Commander Thorn Novels & Stories

The echo’s power gave us a momentary breathing room. But it did not last. Thorn charged straight toward the central tent. His massive body thundered across the clearing, shadow chains lashing out from his hands like living whips. They cracked through the air, wrapping around more loyal wolves and dragging them screaming toward the still-open portion of the giant portal. Thorn’s voice boomed across the battlefield, full of dark triumph. “The echo is calling me. Give me the child now or I tear this camp apart piece by piece.”

They had bypassed the outer wards, knowing exactly where to go. “They didn't touch the main sarcophagi,” Draken muttered, his fingers tracing a jagged fracture in the heavy iron threshold. His jaw was locked tight, his golden eyes scanning the dark corners of the tomb. My attention remained on Thorne. The normally unshakeable High Commander looked pale under the torchlight. His posture was rigid, his fists clenched so hard his leather gloves creaked. This was the man who executed royal orders without blinking, yet looking at the broken seals of his family's final resting place, a raw, bleeding vulnerability showed through his armor. It was the first time I had ever seen him genuinely shaken.

Dorian finished grimly, "he's planning to tear open again, deliberately, from somewhere Kade never anticipated needing to defend." We left the garrison the following morning, careful to maintain the appearance of a routine inspection concluding normally, though the tension of what we now knew made every farewell exchange with Thorne's soldiers feel like walking past something dangerous that hadn't yet noticed we'd seen through its disguise. Thorne himself saw us off personally, and standing close to him for the first time since that night in Kade's study, I understood immediately what Bryn had been trying to describe. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't obviously wrong in any way a stranger might

You’re a goddamn coward, a voice inside me sneered. But it was safer this way. Better she hated me now, before things got tangled. Before I ruined her like I’d ruined everything else. I was about to force myself back into the endless stack of paperwork when my phone buzzed sharply across the desk. Dominic. I answered immediately. “Talk.” His voice was grim. “We’ve got a problem.” Of course we did. I leaned back in the chair, pinching the bridge of my nose. “How bad?” “Bad enough. Her old man — Blake — he’s moving faster than we thought. Put out word last night to some of the nastier crews in town. Offering a payout for whoever brings her back alive.”

It felt impossibly light, no thicker than a shoelace, yet she knew its true nature. Commander Thorne had first presented the armory's options when she took a tour of the pack house earlier on—swords, knives, and even a compact kinetic pistol, even though she wondered why creatures such as wolves would have such need for such weapon since they are not easily felled by such weapons. She had dismissed the cord as a trinket,a fancy piece of rope for a training dummy. But Thorne? He wasn't fazed. He’d simply dropped the end of the filament onto a steel table, then pressed a small stud on his gauntlet.

His uniform bore crimson insignia stitched into both sleeves, marking him as an elite. But it was his eyes that truly marked him—piercing gold with rings of silver around the irises, like a wolf in mid-shift. They scanned the students not with curiosity or kindness, but with precision. Measuring. Testing. Judging. Professor Aerik Thorn. Rian had read about him briefly in Mira’s research. Former general. Once led one of the Alpha Council’s black-ops units in the Border Wars. Rumored to have once fought an entire pack of rogues on his own during the siege of Varenth Hollow. No one knew how many wolves he’d killed in his lifetime, only that he’d stopped counting.

They were hundreds even, I had no idea. Thorne might be a crazy ass villain but he was able to gather this much rogues together in one place and I commended him for that. He was an evil leader but he was not necessarily a bad one. Though his cause was shit, he was at least determined I’ll give him that. I had heavy chains wrapped around me, weighing me down. The silver was burning me. Everything hurt. Thorne took out a dagger, “Comrades it is finally time. What our ancestors failed to do, we do tonight!!!”