Yes, I typically write a prologue for a fiction piece after the main body, though prologues for nonfiction are usually done first.
“You embark; you make the voyage; you reach port; you step ashore, then. Into another life.”
-Marcus Aurelius
Nest-taker was the egg-bringing man of the Clan; the climber who climbed higher, the taker who took more. The ice had retreated since his boyhood, to expose the jagged peaks of the mountains they had covered like a white winter hide for as long as the Old Ones could recall. The hunting birds took to these unreachable spear tips of stone to build their nests. But he would have their eggs this summer!
For a day he had trod trail, climbed rock, sure-footed his way across snow fields mindful of their secret gobbling mouths, and now he stood at crag base, where the tip of the World Spear was bound to its immeasurable haft with root for sinew and soil for glue.
He looked up at the soaring eagle, wondering if the sky hunter would soar out over the forests below to the grasslands beyond. Then the sky bubbled like a churning stream at the base of a waterfall. The sky then streaked as if the bubble turned to a river of water surging through the sky.
The eagle squawked and plunged for the forest like an owl after a hare. The bubble, a strange shivering watery egg, fell toward him like heavy smoke on a wet misty day, unable to rise and uncertain to fall.
He looked up, entranced, drawn to the falling circle of water floating down through the cold summer sky. For many moments he regarded the thing as it fell. As it neared his level he was able to peer inside and see that it was not so much an egg, but more of a baby sack inside of a doe who had not yet dropped its faun. He crept close as the gelatinous mass oozed down onto the rocks, rounded and jagged.
This was the biggest egg imaginable! He would be able to feed the entire clan for two moons with the tasty unborn thing within. Perhaps this was how the creatures which lived in the dark salt water were birthed, out of the sky, save that this one had dropped over land. It was obvious that the creature within was a thing of water by its appearance.
He slinked closer yet, placed his hands on the flesh-like water sack and peered within. He could see nearly to the other side, much like looking into the shallows of a sandy-bottomed stream where it flowed lazily. Within seemed to be one many-limbed fetus with a discernable head. The limbs had no fingers or toes, but something different. He spread his hands to pull the fleshy shell taut to clear his view.
The head turned.
A great bulbous eye blinked open.
The fleshy shell of the egg gripped his hands.
He struggled, pulled, tugged; tried to get away, and it pulled him in, ever closer, ever deeper, hands first, hands washed with a warm liquid that caressed like a tongue cleaning the inside of a mouth…
Nest-taker, bringer-of-eggs, would have never thought, until now, that he might be taken, no less by an egg, and one that was itself a nest.
