Oct 23, 2021
To build a little off of Sharpedon's comments, the vaguery feels intentional to me because they exist in both the first and latter portion of the chapter in differing extents.
The opening portion lacks specifics, as Sharpedon noted, but I think I sense a sort of agreement between the narration and the character. The character is ruminating, asking themselves existential questions ("What are expectations anyway?") that are so big they almost can't be attached gracefully to a single moment—at least not in a prologue chapter when there's not yet a foundation to build meaning on.
The latter portion of the chapter offers the reader more grip, but holds off and obfuscates some too. That spiral rainstorm shaped like candy preceded the girl with plum-colored eyes so immediately that I at first took it as her calling card, only for that to be disproven later—a fair exploitation of a reader's connection-drawing circuits. Speaking of that character, I don't think we got her name in this chapter (we get a couple others') and she is announced as the "main protagonist of this segment" a touch before the reader sees her or her first action: "bolted at an unnatural scene". At least once the narration is explicitly uncertain, when it states the spell she is casting "seemed to be" high-tier.
All this points to the story holding the reader at arm's length for a moment, then a little longer. And for a prologue, I think that works. I don't write many prologues, but most of the ones I've read and liked *bode*. This prologue, from its mentions of changed reality and ending world to the crystal on the character wilting in front of us—it all bodes ill.
