Just finished the A Memory Of Light prologue.

And wow.

Simply. Wow.

In my earlier post about the titbits released, I mentioned that there was nothing much to shout about.

But the full prologue, a super-duper long one divided into many parts (Talmanes's POV alone has four-five parts, I think), just blew me away.

Detouring a bit, I'm re-reading Towers of Midnight and The Gathering Storm for comparison's sake, because I found Towers oddly inconsistent in writing style, which distracted me from the main story at hand. Maybe I'm just being anal about this.

[And yes, 'anal' can be worked into regular conversation without it being dirty.]

Despite the filleropening on Jarid Sarand, the prologue jumps straight into the events that ended the last book (Towers). It's very, very fast-paced, moving from Talmanes trying to halt the Trolloc invasion of Andor, to Slayer (a character I'm very interested in) having a meeting in a town within the Blight. We also get to see the Forsaken (always interesting stuff), and plus, somebody got bloody promoted!!

I'll just leave it at that; my jaw dropped.

And the flow is much better, this time around. Granted, things move a lot quicker than they normally would, but reading this feels like Jordan again. Well done, Brandon Sanderson.

Very well done.

Although I'm kinda not digging you at the moment, because you made Talmanes die really slowly. And you're giving me hope that he will survive the entire thing, because even Masema had a death that was better-written than this.

[I wanna see Talmanes laugh more!]

Cannot flippin' wait for January 8, 2013. Hope the majority of us are not part of the undead by then.