Dec 21, 2021
That was quite a ride! I think your prologue deserves my full Good, Bad & Ugly treatment so here we go..
The Good:
This was a particularly well-written prologue. Your prose was clear and elegant, your world-building neat, your descriptions (particularly of the eggs and the castle) rich but not crammed with too many unnecessary details, and the names you devised well thought and quite original.
I also loved your Easter eggs / homages:
I sensed *quite* a few GoT themes, from Silverscale Castle itself (Dragonstone?), House Harker (House Targaryen?) and the five dragon eggs themselves. That Silverscale Castle was in the... sky (?!) was an unexpected surprise, and quite unlike Dragonstone ๐
Your persistent use of curly quotes (even if HF renders them diagonal rather than curly..) shows good typesetting, the โheart of the hearthโ bit was nice and, by and large, the โhigh fantasyโ sense is strong in this one :)
The Bad:
I think your prologue was unnecessarily spoiled by your synopsis and by the title itself. By disclosing that Silverscale will fall before we even started reading the prologue we were robbed of the surprise and shock of the fall itself, since we were 100% expecting it.
Perhaps that was by design, to have us wonder how / why / when it will fall while reading. Even so, personally I would have much preferred to be surprised and shocked over wondering what will happen to make Silvercastle fall.
The white-haired girl was earlier seen by Marea, not Blake.
Perhaps an โin media resโ beginning, starting with action but without disclosing too many details, would have worked better (I'm currently in the process of converting to โin media resโ the beginning my own novel) or perhaps not, I cannot be sure.
But I'm almost certain that naming your prologue Silverscale Castle (for instance) and keeping its fall under wraps in the synopsis would have been more effective.
The Ugly:
I know high fantasy is notoriously wordy but this is still a web novel platform, so I believe splitting this ~6,300-word beast into two (or three) shorter chapters would have been wise. There was a clear cut between your Marea and Blake sub-chapters for you to do that.
(my comment got quite long, so I'm not adding the editing tips for typos, errors etc that I spotted; if you want I can add them later in a short p.s. comment, I only spotted three).
