Reincarnated as the Last Dragon Egg-Chapter 28: Darians Return

The moon above Emberwatch was unusually dim that night.

Not clouded. Not hidden.

Dim — as if something had drained its light.

Kaela stood alone atop the tower, her senses sharpened. The Flame in her veins, a gift from her time with Darian, trembled as if recoiling from something vast, unknown, and dangerously close.

A storm was coming. Not of weather — but of word.

---

Far away, in a place that did not exist on maps, the Librarian dipped his quill into ink made from the forgotten.

He sat at a desk carved from the ribs of an ancient beast, inside a dome stitched from the dreams of dying gods.

Before him lay the Manuscript of the Void — the last untouched page in a realm Darian had sealed.

Until now.

"Creation was imperfect," the Librarian whispered, quill hovering above the page. "Perfection lies not in freedom... but structure."

He began to write.

And with each stroke, realities shifted.

In Emberwatch, a child’s name vanished from their mother’s tongue.

In the Isles of Quen, the sun rose in the west and set twice.

And in the ruins where Isen had first glimpsed the First Flame, a crack opened in the stone under her feet.

Not a rift — a rewrite.

---

Isen screamed and jumped back as the ground split.

From the crack, tendrils of smoke curled upward, not made of fire or ash — but words. Letters. Inverted symbols that shimmered and swam like serpents.

"What is this?" she gasped.

The Librarian appeared behind her like a shadow cast from no light.

"It is your gift," he said softly. "Or your curse."

"I don’t want it," she replied.

"You don’t get to choose what you’re made of," he said. "Only what you do with it."

The symbols coiled around her arm. She tried to tear them off, but they burned with memory. Her memory. Things she never lived — but remembered.

Battles she never fought. Flames she never summoned. Faces she had never seen — yet knew.

A man with gold-red eyes. A voice that whispered through time. Darian.

She fell to her knees, overwhelmed.

"Help me," she choked.

The Librarian knelt beside her.

"I already am."

---

Deep within the sealed Flamecore, Darian’s eyes snapped open.

He stood amidst the memory of the Seventh Cycle, and everything around him pulsed violently — the threads of his creation being undone.

"She’s being rewritten," he whispered. "He’s using my spark to unmake what I sealed."

The shadow beside him finally spoke.

"You left it unfinished. That’s why she exists. That’s why he exists."

"I didn’t leave it unfinished," Darian said bitterly. "I gave the world a chance to write its own end."

"You gave them freedom. But now freedom has been twisted into design."

The mirror before him — the one connected to Neriya — began to shimmer. He saw her, faintly, meditating in the Cradle of Echoes. Then her eyes opened, and she stared directly into the mirror.

> "Come back," she whispered. "Please, Darian. She needs you. We need you."

Darian clenched his fist.

"Then I will return. But not as the Cycleborn..."

He stepped forward.

"...as the Rewrite."

---

The next morning, Isen awoke beneath a tree she didn’t remember lying under.

The Librarian was gone.

Her arm still bore the swirling symbols, now faded and embedded beneath the skin like a second vein.

Birds flew backward overhead.

The sun pulsed like a heartbeat.

And in the distance, people screamed — not in pain, but in confusion.

She rose.

A voice echoed faintly in her mind — not the Librarian’s, not her own.

> "Isen... hold on. I’m coming."

Her eyes widened.

"Darian?"

But the voice was gone.

And in its place... a flicker of the Seventh Flame.

Burning again.

Just barely.

Enough.

For twelve years, the world had only spoken Darian’s name in reverence. In temples, in war songs, in the bedtime stories of children who believed the Cycleborn was watching over them like a distant star.

But now... he was returning.

And stars don’t weep when they fall.

They burn.

---

The Cradle of Echoes groaned as Neriya stepped back from the mirror.

The surface had cracked.

Not from damage — but from effort.

The moment she’d whispered his name, the weave of memory had started to pull apart, threads rewinding in real time.

And then she saw it.

A hand pressed to the other side of the mirror — steady, calloused, familiar.

She exhaled shakily. "You’re here."

The hand clenched into a fist. The mirror pulsed. The air rippled.

Behind her, the chamber doors burst open.

Kaela ran in, followed closely by Solin.

"Something’s wrong," Kaela said immediately. "Flame-touched are convulsing across the city. The Stormborn in training—some of them levitated off the ground and passed out mid-flight. It’s like the Cycles are reacting to—"

She stopped.

Her eyes fell on the mirror.

Then widened.

"...Darian."

The mirror shattered.

Not into shards.

Into embers.

They floated in the air, glowing symbols burning softly in the dark.

From the center, a figure stepped through.

Tall. Leaner than before. Silver dusted his temples. His cloak shimmered between flame and void, storm and stone.

He looked exhausted.

But alive.

Darian Valen stepped back into the world.

---

Kaela was the first to move, stepping toward him.

He didn’t smile.

Not yet.

"I didn’t want to come back," he said, his voice rough with years of silence.

"Then why are you here?" Kaela asked.

"Because I made a mistake."

---

Meanwhile, across the far continent, Isen wandered the fields beyond Emberwatch — lost, shaken, and unsure if she was dreaming or if the world was.

The people she passed didn’t recognize her. A few stared at her arm, where the symbols still shifted beneath her skin. Most simply avoided her.

She wasn’t a threat. Not yet.

But she wasn’t normal either.

At a roadside inn, a blind old woman placed a bowl of stew before her.

"You feel like a storm with no sky," the woman murmured. "What are you, girl?"

Isen didn’t answer.

Because she didn’t know.

That night, the dream came again.

The Amphitheater. The First Flame. Darian’s eyes on hers.

But this time — he spoke.

> "They’re rewriting you."

> "Who?"

> "The Librarian. He’s twisting the spark I left behind. Turning it into a thread in his own story."

> "Why?"

> "Because if he controls you, he controls the future."

She looked down at her hands.

> "Then what do I do?"

> "Find me."

She jolted awake.

The symbols on her arm had changed again.

One of them now glowed — and it was a name.

Darian.

---

Back in Emberwatch, Solin stared at Darian like he might vanish at any moment.

"You really came back through memory? Through the Cradle?"

"I didn’t come back," Darian corrected. "The Cycles pulled me. Because they’re scared. Because something is bending them from the inside."

Kaela crossed her arms. "The Librarian?"

Darian nodded once.

"He’s using my spark. My failure. That girl... she isn’t just a piece of me. She’s a door. If he fully opens her — the Seventh Cycle falls."

Solin’s face darkened. "And the Unwritten returns."

Neriya’s shadow hissed.

Darian looked up, gaze cutting through the room like fire through fog.

"I have to find her."

---

Far to the west, the Librarian sat in a temple of silence.

Before him knelt six figures in cloaks of ink and ash.

Each one bore a mark across their chest — old Cycle sigils, warped and melted.

Failed bearers.

Erased, then rewritten.

"Prepare," the Librarian said softly. "She is awakening."

One of them hissed, "And the Cycleborn?"

The Librarian smiled.

"I wrote his return too."