To me, the most mysterious and beautiful thing about writing is the process itself. This is an exploration into the Otherworld; like a hapless warrior in a medieval tale, I venture in with my sword and cloak not knowing what will appear from the shadows. I like to be startled.

The Otherworld loves a good laugh. It’s full of tricksters, beautiful beings and demons, a virtual parade of mirrors in which I see myself in the form of fantastic places, characters and events. While this is easy to romanticize, it’s not for the faint of heart. I’ve often regretted getting what I asked for, or been bewildered by the obvious to the extent that it spins my life around—suddenly, it’s not about the story anymore. I’ve written things that took me years to understand and synthesize. But that’s where the mystery comes in.

I love supernatural archetypes…but then again, I’m friends with most of them. Here are some of my favorites in action.

Odin

In Norse mythology, Odin is the one-eyed, all-seeing god of war, magic and wisdom. He is a complex figure, associated with poetry and inspiration, madness and battle fury. He is also a shapeshifter and considered fickle, not to be trusted. He brings to mind the old Celtic stories of poets and magicians who, in their search for truth and pattern, end up going mad and wandering bewildered through the wilds. A patron of writers, if ever there was one.

“The Eye of Odin” is a science fiction story woven into the myth of Odin. It’s about the daughter of a warrior clan who made her fortune as a fighter for a military contractor who harnessed the powers of the higher mind. When she is targeted for discovering a secret beneath their dominion, she must learn the nature of a much greater power: love.

Master of magic, god of war, Odin wanders alone. – From “The Eye of Odin”

Shapeshifter

The Otherworld itself has the nature of a shapeshifter. You think you are looking at one thing, but it’s something else; the psyche wears garments that mimic the forces of nature in symbolic ways. The shapeshifter reveals things through deception. What better thing to leap out while writing a story of a wizard-assassin about to fall to his own machinations? She appears from the Otherworld with a message he won’t understand until he knows what she is.

He drew one more arrow from the shadows of wind and snow and leveled the black, shiny tip through the trees, drifting along in a track as the lord rode down. Then the small man called out—in a woman’s voice. She stopped and turned, slowly pushed back her hood to reveal the face of a wolf, gray with a white muzzle, her eyes flashing moon pale as they leapt over the surroundings.  – From The Hunter’s Rede, Book One in The Chronicles of Ealiron.

Loerfalos

The unconscious mind has often been compared to the sea. An awesome force, vast, mysterious and mostly unseen, the sea is a metaphor par excellence for the forces of the Feminine, the primeval void from which all things come. The loerfalos, which in the wizards’ tongue means “serpent of green darkness,” is an enormous immortal sea serpent. A creature of the Otherworld, she moves between dimensions, making her elusive and difficult to believe in. Her appearance heralds transformation on a large scale…usually unpleasant. When I began writing The Gray Isles, she was waiting for me. And she had quite a lot to say.

Voices rippled the surface above like the wings of a mayfly, an irritating vibration caught in the rays of the rising sun filtering into the surrounding darkness. One voice she knew; the other, she knew as the blood of an offering cast into the infinite flow of her creatures. Untold shades, hunter and hunted, the souls of drowned sailors, thousands of pearly eggs for every one that breathed, they whispered of chaos in balance.  – From The Gray Isles, Book Two in The Chronicles of Ealiron.

Sioros

This beastie showed up in my consciousness with a roundhouse kick. He is the driving force in my novel Crowharrow, which is the folk name for him. In the wizard’s tongue, sioros means “destroyer in the air.” A rare creature with the body of a man and the wings of a raven, he is immortal, as are all properly integrated archetypes. Predatory and tricky, he is a powerful seducer of women. Like the loerfalos, the sioros is of the Otherworld, and moves between. While not inherently evil, he can seem so. A supernatural force, he burns with the fire of gods and confronting him—or worse, falling in love—is exceedingly foolish.

She leaned down and plucked a crimson columbine and some meadowsweet. She paused, and then straightened her back as the forest eaves stirred on the edge of the field. Something pale moved there, with a darker shadow surrounding it. A chill rippled over her heart as it came into focus, a magnificent man with the wings of a raven twice his height. Clad in the forest, he moved with the grace of dreams, his feathers settling in whispers as he turned and gazed at her from eyes the color of stars.  – From Crowharrow, Book Three in The Chronicles of Ealiron.

© F.T. McKinstry 2014. All Rights Reserved.