The cafeteria's warmth had barely faded when a ripple of whispers began to swell again. The Hall of Drafts thrummed now—not from hunger, but from something sharper: competition.
Darius lounged at a long table, the center of his small, smug universe. His followers clustered close, enjoying the afterglow of yesterday's dominance. Philip sat near him, jaw tight, nursing that wet-plate sting.
"You know," Darius said loudly enough for the nearest benches to hear, "this place will quickly learn who matters. Talent, influence—some of us were born privileged to win."
A few boys chuckled. A few girls rolled their eyes. The statement was meant to steady his reign—but it sounded like a dare to anyone who disliked arrogance.
Someone in the back of the hall threw a glance, then a voice slipped out: "Prove it, then. Show us that talent beats truth."
Darius's eyes snapped up, hunting for an easy target. "Fine," he said. "A duel. Right now. The Writer's Flame. A hundred words. Five minutes. Whoever's words burn truer, wins."
The Hall of Drafts tightened. Instructor Renaldo Hale stepped forward from the doorway, expression unreadable behind rimless glasses. He looked from Darius to the crowd, then to the empty desks.
"If you insist on theatre, do it properly," Renaldo said. "Five minutes. A hundred words. No theatrics. You write; I judge."
Darius's grin widened. "I'll pick my opponent." He scanned the room looking for submission, not talent—a show, not danger.
His gaze landed on Aiden Cross—not as a deliberate selection but because Aiden's steady posture made him impossible to ignore. Aiden sat with his notebook closed, hands folded, eyes calm. He didn't beg attention. He merely existed in a way that drew it.
Darius called, pride in his voice as if naming a lesser thing. "You there. Stand up. Show the hall you're worth noticing."
Aiden looked up. For a moment he only measured the room—then he rose and walked forward. He did not swagger. He did not shout. He walked as someone who had thought it through and accepted whatever consequence would come.
He had been watching Darius for days, scanning the boy's postures and the way his followers fell in line. He had watched how privilege disguised itself as destiny. He could have refused—he could have stepped away—but he had chosen this to expose arrogance with craft rather than anger.
The benches arranged themselves into a ring of faces. Pens were ready. The two boys sat at the forward desks, paper before them. Darius's hand trembled for a heartbeat—more from pride than fear.
"Write on 'The Writer's Flame,'" Renaldo said. "Five minutes. One hundred words. Begin."
Darius attacked the paper. His words came loud, ambitious, full of flourish and polish. He wrote grand phrases about quills that scorched the sky, lines intended to dazzle and intimidate. He wrote the kind of sentences that asked for applause.
Aiden wrote quietly. His strokes were careful, pared down. He wrote of the small light that survives when everything else goes out; of the little voice that keeps a child warm in a cold house; of the kind of flame that does not roar for itself but for another's way home. No grand metaphors—only precise, honest images that landed like quiet truths.
The bell in Renaldo's hand cut their pens off. He collected the papers with a careful hand and read Darius's aloud first. The room listened; some applauded. Darius looked triumphant—certain of his superiority.
Then Renaldo read Aiden's.
A hush fell that felt like a held breath. No applause followed the words—only a feeling that had nothing to do with spectacle: people shifted in their seats as if some unseen corner had been opened in their chests. The image of a hand reaching through heat to give a child a crust of bread seemed to reverberate, small and insistent.
When Renaldo folded the pages and looked up, his voice carried the weight of judgement and surprise. "Both showed skill. One sought command; the other remembered what it meant to care. The winner of this duel is Aiden Cross."
The hall responded in waves—shock, then a chorus of questions and a small, growing chant: "Aiden! Aiden!" Darius's face drained of color. The easy throne he'd been sitting on felt suddenly unstable.
Philip's anger flared hot and uncontrolled. He lurched from his seat, hands clenching, eyes burning with a new, raw humiliation at Darius's expense. Darius, hands white-knuckled at the desk, snapped out a laugh that sounded like breaking branches. "Rigged," he barked. "A trick."
Renaldo did not reply to the accusation. "A duel shows you what your ink can do," he said softly. "It is not about lineage or volume. The academy rewards truth that reverberates. Remember that."
---
At the far edge, Angel whispered to Angelina, her eyes bright with a new hunger.
"Who is he?" she asked. "Aiden Cross—did you see how he wrote?"
Angelina shrugged, fascinated. "He's not showy. He writes like he's… remembering things you didn't know you lost."
Luther slid into the bench beside Francis and grinned. "Saw that, huh? Some of us knew something was up. Talent isn't all brags and banners. You just saw it." He nodded toward Aiden. "He's not a boy to sleep on."
Clinton, recovering, gave Francis a crooked grin. "If I keep eating like this, maybe I'll get an inspiration someday." He elbowed Francis playfully. "Teach me that trick of being spare with words."
Francis only smiled — small and private. He watched Aiden, watching Darius, and realized the Academy's hierarchy could bend. That thought felt like a fresh page.
---
When the hall thinned, Francis approached Aiden where he sat back at his desk, steady in the eye of the new storm.
"You could've walked away," Francis said quietly. "Why accept? You had the advantage in choosing silence."
Aiden met his gaze without surprise. "I've been watching Darius for some time," he said, voice low. "His arrogance builds walls. I accepted because I wanted to show that volume doesn't equal truth. He needed that lesson more than the rest of us did." He paused, and there was no bitterness in him—only the kind of calm that came from certainty. "If they learn it early, perhaps they'll write better for it."
Francis considered that. "You didn't humiliate to humiliate," he said slowly. "You wrote to correct."
Aiden's half-smile was almost invisible. "Correcting, yes. Not destroying." He closed his notebook with a soft snap. "Words should form people, not fracture them."
Clinton, who had been hovering nearby, grinned and slapped Francis on the shoulder. "Well played," he said. "I can barely string a sentence right now, but I applauded. That was brilliant—quiet strength."
Luther, watching from a bench, gave Aiden a quick respectful nod. "We'll be hearing his name from now on." He grinned at Francis, "And yours, if you keep being stoic like that."
Across the hall, Clara's eyes glittered. Darius's grin had scratched, and where there's a scratch, clearly a plan can form. Darius called his followers close, voice low, cold—no outburst now, only strict business.
"We'll respond," Philip promised through clenched teeth. "He won't get away with this."
But the hall had changed in that small, dangerous way that comes with a new power recognized. Aiden sat back, not triumphant but composed, as if he had only turned the page.
Francis watched him, feeling a corner of something shift inside—danger, perhaps, but also possibility. The Seven Reviews stood ahead like a line of gates, and a new name had just been etched onto the map of competition.
As students drifted back toward their rooms, the whisper trailed them: the Academy was no longer predictable. Rivalries would flare, alliances would test, and the ink that bound them would soon be the measure of their fate.