It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar.

In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts. Here, in its entirety, is the prologue to The Kingkiller Chronicle:

A reader turning the first page of The Name of The Wind is standing on the brink of a significant time investment (not to mention the inevitable emotional investment that comes with being a fan of anything long-running and serialized).

It's the opening of a gigantic trilogy whose concluding volume has been incognito for nearly six years. This is a book that weighs in at just over 200,000 words, whose sequel is nearly double that-almost 1000 pages depending on the typeset used. With that in mind, let's take a look at the opening to The Name of The Wind, the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy. You can promise one type of story and deliver another and get away with it, but you need to be very, very good and, crucially, the story you give the reader must be at least as interesting as the one they signed up for. This isn't just a matter of quality or a book being well written. I remember reading somewhere (Stephen King might have said it) that the opening of a book is a promise, and that the extent to which a book succeeds-the extent to which the reader comes away from it satisfied-depends largely on whether it upholds that promise.

The kingkiller chronicle