Thoughts on this prologue?

Should drop the second "the" ^^

"Hills, startling in their clarity, ringed the body of water, a silent witness to the events of two thousand years ago."
Hills is plural but witness is singular--I'm also unsure about the initial description. It sounds good, but what exactly does it mean? What's a startling clear hill? Well defined against the sky or water is all that comes to mind. Maybe the witness is the water, that would make sense singular/plural wise, but the sentence structure, with so many commas, is a little confusing.

"He whittled on a fallen branch..."
I'm unsure about "on" after whittled. It seems a little odd to me, "he carved on a fallen branch" might sound slightly more natural, if only because you can carve words or images on a branch, but whittling doesn't allow for one to carve an image/word onto one as its meaning is more specific.

"dagger with which he had once been stabbed."
Suggesting: the dagger he'd once been stabbed with.

Aside from that I liked it and saw no issues, definitely leaves on a note of suspense!

Apricots, I changed clarity to beauty. I, too, am unsure whether witness should be singular or plural in the above. I could change whittling on a fallen branch to whittling at a fallen branch, although I'm not sure one is more correct than the other. However, he wouldn't carve into a branch unless it's thick enough that he could do so without the dagger slipping. One usually carves into a tree.

Thanks
Dirk

Google agrees with you. Also, after rereading the sentence with the hills/lake witnessing several times, I think it should be plural, referring to both the hills and the lake acting as witnesses.

Don't end a sentence with a preposition is a Latin rule not a Germanic one.
We've imported the rule to the detriment of creativity

My two cents for whatever help it can offer ~ Father Romano and fourteen-year-old Connor led their tour group on a walk alongside the Sea of Galilee, blue swells glinting with light from the afternoon sun. Hills, startling in their beauty, ringed the body of water, silent witnesses to biblical events from two thousand years ago.

'A cool breeze raises blue swells that glint in the late afternoon swell'

If you don't mind letting a preposition creep in front: 'On the Sea of Galilee, a cool breeze ...'

Hello. My thought is if the actual start of the story is compelling and draws the reader on, you don't need this Prologue. If you need this to entice a reader to delve deeper, then perhaps reconsider the opening to do that very work.

Disclaimer: I used a Prologue in my novel Terrorcruise but that was to show an event that happened years prior to the actual story's start. This event set the stage for the rest of the story. And I wrote the event from the antagonist's point of view. When I later had the protagonist recount the event, it was from his point of view and altered the perception of it. The actual start of my story involves a military assault, which gets the story rolling wellfully enough. If I needed to, I could delete the Prologue and not lose anything. But its inclusion does help the reader make sense of motivations.

So ask yourself, what does this Prologue do that the opening does not? If you're just trying to build excitement for what's to come, use the opening pages to do that. They're the ones that really count.

Just my mere humble opinion. I'm not for or against Prologues. But they should serve a unique purpose. Opening a story on a cliffhanger is not one I would advise.

Edit to add: Also, this details an event that happens late in the story. By including it right up front like this, all the threats the main characters face are rendered irrelevant. That they are alive here means they survive, relatively unscathed, all the previous dangers. Do you want to spoil your own story like that?

I updated the top of this thread a few days ago. Here's the latest:

Those are my opening pages. The main difference is the top of the page says Prologue rather than Chapter 1. Admittedly, most prologues are set in the past, but a forward look is not unheard of.

The title The Rise of Connor (previously Saving Connor) pretty much guarantees I'm not going to kill off Connor before the climax. The fact that the prologue reveals that Romano lives until that moment later in the story doesn't bother me. Besides, as you saw in the excerpt at the top of this thread, the prologue ends with a cliffhanger, which isn't resolved until chapter 32. For all the readers knows, I'm about to kill off the whole lot of them. Especially, if I write like K.dot. :-)

Thanks, John. I prefer opening with the paragraph about the Sea of Galilee. I'm trying to evoke the grandeur/history of that land. Naturally, it's very important because Jesus lived there, but the story is about Connor. The prologue takes place during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. For various reasons, Romano is the POV character, so he's named first.

On a related note, that opening has already been updated in the book with more changes based on feedback.