The Great Hunt

The Great Hunt is the second book of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, published in 1990. The Wheel of Time begins with an epigraph about the turning of the Wheel and the Ages.

The book's central object is the Horn of Valere, which will summon dead heroes back to fight, and the plot begins with its discovery and immediate theft. Since the Horn is a legend that the characters had treated as a story until this point, the theft converts a piece of folklore into an emergency that requires a continent-wide pursuit. Since the Horn's power is to call the dead back to fight, whoever holds it holds an army, which is why the search becomes a contest between several parties rather than a straightforward recovery.

Jordan's series is one of the largest works of epic fantasy of the late twentieth century, and the second volume is where the scope of the undertaking becomes clear, because the cast expands and the action is distributed across several countries rather than being confined to the first book's travels. The publisher's material presents the setting as one in which the world and time themselves hang in the balance, which is the register the series maintains from here.