, and his closest ally is a sardonic witch named Ziede. So the idea of their boundaries being pushed as they near a dangerous objective sounds like an idea with intriguing possibilities.

One thing I do wonder about Queen Demon is how it will affect the overall feel of the series. Because Witch King was announced as a standalone, the story had a certain type of shape to it that didn't make me think about what could happen in a sequel. It sounds like Queen Demon is set after it, so I'm curious whether it will feel like a second standalone book, or a sequel in the more traditional sense that takes all the previously established plot threads and runs with them.

We'll find out next year! Queen Demon releases on July 8, 2025 from Tor Books. It's available for pre-order now.

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