When I first imagined Caelen Duskryn, I knew exactly what he was supposed to be.
Dangerous.
Feared.
The Dark King beyond the veil—the fae ruler Elara had been warned about her entire life.
He was supposed to walk onto the page carrying every terrible story the human lands had ever whispered about him.
And he did.
The problem was that Caelen apparently had absolutely no intention of staying the man I had planned.
The more I wrote him, the more I realized there was something underneath all that darkness. Not softness, exactly. Caelen would probably object to that word.
But loyalty.
Grief.
A vicious sort of devotion.
And a man who had spent years allowing an entire world to believe the worst of him because sometimes being feared was more useful than being understood.
That changed the story.
Because A Crown of Thorned Fate stopped being a story about a woman discovering that the monster wasn’t quite as monstrous as she’d been told.
It became a story about who gets to decide who the monster is in the first place.
Elara enters the fae lands believing she understands the difference between light and darkness. Between good and evil. Between the people she should fear and the people she should trust.
Caelen destroys that belief simply by existing.
And I think that’s part of why I fell so completely in love with writing him.
He wasn’t the villain.
But he wasn’t secretly the shining hero, either.
He’s possessive. Arrogant. Ruthless when he needs to be. He makes decisions for Elara that infuriate her—and sometimes infuriated me while I was writing them. He carries centuries of anger, responsibility, and loss behind a carefully controlled exterior.
And yet, when Caelen loves, he loves with everything he has.
There was something incredibly fun about watching Elara slowly realize that the creature she’d been taught to fear might be the one person in this world who would burn it all down to keep her safe.
Especially because Caelen knew something she didn’t.
Their story had begun long before she ever crossed the boundary.
Long before she knew his name.
And long before either of them understood what the Thornbound mark between them truly meant.
By the time I reached the end of A Crown of Thorned Fate, Caelen wasn’t remotely the character I’d first imagined.
He was better.
And now that I’ve started Book Two?
Let’s just say the Dark King still has a few secrets left.
— K.C. Hawthorne
From behind the veil, exclusively for the Thorn Court Archives.
