Hawkwind's Tale

Hawkwind was born a Feathyr: descendant of the wild griffins who ended a war by swearing a pact with the humans of Northnest. From birth she was raised to protect and defend the human royal family with her life, but she never expected she'd have to. For generations the tiny kingdom of Northnest, with its unique alliance with griffins, had been ignored or avoided by conquerors and villains, until now. The only griffin to escape the slaughter at the castle, with only four tiny human children, Hawkwind must flee for her life and theirs, but a lone griffin cannot raise helpless human children on her own. She turns her path the only direction she can, into the wilds, to seek others who descended from her ancestors: the griffins who did not join the Northnest pact but instead retreated into the deepest mountains-somewhere. With nothing but a lullaby and a legend to guide her, she must take the last of the Northnest children and find a way to keep them alive, to make a new home, until she can someday help them take back their kingdom. (Author's Note: this book's text was updated in 2016 to correct typos and a few minor continuity errors, so it is now better than ever!)
About the Author: Katherine A Smith was born in 1980. She grew up on the Mendocino Coast in California, USA. As a child, her pasttimes were art, writing, playing with both toy cars and toy horses, building models, and exploring the Jackson State Forest. In school she was a good student. She briefly played basketball, but devoted most of her energy to martial arts, particularly the style of American Parker Kenpo. She trained for ten years and was also an instructor for kids classes, only leaving to go to college in 1998. Katherine attended college for four years, and spent a fifth year on exchange. She graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Zoology. During college, without a martial arts studio to train at, she switched to dance, learning ballet, jazz, modern, and post-modern, and danced in a number of shows, including with the Blau Rhino Dance Company. She also performed as an actor and actor-dancer-singer, and worked behind the scenes as a tech, as needed. After college, she lived for two years in the San Francisco bay area: working, dancing, and teching theater shows, before returning to school. She graduated in 2006 with a Graduate Certificate in Scientific Illustration from the University of California Santa Cruz. The next year she spent as a graphic designer and illustrator for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, and then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked for two years, before being laid-off along with many others. Since then, she has returned to school yet again. She completed an intense one-year course in the Japanese language at Cornell University, and went tol live and work in Japan starting in the fall of 2010. In 2013, Katherine completed her exeperience teaching in Japan and returned to the US. She now lives again in the San Francisco bay area. She has been freelancing and job hunting since then, as well as working on her fifth fantasy-adventure book, a children's book, and a video game, among other hobbies. Katherine has always enjoyed art and writing. Above all, she likes making up and telling stories: via words, drawings, dance, song, or stagecraft; the telling of a story is the motivating force. She firmly believes that with positive thinking and tenacity, a person can change their life, and that in some universe, cats do indeed have wings.