M Reads High Fantasy

My friends insisted I need to read this book. I'm not going to name the book, but points to you if you can figure it out from the following description. I'm, like, not even 20 pages in, I don't think. And I haven't gotten to, you know, the story yet because there is a Prelude and a Prologue. WTF kind of book needs two head starts?

You have to understand, I like fantasy in concept but tend not to read epic or high fantasy novels because they require so much damn work and all feel more or less the same to me. There are a bunch of names and different races or kinds of creatures. Something or someone is evil and a band of oddballs usually have to go on a quest to stop the evil. This is my entire understanding of fantasy, even though I did enjoy Greg Keyes' Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series and got partway through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I think maybe I prefer fantasy rooted in more contemporary things, like Aaronovitch's Peter Grant books.

Okay, so this book. It starts with . . . a guy? He's not human, though, I don't think. Apparently he has to keep fighting a battle over and over again for eternity, and sometimes he wins and sometimes not? Not just him but, like, nine others like him. Between the battles he goes to be tortured in a hell-like place. But then after this one battle, he and some king guy decide they're not going to do this any more. And the guy feels kind of guilty about that, but he really doesn't want to go back to being tortured, so they all just leave.

Oh, and there are swords. But they leave the swords, too.

THEN. Fast forward some 4500 years, and there's an assassin at a feast. He's going to kill a king. He has to wear all white because the people who hired him say it's only fair that the victim see him coming.

That's as far as I've gotten. I'm in the Prologue, waiting for the murder part. BUT. The assassin did pass through some hall or something that had statues of the guys from the Prelude? He called them Heralds, but for some reason one of the Heralds doesn't have a statue. I'm guessing this is a cultural thing since they've already made a big deal about the differences in the cultures here. That's another thing about high fantasy—the world building is incredible (when done well), but it's quite a burden on the reader when the info is being shoveled at you. These people have black skin and dark eyes, these ones are white with light eyes . . . I'm never going to keep all the names straight either. It's really overwhelming.

That said, I'll keep reading. My friends are so into this, I just have to see what it's about. Perhaps I'll update you as I go along.