Here is the revised chapter, same style and novel formatting:
A week passed, and when it did, Ivel was up before the sun.
He moved through the house with the barely contained energy of someone who had been waiting far too long for something and refused to wait a single moment more. By the time dawn had barely begun to grey the sky, he was already at the blacksmith's door — and knocking on it with considerably more force than the hour warranted.
"Who in the hell is knocking like that at this time of morning," Aldrius muttered to himself as he crossed the shop floor.
He pulled the door open with the full intention of making his displeasure known to whoever stood on the other side of it. He found a boy looking up at him with barely suppressed excitement written across every feature of his face.
Aldrius exhaled.
"Ah. It's you, Ivel." He stepped aside. "Come in. The gear should be ready — the sword is made from some of the best steel I could get my hands on, so if you'll let me explain the particulars of how it was forged I can tell you about the properties of the alloy I used and why I chose to balance the weight distribution toward the—"
The boy was gone.
Aldrius turned. Ivel had already crossed the shop, collected what was his, and was halfway out the door before the sentence had finished leaving Aldrius's mouth.
"Thanks, Aldrius!"
The door swung shut.
The old blacksmith stood alone in his shop for a moment. Then he sighed, shook his head, and went back to work — glad, at least, that the boy had been that eager for it.
Ivel laid everything out on his bed when he got home and stood back to look at it.
The katana was longer than anything he had carried before — a single edge where he was used to two, the blade drawing a clean, deliberate line from hilt to tip. It would take some adjustment. He could already feel the difference in how he would need to move with it, the angles that would have to shift, the habits that would need to be unlearned. He picked it up and turned it slowly in the morning light coming through the window.
The armor was black, supple as good leather and lighter than it had any right to be. He pressed his fingers into it, testing the give, and found it firm beneath the surface in a way that ordinary leather wasn't. He turned it over and checked the fit — and then held it against himself.
He got the size exactly right.
From a single look. Ivel found that quietly remarkable.
He dressed, buckled the armor into place, and went outside.
Standing in the open air with the katana at his side and the black armor fitted to his frame, he felt — for perhaps the first time — like the thing he was trying to become.
He was still standing there, somewhere between proud and distracted, when Leom's voice came from the doorway.
"Ivel. Inside. Breakfast."
He came in and took his seat at the table.
His sisters noticed the armor immediately.
He had known they would. He had hoped — briefly, against all available evidence — that they might simply say nothing. He closed his eyes for a moment and offered a quiet, private appeal to whatever forces governed fairness in the world.
The forces did not respond favorably.
"Aw," said Aniya, in the voice she reserved specifically for small animals and things she found unbearably endearing. "Look at him in his little armor."
"What are you going to do," Elia added, "defeat the creatures with your cuteness?"
Ivel looked at Leom across the table with the expression of a person seeking rescue from a situation that was entirely beyond them.
Leom was smiling.
"I'm glad you got your gear in time," he said, which was not rescue at all.
Ivel blinked. "In time for what?"
Leom set down his utensils and seemed to consider how to begin. "I haven't mentioned it yet, have I." It wasn't quite a question. "This year, we've been invited to the capital ball."
Ivel stared at him. "The capital?"
"The royal family extends the invitation to Reverends and above each year. Something of a gathering. A formal one."
"When do we leave?"
"Today," Leom said. Then, as an afterthought: "Actually... now, more or less."
Even Elia and Aniya looked up from their plates at that.
What followed was the particular chaos of a household that has been given no warning and very little time. Bags were gathered, things were found and then lost and then found again, and within the hour a carriage stood waiting outside the house that Ivel had never seen before — gold filigree worked into the wood in long curling patterns, the timber itself warm and deep-grained, the kind that comes from trees that have been growing longer than most things have names. The horses were magnificent. Dark as good ink, with long clean lines of hair running the length of their manes, their legs carrying the quiet power of animals that know their own strength and feel no need to demonstrate it.
Ivel stood and looked at them for a moment longer than was probably necessary.
Then the family climbed in, and they were moving.
The teleporter to the capital sat inside a city, and the city was the first one Ivel had ever seen.
He had known, in an abstract way, that cities were large. He had not understood, until the carriage passed beneath the towering gates set into the stone walls surrounding it, what large actually meant when applied to a place. The gates alone dwarfed everything he had grown up around. And beyond them — people. Hundreds of them, moving through streets lined with market stalls and storefronts and the kind of layered, overlapping noise that only exists where a great many lives are being lived in close proximity to one another.
Above the rooftops, towers rose. And above the towers — floating, vast, held aloft by the slow and constant pull of ambient magic — structures that had no business being in the sky hung suspended in the air as though gravity were a suggestion they had chosen not to follow.
There was too much to take in and no time to take it in properly. Leom moved the family through the streets with purpose, navigating toward the teleportation platform with the ease of someone who had done this many times before. The platform itself was quieter than the surrounding city — the people waiting on it were fewer, and they carried themselves differently. The kind of differently that came from being accustomed to power.
Leom paid for passage, and they stepped onto the platform.
The sensation, when it came, was unlike anything Ivel had a word for. His body disaggregated — or seemed to — and he felt himself pulled in every direction at once while simultaneously remaining perfectly still. It lasted only a moment, and then it stopped, and he was somewhere else entirely, standing on a different platform, blinking in light that felt marginally different from the light he had been standing in a heartbeat ago.
He stood very still for a moment afterward, waiting for the rest of himself to catch up.
The capital was larger than the city.
He hadn't been sure that was possible.
Buildings stretched in every direction as far as he could see — houses and markets and towers and wide stone streets full of people and movement and sound. Every surface seemed to breathe with mana, faint and constant, the way certain places hum without making any noise. Above the skyline, enormous balloons drifted slowly through the air, trailing cables and shadow.
"A lot to take in, isn't it," Leom said.
Ivel nodded and said nothing, because there was nothing that would have been adequate.
They walked. Leom led them through the capital's streets to a manor set back from the road — well kept, unhurried-looking, the kind of building that didn't need to announce itself. A servant met them at the door before they had fully reached it, inclining her head in greeting.
"Welcome, Revenant Leom."
Ivel's brow creased slightly. He turned the word over.
Revenant.
He had always heard Leom referred to as a Reverend — had assumed, without giving it much thought, that this was simply what Leom was. He glanced at his sisters to see if the correction had registered. Neither of them reacted. They moved through the door as though nothing out of the ordinary had been said.
Maybe she misspoke, Ivel thought. Maybe she meant Reverend.
He stepped inside after his family and let the thought settle at the back of his mind — quiet, unresolved, waiting.