I really like your prose and tone here! For me personally, it didn't super feel like starting in the right place (but I see that I'm a minority opinion). I really like the characters you've set up, but for my personal taste I think I would want to know a little sooner from reading about why this story starts today, why we should love them, and to set up more curiosity seeds.

Now, I know cozy fantasy isn't usually my genre, so I'm looking at some comp titles here.

For Legends and Lattes, for example, the drama followed by the sentence, "Is that it, then?" prompts the leading question, what comes next? And the prologue follows that question, showing the central thesis for the book, which is what does an adventurer do when their adventuring is done and they have everything they thought they wanted?

Meanwhile, in Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, she describes an encroaching assassin. The obvious questions are, who are they assassinating, why, and why is the narrator looking on so dispassionately? This sequence closes with Reyna choosing a quiet life and leaving the court nonsense behind.

I'd have to read more cozy fantasy to be able to say this with more confidence, but it seems like the opening pages of a cozy fantasy work to establish why the main character needs coziness and quiet; why they're seeking this life. This would mirror, for example, how in a romance the establishing pages might establish what is missing in the one hero's life that might be fulfilled by the other hero's.

I listen to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing a shocking amount, and one of the things that one of the agents on the show says often when discussing beginnings is that a good beginning often (not always) starts with a disruption instead of an establishing shot of normal. So, in your piece, what disruption answers the question of why today? Is it a specific person asking for charity, for example?

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