A Grand Reckoning is, as you would expect, gigantic. The author, one Lokan of Olmer is extremely verbose, unwilling to use one word where sixteen will do, and peppers absolutely everything with quotes from classical texts. Fortunately, these quotes from classical texts are often written by very good author, which makes it much more reasonable, considering that he also prefers to copy sections of earlier histories into his than to restate them in his own words.
Also, despite the name, it's a history of the Eastern Empire, since apparently the author doesn't consider anything else worth writing about.
The second volume begins with the foundation of the Empire; there's horrible famines everywhere and mage-storms and the land is in chaos, but the First Emperor, descended from the great heroes of Tantara and Predain, brought Order and Civilization and Justice and all other good things in life. Fortunately, there are quotes - here's his Imperial Policy Statement about bringing Civilization and Humanity to the wastes, here's his advisor, Arved's, terse notes about what Tantara and Predain did to solve the problems they are now facing (Arved is obviously a major stylistic influence of the Second Emperor, though tragically not on Lokan).
The First Emperor manages to be even more sickeningly humane than the Second Emperor; blood magic is explicitly outlawed as making all the problems worse, and compulsions are only used on serious criminals to prevent reoffense. Lokan brings quotes from all sorts of sources to describe it - scribes in the imperial chancery taking notes of records, students at the school the First Emperor establishes for mages, the recorded testimony of 'enemies of the empire' criticizing it for conquering them - as well as memoranda from leading advisors, all tied together with reasonable competence.
The main imperial advisors in this period are Kesnas, the Emperor's top general (who, by his memoranda back home asking for more money, is constantly fighting and defeating the armies of vast tribal confederations in glorious battle, none of whom have anywhere *near* the amount of magic the Empire does, or as well trained-troops), Arved, who is largely managing the construction of infrastructure and weather-control with a whole lot of explicit predictions, and Vadan, who is in charge of diplomacy and 'internal security' and is quietly being paranoid in everything he writes, though nowhere near enough, since the Emperor and all three of his advisors are murdered by halfway through; the rest of the book talks about the civil war after his death.
(Which is very nasty; the Emperor's young son and daughter are briefly used as puppets to legitimate Kesnas's second-in-command, who calls himself Emperor until he's murdered in a mutiny; from then on there's too many sides and they're all using blood magic and the sources are very bad and mostly Lokan making sweeping generalizations, before the Second Emperor rides in on a white horse, crushes the warlords in a description sixteen times as long and about half as informative as *My Reign*, and ends the book.)