Prologue:
Empasse -~*~
The old man arrived before the rest. His face was tired and his clothes had been worn by Time, but he smiled widely when he saw his old friend.
‘I am not dead,’ the old man said. It did not sound like a question.
His friend smiled. He shook out his sleeves and embraced the old man, and together they laughed and cried for what seemed to be a little while, but was actually a hundred years. Their faces shone, so brightly that even the moon stopped in her tracks to look with awe upon their happiness. It had been a long time, she appeared to be thinking. It had been a long time since any Real Happiness had been seen here.
‘You are not dead, old friend!’ the old man’s friend cried. ‘But welcome, welcome back! And shall you stay this time?’
The old man looked over his shoulder, at the bright dashes of colour that had spun like shackles around his feet mere seconds ago. Or, what had seemed to be mere seconds ago, but had actually been a thousand years. The old man turned back toward this world, the world his friend inhabited, and watched as it slid in and out of view. The trees at the bottom of the Empassian hills wavered in the night’s illusionary landscape, like the moon glinting off water, or candles in a hurricane. Behind the trees, the snow caps of the Ellysian mountains glinted white, but even those swam hazily in the man's vision. He squinted. It was like looking at still-lighted fireflies floating towards a watery burial.
The old man inhaled deeply and the nostalgia lingered on his lips. The grass, the smell of dew that pricked his nostrils, the jasmine and the dusky scent of summer—they hailed his vulnerable senses. They made him want to stay.
Behind him, the portal opened and closed, like the mouth of a whale. Within it, the man heard the cacophony he had left behind, and the music of what lay ahead. The sounds collided in the portal, not like thunderclouds, but like nails that clicked and clacked in morse-code on the man’s skull. His friend looked at him expectantly.
'You will?' he pressed eagerly. 'Stay?' His eyes were alight with happiness. 'Stay?' he repeated. 'Please, please stay.'
But the old man simply looked sad. The hands clutching the leopard-patterned briefcase shook like skeleton trains rattling down a gauntlet. His face looked like it was raining: pockmarked, veiny, and just a little bit more scarred than it had been seventy years ago. It was a severe face. A kind face.
A tear dripped off the end of his nose.
‘I must go on,’ he said quietly. ‘The journey cannot end here. I promised.’
There was silence. Owls hooted in the distance. Female nightingales sang. The old man’s friend grasped him by the hand, tears running down his pale, young face. ‘Then do not let me keep you, friend, but promise me that you will return, once more, before you die. It is a reality that causes me to ache every night, for you shall grow old, and I shall not, although I have lived longer and am older than you will ever be. Come, and stay, and let this not be your last goodbye.’
The old man’s head dipped. ‘I cannot promise, yet I will try, old friend. I have left many people behind whom I never had the chance to say goodbye to, and my stopping here was chance, but … but now that I am here … you must promise me—if anyone stops by here, and they claim to know me, and carry my name, lead them on, guide them, and teach them all that I could not.’
‘I promise you, old friend. And do you—do you promise? Will you try?’
‘Aye,’ the old man whispered, his brown eyes glassy and shining with tears. ‘I will try.’
He stepped back, into the doorway through Time, and scarcely had he raised his hand to wave goodbye that Time carried him away.
The old man’s friend sat staring at the grassy knob where the portal had stood. He sat there for what appeared to be a minute, but was actually ten-thousand years. Eventually, he stood up, and the wind ran its fingers through his dark, wavy hair.
‘Goodbye, Sam,’ he said. With a last, lingering look at the grassy knob, Trevor Hampshley turned away and, with the moon looking curiously down at him, walked towards home.
It goes without saying—but for the sake of posterity, it must be mentioned—that the old man never came back.
End of chapter
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140,727 Literary Works • 673,681 Reviews
Okay, as promised I’m here to leave you some reviews. I may not have a ton to say about each chapter, as they were fairly short and also because I typically only comment on general things rather than small details. You know, unless you’re in your final draft and want that kind of review.
That said, I have so little to say about this prologue that I might actually bring up some of the little things. But to begin with:
I wanted to tell you I enjoyed your prologue pretty well, which may not sound like much of an accomplishment but is actually a big deal. Generally speaking, I hate prologues. Not an exaggeration. I feel like they don’t add much—they’re either an opportunity for a huge infodump of backstory because the author feels like the readers that information but doesn’t know how to fit it into the story, or else they’re a cheap way to hook readers because the first chapter isn’t exciting enough.
Your prologue interested me, though. You had a lot of good description, like this.
You also visited an interesting scene—an old man passing through Time, not exactly dead but not exactly alive, either, as it seems—without throwing us into the midst of action before we had any characters to care about. You didn’t spend your time going on and on about some backstory that might be useful at some point later in the story; nor did you use a scene from later in the story to spice things up. Instead, you hinted at the main plot of the story without giving too much away. The prologue also made a nice tie-in for the end of chapter two.
(For once I actually read all the chapters before reviewing any of them. Yay me.)
So, well done. I can’t think of higher praise I could give to someone’s prologue than to actually come right out and say I like it and don’t find it either dull or unnecessary. Hooray!
My only complaint is that you were a little heavy-handed on the similes. You had good similes—I never found myself thinking, “that just doesn’t make sense”—but there were a lot of them for so short a chapter. This is 787 words (minus my comments that I typed in there as I was reading so I wouldn’t forget my thoughts) and there are at least nine similes. Whoa. That’s not even counting the other types of figurative language you used.
It especially became noticeable and a bit grating in the instances where you supplied two similes for the prices of one.
In the first instance, I liked this because the two similes gave me different images—moonlight on water is sort of gentle and mysterious, while candles in a hurricane would flicker wildly out of control—and I felt like that was the kind of imagery you were going for in this strange setting. In the second, however, I felt it was unnecessary. The noise in the portal isn’t a known sound; the reader doesn’t have an association with it, so “like thunderclouds” isn’t an assumption on the reader’s part. It’s unnecessary to say “not like this sound.” Just tell us what it does sound like.
Anyway, I’d suggest cutting down to just two or three. You can choose the few strongest and keep those so they’ll pack more of a punch. In case you’re curious, here are my favorites.
This one is really close to the other one, but I chose these two because I thought the similes were most helpful in describing your odd setting. A note on that second one, though: you could delete “still-lighted,” because if you’re describing something as giving the impression of fireflies, your readers will probably assume you mean lit-up fireflies.
But you can always use your favorites instead, or ask other readers their opinions.
Pompadour! I'm heading through to try to review your newest installment of this piece, so I thought I'd drop a review here, first. My favorite part of this prologue is the sense of time that you weave with the repetition of phrases like "but it was actually ten-thousand years". Immediately, the reader gets a sense of how fluid time will be in this story, how comfortable this particular character is with that, and how far-reaching stories might be. Because we immediately identify with the "main" character in the scene, we have to take on the responsibility of being okay with taking so, so long to perform small, simple actions, knowing in our own reality that hundreds of generations will have lived and died in that space. In addition, we are familiar with the reality of a friendship, and how painful it is to be separated by time and space, so we feel the elation of the reunion. This interplay between unfamiliar reality and familiar sensations makes for an exciting, but calm, experience of this prologue.
If I had to make one suggestion, it would be to try to vary the way that Sam begs Trevor to stay. It seemed to me that he simply kept repeating "stay", but without reasoning or variation. In addition, after such gorgeous description, just saying that the moon looked "curiously" down on Trevor seems very lackluster! Bring the prose out strong to the last line, which is amazing and sets us up for the first chapter.
I loved this. Let me know if you have any questions or comments about my review.
Thanks,
Hannah
That was very interesting. So the old man is friends with Time? I want to read the next part to see what that was about. The man thought going through my head when I read all of this was "what was that about?" but in a way that makes me want to see more because it was good and I want to find out what it was about. Plus, this reminds me of the kind of stuff I used to like to read, I'm not sure what to call that stuff, but as I would be happy to read more that's good.
I love this. More pls
Hey there, yizhongt here to leave a review. Let me just start by saying that you got a good start to your story right here. The vocabulary you used in writing yout story is absolutely fantastic. The descriptions you give as well I'd equally well written. The story also flowed well and did not feel like a drag reading through it.
I didn't find any grammatical errors or spelling errors while reading through it. All in all, this was a good piece of work. Good job and keep writing!