Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies has been out for about a month, and many of you have already taken the plunge. I think I can venture into this topic without coughing up too many spoilers. That said, if you’ve yet to join the Tales of Ciel party and consider yourself a purist, minor spoilers for Book 1 to follow.

The prologue is one of the most misunderstood tools in the novelist’s kit. New writers seem to like including them, even though they don’t fully understand their function. The truth is right there in the Latin: pro logos–before the story. A prologue is a contextualizing scene that takes place before and apart from the arc of the narrative. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but your book does not need to start with a prologue. That might sound obnoxious coming from me, because I frequently start my books with a prologue, but I do it with intention.

The easiest way to break this down is to start with what isn’t a prologue. 

• If your first scene takes place concurrently with the timeline of your narrative or far in the future, it isn’t a prologue. 
• If your first scene launches the primary arc of your narrative or, in some cases, actually includes the inciting incident, it isn’t a prologue, either. It’s Chapter One.

Consider the prologue of Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies. This scene plays out far from the Zephyr Archipelago, from the point of view of a tertiary character, Hekuba Klaeda, who does not appear again until the epilogue. The scene feels disconnected from the rest of the novel and only becomes more relevant as the trilogy develops, but it serves a few different functions:

1. It establishes key elements of the setting – the sky island geography, Gifts, Leviathan bonding, piracy, the Celestial Empire, the Long Drop.
2. It introduces a character whose existence and mission accrues importance over the next three books.
3. It introduces a mystery box – the cartographer – that also gains layers of importance as it becomes more central to the plot.

The prologue doesn’t introduce Effie or Vanna. It doesn’t introduce the Zephyr Islands. It’s a scene that takes place temporally prior to the story and apart from the main narrative arc of Book 1. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to Book 1. That would also be a mistake.

In the drafting stage, I managed to avoid a few other tantalizing options that would have been missteps. Vanna’s Ascension could have easily been the prologue to Book 1, but this scene introduces all the main players in Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies and some crucial elements that provide the book’s narrative thrust: Effie’s ambition, Vanna’s skill, the relationship between the sisters, Celestial rule of the Zephyrs, the Ascension Ceremony itself. The scene is properly situated as Chapter One. 

I also might have flashed back to an earlier moment on Volturnus. At the earliest stages in the planning, I toyed with an in-scene depiction of Maug’s attack on the Zephyrs, the malign event that orphaned Effie, Vanna, and Kai. This is obviously an important bit of backstory in Ardent Wings, but it would have been the wrong choice for a variety of reasons.

1. This scene would waste precious page space on characters that we’ll never see again–the deceased parents of our cast.
2. It would set the wrong tone for the novel.
3. It would introduce the setting of the Zephyrs years in the past instead of establishing the paradigm in which the story actually takes place.
4. Most importantly, it would be a POV slippage. If I let readers experience Maug’s attack in-scene, then they’ll have a more vivid recollection of those moments than the two POV characters who provide our eyes and ears over the course of the novel. The truth of Maug’s attack isn’t what’s significant to Ardent Wings, but rather the event’s impact on the lives of Vanna and Effie.

Ultimately, the story of Maug’s attack is better related in Effie’s own voice, despite her foggy recollection. It comes quickly enough through narrative summary in Chapter Three.

Readers will ultimately decide whether I made the right choice here, but from a storyteller’s perspective, I think it’s an effective scene.