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Empire of too many words in the Glacial Torrent series, more like. A bit grounchy by the end. It definitely needed some editing in the last like 20%, min.

CONTENT WARNING: (view spoiler)[ Graphic and extended torture including to hands, internal organs. Parental abuse, slavery, casual misogyny, xenophobia, plague, loss of a loved one (hide spoiler)]

Things that kept me reading:

-Foreshadowing. Curious about how we got to where this hints things go from where we started. Lots of cool hints and shiny red herrings.
-So very broody. So broken, so many travails.
-Everyone else liked it. What can I say, apparently if all my friends jumped off a cliff, I'd put it on my TBR.
-Audionarrator. He did a good job, I'd look up his other works.

Things that make it doubtful I'll continue:

-Overly long. While this book is very fluent to read, a lot of it is fluff. Pretty fluff and or perhaps meant to be thought provoking, but in the way that a hoard is a collection. Sure there's good stuff in there, but when there's this much of it, the focus is not on how cool your stuff is anymore.

-It's not like *that*. He's a good fighter who gets his ass beat. But he's REALLY good, like professionally, until the story is more fun for him to fail for some reason. We watch so many failed and useless plans from their inception to their execution to their eventual failure. While this might be true to life, the cool thing about writing about it afterward is you get to pick your scenes. He's a softy who would never abuse his power or cause harm for knowledge until the first opportunity to do so? Things like that all over the place. Whatever you think, nerds, this isn't like that, ha ha, gotcha.

-The torture scenes. For a book that starts with a desire not to torture anyone, it sure has a lot of it. I mean, a lot. I think at least 2 chapters are full of it. I skipped several pages of it because it gets graphic and there are who pages of *bad thing is done in exquisite detail to this person* between "Tell me what you know!" and "I don't know anything!" type dialogue. And this is also seen in the beginning where it's just chapters of people being mean to this (admittedly very whiny and stuck up) teen.

-Nobody until he's somebody. While stewing about the torture scenes, I had mental space to muse on how the whole set up of this book and how we're meant to think of Hadrian as a nobody with nothing going for him and no one on his side until the story needs him to use his power. It's, like, every single major plot point (and even some minor ones) is solved by people suddenly giving him authority.

It wasn't necessarily bad. I see the fun things. I liked a lot of what the author was going for. I stuck it out. But I think I just require much tighter writing and this, while cogent, was still very much too "seat-of-the-pants" plotting for me to engage fully with it.