> My current book starts off with a group of gods speaking with one another so that the reader can learn about how the set universe came to
Umm. As ... speaking not as a sophisticated reader or a widely read reader but as a prolific reader, that's the kind of prologue I will either skip, read grudgingly, or immediately and brutally use as a heuristic to read a different story that starts without talking heads making talking head noises, vanilla basic truck-kun, or a white room with a character generator terminal/overworked psychopomp.
Arguably, in a writer's first chance to grab sophisticated readers' attention with action or novelty, you don't want to burn that chance by wasting it to low-drama chatter and low-drama actions, incrementing the reader's boredom bar. When you can hook them with action, with a character's motivations, a stolen mcguffin, a chase scene, some artisan patinating a bronze plaque, the play of light reflecting off of blood running into a crack, etcetera.
Skimming "Severed Wings's" prologue and the first few paragraphs of ch1, the first few paragraphs of ch1 are much more interesting. And don't increment the reader's this-is-boring metric.
Crucially those few ch1 paragraphs can be cheefully read without reading the prologue. So why have the prologue if a new reader can parachute into the actual interesting ch1 without needing to read a low-drama prologue (or deciding not to bother)?
If the passages don't build or relieve narrative tension, and don't meaningfully effect or support mood or ... reader mouth-feel, excise the passage.
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en.m.wikipedia.org
> A narrative work beginning in medias res (Classical Latin: [ɪn ˈmɛdɪ.aːs ˈreːs], lit. "into the middle of things") opens in the chronological middle of the plot, rather than at the beginning (cf. ab ovo, ab initio).[1] Often, exposition is initially bypassed, instead filled in gradually through dialogue, flashbacks, or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins after the death of Hamlet's father, which is later discovered to have been a murder. Characters make reference to King Hamlet's death without the plot's first establishment of this fact. Since the play is about Hamlet and the revenge more so than the motivation, Shakespeare uses in medias res to bypass superfluous exposition.
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en.m.wikipedia.org
> His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers' adage "murder your darlings":[22]
>> If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'[23]
It's only three chapters. I'm sure that the more chapters you have, the more readers you'll attract
