A Call to Love

May 9, 2013June 26, 2018 / F.T. McKinstry

Weave a broom, grow a maple; float the child upon the east.
Bloom the woodruff, grow an oak; light the child upon the south.
Drink of violets, grow an apple; bathe the child upon the west.
Reap the barley, grow a cypress; dance the child upon the north.
In the dark, a call to love; in the light, a bridge.

From “The Fifth Verse.” In this story, an ancient immortal entity defies the rules of her kind by falling in love with a mortal warrior, an indiscretion that leaves her grieving, pregnant and dependent on the help of a wizard whose army was responsible for the death of her beloved. “The Fifth Verse” appears in Wizards, Woods and Gods.

© F.T. McKinstry 2013. All Rights Reserved.

For the Birds

April 27, 2013September 9, 2013 / F.T. McKinstry

Every season of the year has its distinguishing qualities. One of my favorite things about spring is the return of birds. In the north, where I live, winter is long and somewhat daunting; still and silent but for crows, blue jays and chickadees. But in the spring, suddenly I hear birds, lots of birds that I haven’t heard in a good while. The woods come alive with them.

My cats are interested in this too, of course. They do what they do—yeah ok, they hunt. Ferocious predators, cats. I’ve rescued quite a few birds from their clutches. I have this Radagast the Brown thing going on. I explain to the birds that they need to be careful around here. The phoebes get a special talk: “Oh dear no, you can’t build your nest on the shed door because that black cat there will eat you and yours and not even belch afterwards.” And don’t even get me started on the hummingbirds. Despite this, the birds kindly hang around all summer even after I take the feeders down to deter the bears, raccoons and skunks. Nature knows her own dark side, as do all balanced things.

In honor of our feathered friends, I would like to share some paintings I’ve done over the years…in the spring, usually.

: Wood Thrush in Rowan

: Hummingbird in Spring

: Redbird in Hemlock

: Evening Grosbeaks

: Tufted Titmouse in Autumn

: Chickadee in Winter

When I began building the world of Ealiron, birds like raptors and swans became symbols for hierarchies of wizards. Ealiron: The Keepers of the Eye contains a series of pen and ink drawings depicting these.

Happy birding!

Tansel of Loralin

April 20, 2013June 29, 2018 / F.T. McKinstry

It is often said that characters in a story have a life of their own. This phenomenon can be startling to writers, myself included. Tansel first came to me in a fairy tale about a maiden whose love for her garden and a bad attitude towards wizards lead her to a remarkable discovery of her hidden power. But Tansel had more to say when her little story grew into an entire novel involving the forces of the Otherworld, two of the most powerful wizards in the land and a nasty family secret.

In the following excerpt, we are introduced to Tansel and the seeds of a shadow.

Excerpt

Some things did not stay well in gardens.

Tansel knew this, being a gardener like her mother, and her mother before her. She lived deep in the verdant, shadowy hills of Loralin Forest, in a one-room cottage made of river stones. Old clay pots of herbs and flowers crowded small windows with diamond-shaped panes. She owned one small table cluttered with plant stalks, dirt, pots and jars, a mortar and pestle, a knife with a stag-horn handle and a chair with an unraveling reed mat to sit on. She slept on a pallet by the hearth. Dominating the room, a rambling pantry held seeds, dried leaves, twigs, roots and bark in baskets, old cloth bags, stone and glass phials, jars, and wooden boxes. With these Tansel made a modest living.

Tansel loved her garden with all her heart. It surrounded the cottage and spread out beneath the edges of the forest like a wild thing, singing. She grew things for eating, seasoning and healing; things that smelled pretty, attracted butterflies, birds, bees, and cats; she grew things for the shapes of their leaves, the way the sun and moon shone upon a petal or a stalk, or the way one thing grew beside another, tangling high and low in arches, tendrils and delicate patterns. Some plants loved the high, bright sun; others preferred the shadows beneath evergreen trees, or water caressing their roots. Tansel grew things she simply liked the names of. Things no one knew the names of.

Few could have said exactly what grew in Tansel’s garden. Not even she knew, from season to season. The garden had a rhythm of its own, a balance that took care of itself.

Her mother had once told her, Gardens are made of darkness and light entwined. The cottage, the garden and that mysterious piece of information were the only things she had left her young daughter of twelve summers before running away into the lands beyond Loralin like a cucumber vine on a compost heap.

Seven years later, Tansel knew what stayed in her garden and not.

Tansel appears in “The Trouble with Tansy,” a short story in Wizards, Woods and Gods; and in The Winged Hunter, an epic fantasy tale of desire, lost innocence, and healing. Tansel is also featured in Monsters and Gardening.

The Fifth Verse

April 18, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry

Born of stars and witness to the rise and fall of civilizations, an immortal entity takes for granted the vastness of her knowledge—until she falls in love with an ordinary mortal warrior. But the price she pays for this indiscretion involves knowledge of something much greater and more powerful than war, wizards or even the gods themselves.

Excerpt

The wizard lived north in the foothills of the Spectral Mountains, in the ancient castle of Altaeros. A god of that name had built it; he lived in the sinews of the castle through a towering opal spire that focused his mind in the world. But the Shade cared nothing for that. As a terrible storm, she raced over the sky wailing in a legion of shadows, a maiden’s grief, a mother’s wrath. She struck the towering moss-cloaked stones of Altaeros, shattering panes of crystals and glass, uprooting generations of herbs and flowers and shaking the earth beneath the foundation stones. She rained and split the sky with thunder, she howled like wolves and screamed like owls, and blew the trees and brush into tangled, cracking hands until at last, when she had become too heavy and empty to rage anymore, she fell.

The castle shuddered when she hit the floor.

Time slowed, spun around for a moment, and stopped. An overcast sky gazed down dispassionately as the immortal rolled over in her woman’s form, pale as a broken shell.

“Are you finished?” said a voice above her.

“The Fifth Verse” originally appeared in Tales of the Talisman, V5-4.

This story is included in Wizards, Woods and Gods, a collection of twelve dark fantasy tales exploring the mysteries of the Otherworld through tree and animal lore, magic, cosmos, love, war and mysticism.

The War God Sleeps

April 16, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry

$The Temple of Math$

Loneliness and a quest for knowledge will drive a person to many things. Combine this with the vision of a shaman, and an age of ignorance ends on the edge of a sword.

Excerpt

Loneliness remained one mystery that defied Sethren’s mind, despite his understanding of structure and formlessness. The space between the lines had become a wellspring of loneliness, an opaque impression only water seemed to penetrate. He often wondered if his father, a hermit whom the folk in the villages thought mad, living as he did on the wild edges of their simple existences, felt lonely. But then, his father lived half of his conscious life elsewhere. Perhaps the ones he spoke to there, the ones who told him things, kept him company.

According to him, loneliness had driven the War God to abandon the world. An entity who caused death by reaching through the lines into the darkness that created them knew the solitude of the Mother; and after so many turns of a world from life to death to life, so many spirals in so many eons, he could no longer bear it. So the War God grew sad and went to sleep.

The hermit spoke of a temple in the north, at the base of Math’s Eye, the mountain range that protected the realm. He said the War God slept there, beneath five points, five lines and a raven’s eye. So said the old tales. So said the mad. No one else spoke of such things.

“The War God Sleeps” is included in Wizards, Woods and Gods, a collection of twelve dark fantasy tales exploring the mysteries of the Otherworld through tree and animal lore, magic, cosmos, love, war and mysticism.

Marked

April 12, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry

The mother of a fey child learns the pitfalls of mingling with immortals when her boy is taken by a ferocious winged monster at the request of the god who fathered him.

Excerpt

The constellation of Sioros, the Winged Hunter, sparkled on the twilit sky to the north. The towering cluster gazed down from a large star called the Hunter’s Eye, which shone with steady, soothing light that Lorelei felt before she opened her eyes with a violent shudder. A fisherman’s wife from Othurin, she had a simple mind. But in the light of the Hunter’s Eye, her mind became a tapestry, silvery and glinting in divine patterns of arcs, lines and colors from which her thoughts fell most strangely.

She knew the name of the star, for one thing. Alberon. Yes, that was his name.

This elusive memory brought up another, crushingly accessible one. A mother’s grief drew her up from the dead-cold ground. “My baby,” she gasped, rustling in the breeze between day and night as a raging river flooding over a millwheel, splintering it. She staggered across the bloody path before the cottage, its hearth cold and windows dark.

Away in the distance, a woman screamed.

“Marked” is included in Wizards, Woods and Gods, a collection of twelve dark fantasy tales exploring the mysteries of the Otherworld through tree and animal lore, magic, cosmos, love, war and mysticism.

This story tales place in the world of Ealiron, and contains a cameo appearance of Lorth of Ostarin, the protagonist of The Hunter’s Rede, Book One in the Chronicles of Ealiron.

The Origin

April 12, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry

Things aren’t always what they seem. Perception creates reality. But there are rules, such as the linear progression of seasons or the natural and unquestioned confidence one has in the solidity of things. One woodsman falls in love…and the rules change.

Excerpt

He had built this path to the top of the hill where he had first seen her. She had appeared over the grass like a sunrise, walking slowly, her eyes as dark as the night with a tawny star in the depths, her skin the color of the earth and her hair a tangle of moss and roots, reddish and wild, like her. Together they had planted a grove, when the meadow rippled in the wind and birds fluttered and chirruped among the brush and flowers. They had dug the holes for the trees with their bare hands and gently placed the seedlings in. They had smoothed the path by walking to the stream with a fat clay jug, returning to the grove and watering each tree with a jugful, one at a time.

She sang to the trees, the dark-skinned girl. He remembered her voice, rich and full of subtleties, as she stood in the sun with her brown breasts bared and her arms and fingers splayed like the branches of an ash, her voice spiraling into the sky. Underneath the warm green moss, silence loves the water, she would sing. High above the cool blue wind, sunlight loves the air.

He had lain with her, and made her a woman.

He did not yet understand what she had made of him.

“The Origin” originally appeared in Aoife’s Kiss, Issue 21.

Deathseer

April 11, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry

Keeping a personal secret in the darkness of war is perilous, as secrets know the path to the light. Under the influence of a mysterious observatory, a high commander with the ability to see the hand of Death keeps his secret under the cloak of dreams and visions until he realizes, at great cost, that Death doesn’t take sides.

Excerpt

Liros awoke in the clutches of a recurring nightmare. As a white wolf, he saw through the eyes of a child. Drop the candle and run, run on bare feet, so quietly. The dream hovered in his body, his visceral identity and sense of self, an experience as vivid as waking life. Not quietly enough.

Surrounded. Warm tears fall into the open arms of the eternal Void.

As his consciousness returned, the feeling in his heart stood in anguished contrast to the well-built outpost where he lay, in the pre-dawn, surrounded by the watchful eyes of warriors. They called it Fentalon, named after a war god of the North with the head of a wolf. To Liros it felt like a prison.

A candle flickers out against the cold, damp earth.

He closed his eyes and exhaled as the miasma of his circumstance gathered around him. His fading dream darkened it like a bright light casting the long shadow of a crag.

The roar of the river hides the cries, the truth, even as it weeps.

He made a decision.

“DeathSeer” is included in Wizards, Woods and Gods, a collection of twelve dark fantasy tales exploring the mysteries of the Otherworld through tree and animal lore, magic, cosmos, love, war and mysticism.

Earth Awakening

April 10, 2013September 9, 2013 / F.T. McKinstry

Trout Lily

Spring flows through the cold
Softening, awakening
Tangled branches twine
Like nests
Reaching for the sun
Rivers break their icy bounds
And bathe the land in fluid song
Beech leaves rattle amid
Heavens of buds
Gazing down like stars upon the earth
Dark, damp and fragrant
Mayflowers rise through sodden leaves
Ferns spiral forth
And woodland lilies grace the dark with light

Immortal Longing

April 6, 2013September 9, 2013 / F.T. McKinstry

She had asked the stars, whales, rocks, the sun and moon.

She had asked terns, seals, herrings, crabs, and the white horses that roamed the cliffs on the western coast of Waleis.

She had asked the trees and the north wind.

She had asked the dead, their pale eyes staring.

She had even asked the beryl spire focusing the energies of the earth into a mighty web.

But nothing in Ealiron’s creation knew where the mortal shell of her child had gone.

Until one came, bearing news.

As she released the snow-white gull to the north, her immortal lover twinkled with the silence of deep winter on the hard, gray land.

Legends of sailors and wizards collide when an Otherworld being discovers its destiny in a mortal’s imagination. The Gray Isles, Book Two in the Chronicles of Ealiron.