Wheel of Time
He turned to face Ba'alzamon. The tearing within him had ceased as soon as his hand touched Callandor. Only an instant had passed, yet it seemed to have lasted forever. "You will not take my soul," he shouted. "This time, I mean to finish it once and for all! I mean to finish it now!"
Ba'alzamon fled, man and shadow vanishing.
For a moment Rand stared, frowning. There had been a sense of — folding — as Ba'alzamon left. A twisting, as if Ba'alzamon had in some way bent what was. Ignoring the men staring at him, ignoring Moiraine crumpled at the column base, Rand reached out, through Callandor, and twisted reality to make a door to somewhere else. He did not know to where, except that it was where Ba'alzamon had gone.
"I am the hunter now," he said, and stepped through.
Okay, how can you begin to sum up this fantastic series? Well, it's a cliché — like talking about the new Harry Potter — but if anyone deserves the mantle of the "new Tolkien", I think it's Robert Jordan. Except he's a much better writer (no reflection on Tolkien; he was an academic, first and foremost). The truly amazing thing, from my point of view, is that he has this huge cast of characters (which normally confuses the hell out of me), and the list of "main" characters is large, and even though you switch viewpoints between all these main characters (and as the series goes on, the main characters separate, so that you don't know, for chapters and chapters and chapters, what's going on with the other characters), but despite all this (which normally would be guaranteed to make me lose interest, because I tend to get attached to one character at the expense of the others), you're so caught up in the story you follow even the people you don't like particularly (and are interested in their fate nevertheless, because … well, I think it's because it's such a great story!). The books are all wonderfully huge.
There are, so far, twelve books in the Wheel of Time series (not counting prequels), and it's just about finished. Very sadly, Robert Jordan has now died. However, Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn books and others) has proved with book 12 that he is fully up to the challenge of finishing this hugely popular series.
You can find out more about the books at: http://www.tor.com/jordan/
and probably the major fan site/community forum is at http://www.dragonmount.com/main.php
and, of course, there's an action/strategy game based on the series! Check out
http://www.wheeloftime.com/ for more info.
