Prelude Rewrite

I have finished with a reworking of the prelude. I began with three goals in mind:
1. To give the story more of a hook with more action and less explanation in the prelude
2. To fix some of the chronology of the original prelude which did not match up. (Specifically, Gramfeld would have had to be eleven years older than intended.)
3. To reduce the word count from 14,000 to something closer to 5,000

Of these goals, I feel I was very successful with 1 and 2, but not so much with 3. The new prelude sits comfortably at 11,468 words, meaning I only managed to cull a little over 2,000 words from it.

Since I have to scrape at least 35,000 words out of the book as a whole, this is a less than encouraging start, but it is a start nonetheless. Now I must simply press on. Hopefully I will be able to find an average of 1,000 words to reduce per each of the 40 chapters I am setting out to review.