After you read a certain amount of fantasy or science fiction you begin to wonder how many more stories there are still to be told. Sometimes you'll be reading a story and it will begin to sound familiar even though you've never read it before. I'm not saying that authors are deliberately copying other people's work, just that they've ended up telling the same story that someone else had.

It only stands to reason though, how many stories can there be? We used to tell stories as a means of instruction, to teach us how to survive or how to behave. Naturally those stories would change as we changed our manner of living - we didn't need stories that taught us how to hunt when we settled down as farmers, we needed stories that taught us the best way to grow our crops. Along with the Christian creation story, and the stories that have been associated with religious teachings, these have provided the basic blueprints for most of the stories we now tell.

So to find a new way of telling tales that derive from Western culture is nowhere near as easy as you would think. The fact that we can all pretty much identify the same archetypes, X=evil and Y=good, means that we can accept certain concepts in a story without having them explained, but it also gives everything that air of familiarity. So when an author is able to accomplish what Tom Lloyd has done with the first book of his The Twilight Reign sequence, The Stormcaller and create a world where the reader has little or nothing to hold on to that is familiar, it is quite an accomplishment.

Isak is a white eye, and white eyes are different from all the other people born into the world. They are bigger, stronger, and faster than other people, have a natural affinity for magic, and on occasion are chosen by one of the Gods or Goddesses of the land to be the recipient of gifts that set them even more apart from the humans they share the planet with. If that isn't enough to make people fear, and even hate them, white eyes are also quick to anger and low on patience.

Their anger can be horrible to behold as it can quickly turn into a beserker rage that will see them attack any and all who they perceive as being in their way - in other words anyone in the nearby vicinity. Isak is no exception to this and has only been kept in check in his childhood by a former mercenary who guards the caravan of wagons he and his father travel with. Isak's father hates him because as a white eye he killed his mother while being born; they are just big for a normal woman to birth. Ironically white eyes can only be born of a non-white eyed women, so they all sacrifice their mothers in order to be born.