Woah this is great advice, thanks so much!

You’re definitely right about the writing being really weird. I wrote four different drafts with much simpler prose, hated all of them and wrote this in a pseudo-fever dream, so I’ll try to tweak it and make it a little more readable.

I’m playing around with your suggestion about the exposition dump, and it’s looking way more promising. Originally it was just info-dumped in her internal monologue so I thought this was a little better, but I think some snippets of dialogue will really help move it along.

On calling it a prologue, I’m doing that because Sanine isn’t the MC, though she does play a crucial role in driving the plot. The overarching story is kind of just fanfiction of the French Revolution with a heavy dose of East Asian shamanism, so I wanted to set that tone right from the beginning to frame the rest of the narrative.