It happened on the fourth day, in the meal hall, in the specific hour between the end of morning assessments and the beginning of afternoon training when the hall was full and the ambient noise was high enough that conversations at one table reached the edges of adjacent tables without meaning to.
The young man who started it was named Cael. Fenix had already developed a partial picture of him from three days of proximity: he was talented, he knew he was talented, and the knowing had settled into his manner in the way that kind of knowledge settled into people who were talented young and had not yet encountered the particular experience of being talented in a room full of people equally or more talented than themselves. He was not cruel. He was operating on assumptions about hierarchy that had not yet been tested in this particular environment, which made what he did less a calculated insult and more an accident of confidence.
