skybridge

babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Consuming Fire 8/10

This series continues to give me joy. I blew right through this book in no time. I love the main characters and the plot kept me rolling along engaged the whole time. No fat here! In particular I continue to love love love the Kiva character and her gives-no-shits attitude. Good to see was the evolution of the emperox and her increased canniness wielding her power. What a twist on that power too! I can see a setup for endangering that too, though. We'll see if my prediction of peril no one seems to be aware of from the new outsider comes true. Speaking of twists and outsiders, now there was a surprise! The backstory was really added value to the plot and can't wait to see how all of them ultimately fit into the climax of the series!<br/><br/>Some spoiler notes for myself to follow! <spoiler><br/><br/>The introduction of new Flow streams AND finding humans still (barely) alive at the other end was amazing! When they decided to bring the sentient A.I. memory? of that allegedly long-dead king, Tomas (XII) Reynauls Chenevert, back with them I really shook my head, though. They thought about virus cross-contamination with the found humans, but it never occurred to them that it might be a super terrible idea to bring an ancient, sentient, apparently better built A.I. back with them where the only similar technology is secretly wielded by the ruler of the (known) universe! I hope I'm wrong and it turns out to use its powers for good! Speaking of secret tech and using powers for good, it's pretty fucking brilliant for the emperox's A.I. to have been secretly searching for and hoarding all the information everyone THINKS is hidden. And pretty smart of Cardinia to figure out it existed at all and how to access it. But it certainly is dangerous for the future since there have been and probably will be again terrible emperoxes, IF the Jiyi AI survives.</spoiler><br/><br/>Quickly hopping to the third book to see how this turns out!

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere