The Color of Magic The Color of Magic / Prologue Summary

How It All Goes Down

  • We enter a "distant and secondhand set of dimensions" (1.Prologue.1), and see the Great A'Tuin continue his timeless journey swimming through the cosmos
  • On his back are four elephants whose shoulders bear the weight of the Discworld.
  • As obvious as he may seem to us, A'Tuin was merely a hypothesis for the Disc's people until the kingdom of Krull built a gantry to lower observers over the world's edge. In that moment, a major mystery was solved and the field of astrozoology began taking applications.
  • But the answers only lead to more questions, such as where was A'Tuin headed and, for that matter, why?
  • So it is that a young cosmochelonian is testing out his new telescope in the hopes of measuring the albedo of A'Tuin's eye, when he spies smoke rising from the old city in the world.
  • He is the first, but certainly not the last.