Random Story – This is a weird prologue

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Some years ago, a girlfriend and I broke up a few days before my birthday.  It was for the best.  Anyway, during the exchange of things like spare keys and whatnot, I got the book she had bought for my birthday gift.  It was something like The Dragons of Warevin, or something, by an author I hadn’t heard of.  I still have it, and could look it up, but I don’t feel like doing it now.

So this book sat on a shelf for a few months, but at some point I figured I should move on and only remember the good times, and I figured I should read this book.  It started with this fifteen or so page prologue that began with the tale of two kingdoms, one with magic and one with dragons, or something.  I only vaguely remember the details of the story.  Anyway, I’m reading through this and I’m thinking it seems rather odd.  There’s no dialogue, or even a story, it’s almost just bullet points, like an outline of a story.  I read a couple pages of this, and then we find out the kingdoms were joined through marriage, and then we start in on some scandal that rocked this new kingdom some twenty years later.

Eventually, sadly later than it should have taken, I start to wonder if this is like the sixth book in a series.  I go back and scan the cover, and there’s just The Dragons of Warevin, and on the back there’s a blurb about this author’s outstanding Krithrak Series, or whatever.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Inside the book, on the list of other works by the author, there’s several apparently stand-alone novels, as well as five or six books in the Krithrak Series, and The Dragons of Warevin isn’t anywhere on this list.  Which isn’t all that strange. 

I go back to the prologue, and hundreds of years past, and there’s civil wars, and dynasties fall, and gunpowder is invented, and a lot of stuff happens.  By the end of the prologue, I’m convinced that this is indeed the sixth or so book in a series, and the prologue was just a bullet point listing of the big events from the previous books.  I then Google the book (back when you could actually get an answer from Google instead of AI slop or pointless ads trying to sell be shit) and it turns out that, yes, The Dragons of Warevin was indeed the sixth book of the Krithrak Series.  Knowing this, I again looked all over the book, but could not find any indication of this.  I guess if you were buying this author’s book, you knew the series.  Or were my ex-girlfriend.

Since all the big events covered in the prologue seemed self-contained in their respective books, I figured I probably wouldn’t miss much reading The Dragons of Warevin.  I don’t think I did miss anything, and the book was okay.  If it wasn’t the last gift of an ex, and for some reason they decided not to show it was part of a series, I’d probably have completely forgotten about it.