A near dead survivor, from a band of initiates, limps back to the Great Tent, torn from head-to-toe. The wisest elder, goes white with fear – the cursed race of the Gods’ First Born children have re-emerged from their frigid tombs to reclaim a world that was once theirs.
Recruiting an outsider named Wolf, they gather a warband to set out on a doomed passage over hundreds of leagues to the lair of the preternatural monsters who massacred their kin.
Wolf and his men rush against time and fate to solve the riddle of their doom and confront primordial demons that never died – only to be thwarted by the enervating seduction of the long-house and its Maven.
They believe their only hope lies in wielding a divine weapon of the ‘Stony Skies’ – the nature of which is as impenetrable to them as the will of their Gods.
THE TOLL OF FORTUNE sweeps across the Neolithic and Copper Age from the Don River to the Danube, invoking the primal rhythms of daily life of the first Indo-Europeans – cultural and genetic ancestors to nearly half the modern world’s people. The doomed quest brings us face-to-face with our ancestors in a way that’s both alarmingly familiar and deeply alien. A.J.R.Klopp treads the fine line along the marches of human memory where historical reality yields to the timeless imagination of ancient peoples.
Part Lord of the Rings, part Conan the Barbarian, and part Indiana Jones, A.J.R. Klopp’s evocative style takes its readers to a time when heroes were made, not born; when literature, high fantasy and history were mutually reinforcing; and when readers turned each page with the same excitement as our ancestors camped around a fire, hearing the bard’s opic poem.
