hawk & sable

HAWK AND SABLE

SYPNOSIS

SOMEONE'S BEEN PASSING ON GOVERNMENT INTEL TO THE ENEMY, AND THEY NEED TO BE STOPPED FAST.

And hence, Cirinique Diao, spy and debutante has been put on the case. With her fellow students at Lady Kuroki's School for Girls, they head to their native Sai with a top Arecian agent in tow. But this mole is elusive and skilled, leaving behind webs and webs of lies for them to untangle, and Ciri is left unsure what to do.

Laurence Dumont is equally perplexed. But when the body count starts adding up and the Bone Court of Sai becomes as treacherous and dangerous as the rumours claim, they'll have to pool together everything they have to prevent a global crisis that would change the world as they know it.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

AUTHOR'S NOTE

this is book 2 of the sable sisters series, but it can be read as a stand-alone! the sable sisters is the first series in the silk & steel chronicles universe. this book follows the sister of the protagonist of the first book, and events are linked.

hawk & sable takes place in a world that's a mash-up of my favourite historical periods in history. countries are based off ones in our own (sai = china, arecia = United Kingdom, etc) but what I write here does not reflect my personal political beliefs!! the note below explains this a bit more.

I hope you enjoy reading Hawk & Sable!!

PLEASE NOTE

this world is based closely off our real one, and this includes the history and politics of each country. while much of it remains similar, please note that it is not meant to be 100% accurate, and i have added, omitted and edited as i felt necessary, especially regarding topics i feel like i haven't done enough sufficient research to tackle/i do not believe i could portray accurately/i personally do not feel is necessary for my world. neither do i personally agree with all the "counterparts" of more modern political issues that the characters within this story believe in. hence, please do not go after me if you disagree with what my characters believe in!

another major part i changed in, is the titles/ranks of saian (chinese) characters. i've taken a heavy western influence for them, using the lord/lady of (location) template instead of the historically accurate chinese ones. one of the reasons for this is because the titles and ranks of ancient china were visibly explicitly for men (the chinese character for a baron is literally the character for 'male'), and i found it difficult to fit them into a story where many titled females exist. also, I'm taking inspiration mainly from the Qing dynasty, which has an extremely complicated ranking system.

as this is a story that heavily features espionage, the overlying arch of this entire series would involve a war between countries. hence, i've had no choice but to make one of the counterpart countries the general "enemy" of the story (melique). i do not view either the country it's based off or the people of the country poorly. i've done my best to mix multiple countries of various different cultures into one for melique in order to not offend anyone. currently, melique is geographically based off south american countries and inspired by meiji-era japan and french revolution and napoleonic-era france.

there is strong language and hints at explicit content within the story, though none of it is clearly shown. read at your own risk!

20/5/2021 - 6/7/2021
(completed)