Line of Ascent
Can a man love a woman enough to change history?
Dr. Jake Keller is an ornithologist specializing in white storks. He’s also devoted to his hobby of climbing buildings. He combines these two passions to scale an early sixteenth-century church where a pair of storks return yearly to a 500-year-old nest.
On this ancient site, Jake learns why storks are prominent in the mythology of many civilizations as having the ability to carry souls to nether regions. In ancient Egypt, the stork was the ba-bird. The ba was the unique, individual personality of each human being, so ba meant soul or spirit. The word Storch in German means “soul bringer.”
On the roof of the church, Jake finds that he has been transported into the nether region of the sixteenth century where he meets the beautiful and intelligent Katharina Schultz.
But Jake is also given a vision of Katharina’s future and he realizes that to save her he must find a way to prevent the schisms of the Protestant Reformation which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands across Europe.
Jake recruits the most popular scholar in Europe, Erasmus, to his cause. Erasmus is the only man who can unite and rally both the nobility, the reform-minded church scholars, and the populace.
But five hundred years later, will the new world Jake and Katharina create be a better one?
Line of Ascent is a love story across time; a meticulously-researched book infused with history, science, and mythology; and one man’s journey to discover that what we don’t know is often more important than what we think we do.
The Storch by Albrecht Dürer (1515)
In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time.
–Henry Treece
WOW THIS SOUNDS GREAT! Please Notify Me When It’s Available
Counting down to the 500th anniversary of an event that changed history around the world.
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But what if it had never happened?