Ruinous Return, Book 2

By: SerasStreams

Narrated by: Hannah Trusty

With heroes from her past alongside her, and two kingdoms preparing for war, The Eternal Empire continues to grow under the guidance of a benevolent ruler.

Lyn Rivers has many challenges to face and time is running out. Gathering hero cores, vassalizing kingdoms, and discovering the secrets hidden at the Ruins of Elent by the ancient race who made magic.

All of this will lead to a final confrontation between the fledgling Empress, her rivals Cecily and James, and a final decision she will have to make. A question asked when she fully committed herself to this new cause.

"Will you ascend?"

©2025 SerasStreams (P)2025 Royal Guard Publishing LLC

Good!

Great book, great narration. I don’t know where the book would go next, but if it does, I’m all about it

good, but author didn't learn from b1

Like the first book, this is a great story. Give it a read, it's mostly fun and the world they've created is interesting to learn about.

That said, the entire gripe on the audio-book side of things (literally well over a dozen reviews stating the *same exact thing*) is that the chanting of spells is immersion breaking, annoying, interruptive, etc.

That hasn't changed in book two.

Everything seems written in a way to be frustrating for audioboook readers.

Spell chanting is too short to be skipped easily, and too long to be ignored. It pulls the listener from the story.

POV swaps don't have dedicated chapters to explore those POV's, and instead it just cuts straight to someone else in the middle of the MC's story. It's not even announced whose POV we're swapping to, you just have to listen and figure it out yourself.

If you want to skip it, you risk cutting ahead in the main story. If you do skip it, you're bombarded with badly written PTSD victims being cartoonishly evil or childish, which also ruins the story.

character building world building

I really enjoyed this and the voice acting was great and I really liked the story and how it was presented and the story bouncing between characters

Absolutely Amazing 😍!

This is one the all around best books that I have listened to in along time. Great characters. The heroes and the villains were very compelling. I really hope there is more to this series. Five stars all around. I highly recommend it to anyone!

The flow of the story was excellent

Love that this finished off the story with out to much left out. And love how it wasnt some giant cant be beat enemy that the main character just barely beat.