Blackbird Column
Hello Crackers, are you well? The year seems to be flying along briskly, leaving me more unorganised than usual, but here I am, straining the brain to write some words down to entertain. Easter is fast approaching also, so first…...
Category TIFAM Archive
Forever Drawn:A Day with the White Feather
There’s a kind of hush in the troughlands of Fiorbhia Farm when the dew clings still to the grass, before the sun decides if it’ll bake or bless the day. And there I stood, half a ghost, half a child…...
Chanjion
Animosity between Tevaller and Chanjion began when a Tevaller King had a vision of a serpent people putting nations in chains, believed to be the Chanjion. The Tevaller began occupying Chanjion land thereafter. Chanjion had no army, and at the…
A Bow Drawn Between Two Worlds
There are films that do not begin with a title screen. They begin with a feeling. A quietness. A scent. A strange shift in the weight of the moment that tells you—you’re no longer here. You’ve crossed into somewhere else.…...
Aleksander Wat and Japanese Archery
Japanese Archery By Aleksander Wat (in Marcin Malek poetical interpretation) 1The hand to the bowstring speaks:Bend to me, yield.The bowstring to the hand replies:Strike bold, be steeled.The bowstring whispers to the shaft:O arrow, flee!The arrow to the bowstring calls:Unshackle me!The…
The Limits of Precision: How Much Tuning Does an Archer Really Need?
Precision has long been the archer’s silent companion, lingering in the spaces between breath and release. The draw is steady, the fingers poised on the string, the arrow ready to carve its path through the air. And yet, as much…...
Germany at Full Draw
There is a moment before the shot, when the world folds into silence, taut as the string between limb and nock. It is not hesitation. It is not doubt. It is the brief, unbearable stillness before intent becomes action, before…...
Arrows Across the 38th Parallel
There are places where history does not settle, where time folds in on itself, leaving wounds that never scar over. Korea is such a place. A land split not by nature, nor by the will of its people, but by…
Phantoms Draw, Shadows Release
The world I grew up in was not built for dreaming. It was a place of long queues and short tempers, where the winters stretched on like unfinished sentences, and the summers were brief, almost apologetic interruptions of heat and…
The Forgotten Bastion: Jean de Brosse and the Silence of History
I don’t remember when exactly. Could’ve been Lyon. Or Toulouse. Maybe Montpellier. It hardly matters now, except for the sound of rain. A persistent, whispering sort, seeping into the bones of an evening too worn to protest. I had been…
War of the Feathers
When a holy beast is slain by a rogue and so-called Maytoni prince retribution comes fast for the Maytoni nation. Their neighbours, the Xellcarrians, once bonded allies, are seeking blood as recompense.
Royalism is akin to heresy within Maytoni, going against their values of equality and equity - but this hardly stops families with bloodlines rooted in lost riches and prestige.
As the prelude to total war plays out on the Mayne Peninsula, Evander Penrose of the Maytoni Summiteers, elite archers, finds himself in unofficial command. He understands the contrived origins of the conflict, and wants the so-called prince handed over. Yet with the preparator in flight, and thirty thousand Xellcarrians on the horizon, Evander must hold off annexation, against six to one odds, whilst doing everything he can to prevent further escalation.
Yet the Xellcarrians are not his true enemy, as the Maytoni pro-royalist elements seek to ensure bloody total war erupts to ensure the resurgence of their own power.
For anyone who has read The Phoenix Archer, the name Evander Penrose and the War of the Feathers will be recognisable. This is his story about a defining event which has a profound effect on his character in The Phoenix Archer follow up, Orion's Legacy.
Curwood and May: The Worlds They Wrote
There’s a weight to words when they are written by those who have never touched the landscapes they paint, yet summon them with such clarity you’d swear they had walked the paths themselves. Karl May never set foot in the…...
Ishi The Last of The Yashi…
It’s a strange thing, to draw a bow and feel the pull of something older than time itself—a quiet understanding between hand, string, and arrow. I think about that often, about how archery is less about hitting a target than…
The Archer’s Guide to the Unspoken Essentials
The wind came from the west, carrying with it the ghost of winter—damp, cold, full of the smell of leaf rot and something older, something that lingers in the hedgerows before the blackthorn blooms. I stood at the edge of…...
Andrew’s 20 Questions #27 John Playdon
Hello John, welcome to this interview process and I am thankful to you for doing this as these interviews are becoming more and more popular for our readers.You always look cool with bow in hand, the shades if its sunny,…...
Click, Stabilize, Obey: The Rise of the Machine-Archer
Smack My Controversy column Back in the day, the archer was alone with his bow (it was an intimate relationship) between the man and his tool, the same sheer connection bound him to his quiver of arrows and the importance…...
Blackbird Column
Hello, Crackers and Archery enthusiasts! I hope you are well. So, did any of you get to the Setu Arena for the recent IFAF National Indoor Championships..?I was there, and I must say that it was awesome and a great…...
The Arrows That Sang Against Steel: The Spanish Conquest and the Vanishing Echo of Indigenous Archery
You never forget the first book that cuts you. The one that leaves a wound, not in flesh, but in the quiet, unguarded place where thoughts sleep before they wake to meaning. Mine was a battered volume on the The…...
A Window and a Mirror
There was a time when the world was easier to understand. When the grainy flicker of Soviet cinema could paint the world not as it was, but as it ought to be. And in those darkened halls, amid the scratchy…...
DWild Sinusoid Limbs
Sinusoid limbs are multi-cam patented limbs by Davide Vicini from Genoa in Italy. Davide worked for many years as a naval carpenter, where he learnt about the different characteristics of various woods, fibreglass and carbon. This coupled with the fact…...