First off, I'd like to say that I think your writing has good pacing and buildup. The flow of the sentences from one topic to another is very natural. What you need to focus on now is the imagery and energy your words contain. I give a few specific tips about this in the analysis below, but try to expand your vocabulary and use less obvious words.
You do a good job of characterizing the book--I can see it very clearly--but the rest of the world around it is barren. I don't know if it rests in a city or in the countryside. If it is a city, it seems unlikely that it would sit in the midst of the town for days. If the country, it seems unlikely that it would survive the elements. Either of these unlikelinesses are fine, but they should be focused upon in context. You say that the book survived the elements, but not what kind of elements/environment this occurred in, which makes the context difficult.
Also, the focus of the second part is the book surviving the fire. However, we are taken straight to the book, and the fire is mentioned as an afterthought. We know the book is remarkable from the first section. In the second part, when we are tracing its history and present state, the events are more important than the object's description.
Try to think chronologically about the events that are happening.
Currently, the prologue runs kind of like this:
- There was a great disaster in the past.
- Evil or maybe not evil person named Alustein (German?) was involved.
- Book was involved in disaster in some unspecified way
######
- Book is still around
- Building containing Book was in some kind of fire
- Book persists against elements
- Book is avoided by townsfolk
- Government officials actually burned the building down
- Government will persecute anyone who tries to pick up the book, probably.
- Rakeil Gileis (Hebrew + French?) is a social nonconformist.
This is the story you are trying to tell:
- There was a great disaster in the past
- Evil or maybe not evil person named Alustein was involved.
- Book was involved in disaster in some clear cut way.
- Book is clearly magical.
- Book was lost to history? (seems like it, but this isn't stated directly)
#######
- Book is in old building
- Fire burns down old building
- Book remains unscathed and sits in center of town for days
- People begin to spread myth and rumor
- Social nonconformist Rakeil shows interest in book.
I really like the storyteller's appeal to the reader "If such a book came into your possession, what would you do?" To strengthen this, you might bring out earlier what the book actually does to a stronger degree, and contrast how the choices offered to the reader compare to Alustein's choice.
== EDITING / SUGGESTIONS / ANALYSIS ==
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Such times were depressing, as it has been shown throughout history.
Your prologue begins with no idea of where the narrative is coming from. In some cases this is okay, especially if you can establish who the narrator is by the way he talks. I can't figure out whether I'm reading a historic text or listening to someone tell the story, though.
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When the streets came to riotous uproar and the night became filled with the sounds of destruction.
This is actually a fragment.
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Happiness would be no friend of the people.
What does this even mean? I mean, I know what you're trying to say, but it just doesn't feel like it was worded well.
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when a peaceful world was turned upside down by the thoughts of a single man. That single man had managed to turn the entire world on its head virtually overnight.
You said the same thing twice here.
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Now, of course, there was no intentional hatred
It's not obvious to me, but the narrator seems to think so. So we're getting the idea that he's teaching us a lesson or telling a story we are supposed to know already. Are we (the readers) being spoken to as beings who are part of this world? It would seem like the narrator expects us to already know the general gist of what he's saying.
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involving a small little book.
Again, the same thing twice. Also, you want a paragraph break before you start talking about the book, to signal that it is a new topic worth attention to the reader. This paragraph should either be about the hatred of the world towards Alustein, or the book, but not a combination of both.
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A diary of sorts, you could say, one that he found amid the burned wreckage of an abandoned old building.
Run on sentence.
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A story dark enough, true enough, to make an entire world hate a single person.
you should set off the interjection "true enough" with long dashes, rather than commas.
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Such stories of the present are generally feared by the world as a whole.
You say 'such stories', but you haven't introduced completely what the story in the diary is. It sounds like the diary writes itself to keep up with the present state of the world, but this isn't confirmed in the previous paragraph. You need to establish what is in the diary before you start saying 'such stories' and implying that they are a feature of your world.
Words have a certain imagery and energy. If you are talking about a great fire, you use words like 'brilliant', 'risky', or 'pulsating' -- action words. Using a word like monotonous--even when not describing the fire--detracts from the energy of the image you are trying to create. Compare "watch the edges curl in the flames before withering into a writhing gray ash?" 'Withering' as a verb creates a more solid picture and 'writhing gray ash' conjures the image of the book burning violently, which is what you're aiming for here.
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Or would you read, and believe in such dark truths,
There shouldn't be a comma after 'read' here.
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The black covers were tattered and beaten, worn through by the elements of nature after the shelter of wherever it was once kept burned away.
The image I'm seeing here is that someone has just picked up the book for the first time and is speculating about its history, before he's just about to open it. You say 'after the shelter of wherever it was once kept burned away.' But this doesn't seem to be relevant to us as readers. I mean, everything left out in the open gets battered by the elements. When you talk about the building, you remove focus from the book. It would be smoother to talk about how the book had miraculously survived the fire and the elements, rather than that it was once under a shelter that was gone now.
This is a bit redundant. Is there no other way to describe the lettering except 'faded'?
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Through the rain and searing heat that could attract even fire to the water to cool down it sat.
I had to read this 3 times to understand what it was trying to say. Perhaps it can be reworded to be more clear.
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There were rumors abound that the old building did not ‘catch fire,’ not at all.
This is a double negative.
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There is a fourth factor not previously mentioned
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This was the fourth reason.
Try not to number things. Especially when the numbering starts at '4'. I didn't realize we were counting reasons of anything until I got to this sentence. It's a bad sentence, and you would need a very elaborate setup to make it a good one.
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A secret so terrifying that it was said that the arson
Hold on! The fire is an arson now? The first time I read this sentence, I didn't realize that 'arson' was referring to the burning of the building with the book in it.
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Rakeil Gileis was one of those people.
This is not enough energy for the end of a prologue. It gives me no idea of what is going to happen (ok, I know Rakeil is going to pick up the book, but that's only because you mentioned him by name, and that's how these stories go. If you had mentioned five other people by name in this chapter, I would have no idea which of them was going to be the protagonist because none of them were actually doing anything). Try to work some foreshadowing into this segment. Let us know that Rakeil has an interest in the book, not just by saying so as the narrator, but by something that he does.
If you have to tell us that Rakeil is a social nonconformist, and we can't figure it out from what he's doing or done, then he's failing as a character.
Admittedly, it's a little early to begin deep characterization, but this point could have easily come out in two pages of interesting dialogue, and not in a single 4-sentence paragraph. That would give your character some breathing room to develop, and add meat to your manuscript. Maybe in chapter 1...
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So that's that. It's not bad for a first draft, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Let me know when you revise this segment or finish the next one.
~KK
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