On her birthday, Star Breeze wanted to become the first spellcasting pegasus. To do that, she tried to learn how her father became the first flying unicorn. While she listened to his story, she learned more than she thought she would, like how he flew through all of time and space and rescued the world from an ancient evil.
Authors Note: There is now a live reading by Takeshy Reacts of this >>here<<. I welcome you to give him some love.
Cover Art done by the talented Dice Warwick. Link to his Fim fiction site >here<. Link to his Deviant art page >here<.
Chapters (32)
Righty ho. Got a tad distracted by New Year's.
I know this is just a prologue, but remember that it's also going to be the very first thing a reader will see when they open the story, so prologue or not, first impressions are vital. It's the first impression that will convince a lot of casual readers to keep on reading the remainder of the 300+K word story, so an awful lot is riding on it.
There are a few areas in which I think this chapter is kind of shooting itself in the foot. Leading with Author's notes is, whist a petty comment, is I think a rather salient one, since having to read or skip the Author's notes first effectively makes readers wait even longer to get into the first impression of the story. There's no real need for the author's notes at the start of a chapter, so I'd strongly recommend in future stories moving them to the end after a reader has had a chance to read the content.
I'm not a fan of using parentheses to indicate internal thoughts. I skipped ahead a little and saw that other characters had different sorts of brackets as well. I frankly don't see the point in doing this, since at the same time you make it very clear through prose who is thinking internally and there don't seem to be so many internal thoughts bouncing about that it really indicates a necessity to use additional, unconventional formatting to add another layer onto how the story is presented.
Aside from these, you do appear to be somewhat prone to odd choices of phrase. I won't list them all out here, but I think that if you don't do it already, you should consider trying to self-edit by reading the story aloud to yourself. This is a very helpful technique that allows your ear to pick up oddities that your brain (through your eyes) would otherwise gloss over (as it is prone to do).
In terms of a first impression, it was also a shame to see the opening paragraph be quite unimpressive:
Your opening has a very dull structure, which I think presents an unfair first impression to your chapter as a whole. It goes 'She did this because this. She did that because this. She did this and this to do this.' I'm convinced there must be a more colourful way of describing this or a more colourful way of showing your main character. If she's examining the stars, perhaps describe them first, showing the reader how Star is invested in identifying and measuring them, fascinated in every detail. Or something. Also maybe look at Provost's quote on sentence length; it's a very good quote and illustrates something you might benefit from:
Note that in the quote he doesn't just use sentences of different length, but also brings in colourful and unique word choices as well.
Regarding how the chapter sets up character, I do think there could be some room for improvement. We're shown here that Star wants to learn magic, but I think it would help massively if we were shown why she wants this early on. This would set up the need for this conflict (wants magic, can't have it) in a way that's easier to be invested in it than just having Star effectively mention through dialogue that she wants to learn magic and wants to listen to her Dad's stories in order to get it.
In order to not be wholly negative, there were some things I thought this prologue did rather well. Through dialogue, we can see a bit about the family's living situation, and a lot of the worldbuilding (whilst not my favourite part of most stories) seems to occur organically through observations of the characters instead of in blocky exposition (for the most part). We get a time-frame, the tone sets the situation of the characters, and I believe this is done pretty smoothly, so I'm happy with that. : ) The dialogue is, also, I think fine and good, and doesn't feel stilted to me.
We'll see how the rest of the story evolves once we get into future chapters. I wanted to focus more heavily on this one, though, since as the first chapter, it acts as the standard-bearer for the rest of the story, whether it wants to or not.
Good luck! : )