legend

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.

The Winged Hunter is the third book in the Chronicles of Ealiron, a heroic fantasy series that revolves around an assassin called Lorth of Ostarin, an assassin and wizard who serves the old powers.

Deep in the heart of Loralin Forest, folks whisper of the crowharrow, an immortal predator with the body of a male god, towering black wings and the claws and fangs of a mountain cat. A legend, they say. But the wise know differently.

Tansel of Loralin is a gardener with a healer’s hand. Sheltered by solitude, innocence, and the secrets of three generations of troubled wizards, she does not understand why, during a personal crisis, a mysterious mage named Caelfar takes her away from her forest home under a premise of protection. But her aunt Aradia, a witch, has been waiting. She knows a terrible secret involving Caelfar and the crowharrow, a diabolical seducer and destroyer of maidens. When the beast casts its spell on Tansel, only Aradia knows what it means.

Caelfar, while enormously powerful, is very old and worn for reasons long buried in his past. His desperation to protect Tansel from the crowharrow and a strong distrust of Aradia’s motives drives him to summon a wizard named Eaglin of Ostarin, the son of a god and master of the old powers. When Eaglin answers this summons, he is confronted by a secret of his own, an old wound in his heart that takes shape as the crowharrow itself. Thus tormented, he journeys to Loralin accompanied by Lorth, a wizard-assassin with an inborn vision into the Otherworld, and with whom Eaglin shares a turbulent yet appreciative history.

Sheltered by the wilds her entire life, Tansel is ill prepared to deal with the intensity of an immortal seduction spell, let alone the long shadows of wizards and the complexities of family politics. At the hands of the Otherworld, she and the wizards are swept up in a whirlwind of peril, deception, and upheaval that exposes a devastating connection between the crowharrow and Tansel’s bloodline.

Unfortunately, healing this curse will require a terrible sacrifice.

Can be read as a standalone story.

Novel, 312 pages
Third Edition
Edited by E.G. Stone
Ebook includes a Glossary and a link to Maps.
Glossary
Map of Ealiron: Sourcesee
Add to Goodreads

“The novel resonates with the beauty of the natural world, of gardens and the numinous earth.” – Michael D. Smith, author of the Jack Commer Series

“The Winged Hunter is set in a world that is one of the most detailed I’ve seen in quite some time. The book contains rich description of sights and sounds that while evocative of the real world, have that touch of the fantastical that you can only find in epic fantasy.” – Patricia D. Eddy, Author Alliance

“The Winged Hunter provides another fresh look at a fantasy landscape. It is a quiet but powerful tale of innocence and maturity, broken promises, and the value of a well-kept garden.” – Alex Willging, Mr. Rhapsodist

“Wow, what a read! I enjoyed this a lot!” – Review on Goodreads

Read for free on Kindle Unlimited.
Amazon

I see creativity as a reflecting pool. We gaze into the darkness and something appears on the surface, reflected by the light. The water is mostly unseen, rendering this process not only mysterious but also unnerving. To my mind, seeing a slavering monster is less uncomfortable than seeing nothing at all. The monster has form, at least.

I have a penchant for the darkness beneath the reflection. When I write or paint, I stare right into it, past the images, past the lily pads and the ripples on the surface, past what makes sense. My hands shake and my heart pounds. The archers man the walls in the middle of the night. But the self is much greater than the sum of its parts. It creates them.

Writing fantasy is my ultimate mirror, a way to explore the paradox of darkness and light through worlds, characters, places, and events. I tend to spin up stories that deal with the nature of the pool itself, beings and ideas that live in fairy tales, myths, and legends. Here are some variations on a theme.

Lone Wolf, by F.T. McKinstry In the Ostarin Mountains, it is said, only wizards and hunters know the true meaning of darkness. – From The Hunter’s Rede

This was the first line I put down in this tale. I didn’t really understand what it meant; I had to write the book before it came into focus (which it’s still doing, by the way). It’s a simple enough idea on the surface: a wizard brings light from the darkness; and a hunter—local vernacular for an assassin—brings light into the darkness. The void is the common denominator. But that tells us nothing about the void, let alone its true meaning.

It cost the hero of this story quite a bit of trouble to figure this out, and he bears the skills of both a hunter and a wizard. Perhaps that gave him an advantage, though his shortcomings were every bit as powerful. That’s usually how it goes. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

Like a cat, the heart sees in the dark where the mind is blind. This is where the simple explanations end. The heart is connected to everything. It knows every thread in the cosmic tapestry and one must learn, often under great distress, to hear the whispers, subtle as they are. Like a force of nature, the heart does not particularly care what structures are destroyed to clear the ground for seedlings. This happens individually and collectively, in real worlds and imaginary ones. The darkness is terrifying because we can’t see what’s happening there until it comes into the light.

The void is the source. And that is a mystery.

Stars and Sea, by F.T. McKinstry The forces of the sea give rise to imagination, which reflects them according to the nature and disposition of the perceiver. The sea itself is undifferentiated and without bias. – From The Gray Isles

The sea. What an awesome metaphor for the vastness and mystery of the unconscious self. As if the heart of every conscious being in the universe took shape in time and space to show us its nature. I focused on this without thinking, and came up with the fey progeny of a god and an immortal sea serpent, a child hidden in a mortal body and fraught with a restless heart indeed. It didn’t whisper. It clutched him by the head and shouted.

Here, metaphor and reality became one. A legend can abandon, isolate, or even kill. It isn’t real but it is and the sea, being a natural realm of mystery, passion and the perils of the unseen, can appear as anything: dreams, monsters, witches, assassins. Like the seemingly indifferent forces of the heart in its movement towards expression and illumination, the sea is bottomless.

When one is born of the sea, it will protect even as it destroys to bring forth life.

Echinacea, by F.T. McKinstry Gardens are made of darkness and light entwined. – From The Winged Hunter

A girl recalls her lost mother’s words in a moment of crisis, when her beautiful garden is frozen dead by a roguish wizard who disturbed the balance of the seasons. While writing that frightening scene, it occurred to me that the balance can only be disturbed—or preserved—because light and dark are one.

If you want to see this in action, watch nature. In full bloom, vibrant with life, a garden is a wonderful thing of the light. Look more closely and you’ll see the threads of darkness: a leaf chewed clean by a caterpillar, a flower withering after its bloom, a tender seedling returning to the earth because it didn’t get enough sun. Roots find the darkness; rain and decay nourishes them. The cat catches a bird. The big spider in the blackberry patch snares a dragonfly.

Soon this cycle expands, and a larger one includes it. Late in the summer, the shadows start to change. Like a sigh at the end of a long day, the heavy boughs on the trees and the flourishing canopies of brush and perennials turn inward with a kind of longing. These forces are implacable. Try to start a tulip bulb from dormancy, or place a cheery annual in a window over a long winter. You can hear them pine for the void—and likely as not, they’ll return to it despite your mothering, like souls needing rest in a cold grave.

In the fall, I clean out my gardens with sad, cold intent, like some votary of the Destroyer. It’s like weeding in the larger spiral. I take it all down into the dark and when the earth is bare, I grieve for a few days. But in the gray and white silence of a long winter, when my gardens are but a dream, I feel them waiting.