The Bridge

April 4, 2013January 2, 2017 / F.T. McKinstry / 1 Comment

Gods appear to wizards as one thing; to warriors, another. A priestess in search of love in the Otherworld has spent her life preparing for a planetary alignment that will materialize a beautiful nature spirit only she can perceive. But the path to her birthright plunges her into her blackest fears when she is abandoned to a war for which she is indirectly responsible.

Excerpt

The autumn sun cast long beams across the mauve, green and gold tapestry of the brushy field. A woman emerged from the shadows, breathing deeply as a cool breeze drew her cloak around her bare thighs and stirred the rose-violet oil on her skin. She spoke an ancient word from the pit of her womb and passed through the towering gate of Sol Keep, poised like a forbidding hand on the edge of the plain.

The High Master would know she had gone. But he would not know where. Or why.

A chill swept over her flesh as the naidrin’s voice caressed her mind in a whisper of branches, leaves and flowing water. Efae, he said in his gentle way. Where do you fly?

“You should know that,” Efae said aloud, addressing the tree line in the distance. “You told me in a dream last night. Now is the time. Tonight I will cross the Bridge, and we shall be together.”

The naidrin said nothing.

“The Bridge” 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.

These Things Three

March 31, 2013June 26, 2018 / F.T. McKinstry

These things three, your garden needs
To make the dark and light the same.
Slis, a frog,
Gea, the spring and
Retch, the oldest wizard’s name.

From The Winged Hunter, Book Three in the Chronicles of Ealiron. A dark fantasy tale of desire, lost innocence, and healing.

The Om Tree

March 17, 2013February 21, 2022 / F.T. McKinstry

The Om Tree, by F.T. McKinstry

Trees know things. A tree planted by a god at the dawn of a forest and raised in close proximity to an energy well beneath a wizards’ citadel knows a great many things. In this short story, a wizard-assassin loses what is most dear to him and thereby learns the true nature of his art.

Excerpt

In the beginning stood a tree.

I always start my tales with that; it is fitting, as I have stood here for so long. I have spread my roots on many worlds, being seeded by an undying star named Om. He has a child named Ealiron, the creator of this world on which I now grow. He knows I am here, of course. When I took root as a sapling, he sang to me. A charming fellow, really.

But my tale begins with a mortal. He calls himself a wizard, but he is not like any wizard I know. His name is Lorth, which in Om’s tongue roughly means “water-loving root.” A nice name for a most unsavory man. I call him the hunter.

“The Om Tree” originally appeared in Tales of the Talisman, Volume 7, Issue 3.

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

The protagonist of “The Om Tree,” Lorth of Ostarin, is also the main character in The Hunter’s Rede, Book One in the Chronicles of Ealiron. An Om tree appears in the novel as well; it stands in the wizards’ citadel itself.

Monsters and Gardening

October 19, 2012June 26, 2018 / F.T. McKinstry / 2 Comments

I love monster movies. I’ll watch just about anything if it features an alien, a magical beast, a monster or a supernatural being, creatures that both frighten and attract by virtue of their strange and terrifying natures. I tend to root for them, which can be frustrating because the writers usually kill them off with some heroic bluster bent on saving the world or something. If only my personal demons were so easily vanquished! In a mere two hours, at that.

I see fantasy beings in stories as real in their own right, metaphors for the forces of the psyche, personal or collective. The attraction comes by seeing some part of myself in living color that I thought was safely banished to the hinterlands of my darker side. But it’s never a good idea to banish a shadow. Such a lonely thing. So I write; it’s the ultimate way to lure out the monsters and talk to them.

Book Three in the Chronicles of Ealiron began as a story about gardening. Well, not just any gardening, but wild, magical gardening, the sort of thing a wizard or a priestess would know about. But like all natural things, gardens have a dark side, and this one holds a spooky secret bound up in a young woman’s innocence. Born of wizards and yet sheltered from them, Tansel of Loralin reaches womanhood with little more conscious awareness than a flowering rose. Her instincts know more, however, and when a mysterious old wizard takes her away from her isolated existence to live in his castle and tend his garden, the cracks begin to show.

Enter the beastie. The locals call him crowharrow; and wizards call him sioros, one of their odd, multidimensional words for things like him. Immortal, utterly beautiful and fell, he is an expression of the Destroyer, the darkest aspect of the primordial Feminine. He does not appreciate mortal sentiments. He cannot be dismissed or bargained with—and Mother help any woman who falls in love with him. He is pure male in its darkest form: the edge of a sword, the devastation of fire, the blood of maidens. His appearance is never random or arbitrary, but has its roots in the shadows cast by gods.

Conveniently, Tansel believes the crowharrow is just a legend. But innocence crafts its own demise. A mortal cannot remain in that state. In the powerful, such as a child of wizards, innocence is perilous. When the crowharrow awakens her, Tansel floats like a butterfly under his thrall, instinctively knowing what he wants from her but not really understanding it. The wizards do. So do the ghosts of her ancestors.

This is not a monster that can be killed. He is more akin to treacherous seas: either you learn his nature through becoming aware of your own, or you die. He exists beyond the mortal will to control. He does not care. The beauty of such forces is that they affect everything they touch at the deepest levels. Drawn in by his power are not only Tansel but also those who would protect her: a powerful wizard with a wound involving the sexual initiation of a maiden; the old, broken wizard who attempts to shelter Tansel from a curse he laid on his own bloodline for want of a woman’s love; and a master shapeshiftress steeped in bitterness over what she cannot change. The crowharrow has his fangs in every pie, stripping off scabs and exposing each character’s ugly secrets to the light of day. Through interacting with him, these mortals are systematically dashed upon the rocks of their lost powers in a spiraling crescendo of lust, heartbreak, desperation and mishap that rocks the roots of the mountains. Only then can the immortal predator return appeased to the Otherworld, leaving renewal and healing in his wake.

Monsters create heroes. What dies is not always the beast, but those things that hold us from our greatest potential. Still, best to keep an eye on the trees….

The Winged Hunter, Book Three in the Chronicles of Ealiron.

Tansel is a gardener with a healer’s hand. Fey, they call her.
Her aunt, a dabbler in hedge witchery, calls her cursed.
To the most powerful wizards in the land, she is an enigma.

An Archetypal Bestiary

January 18, 2012August 25, 2019 / F.T. McKinstry

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.