The Prologue:
I liked the first line.
Your world is interesting, and I am curious as to why the Aberrant Lands covered most of the world.
Something about yellow things being referred to as moist is starting to annoy me. I have a hard time exactly envisioning what a moist twig is. If it's wet, just say it is wet. The image isn't working for me. It happens twice, I've noticed.
There is a lot of telling in the prologue. Most of the telling isn't necessary. It feels eerie and disconnected from Serra's viewpoint. For example, the last paragraph of the prologue isn't really something that I believe Serra would ever think. There's a great deal of this in the prologue. The scene isn't flowing as well as it should, either. Namely:
All the trees around her now grew upward for only a couple of feet, before turning sideways and running alongside the ground. Branches sprouted from the trunks in all directions, some of them growing down and poking back into the dirt. Even from a distance, the yellow bark looked moist. Serra knew that it would be slimy to the touch, like a slug. The leaves grew into strange shapes, spirals and needles and even perfect squares. They would feel like rough, dry leather.
Serra felt complete, pure terror. She screamed and fell to the ground, dropping Elisa in front of her.
Serra feeling complete terror basically comes out of nowhere, unless she happens to be scared of leather. It took a few paragraphs until I was told why she felt that way. I want to be shown it.
I want to feel why she is entering the Aberrant Lands. I want to know more about her character. She can be summed up as "her father died, and she talks to herself to make her feel better." I at least need hints of other aspects of her character.
As for her character herself, I empathize with her father's death, but she's kind of disturbing. I need more time to understand her before I will start to like her, so I'll give the benefit of the doubt.
And she's ten, which is an interesting choice for adult fantasy. Unless it's not that sort of book.
Finally, not much happens in the prologue. Her father dies, and Serra goes into the Aberrant Land. Since I need more of her character to feel invested, the only reason why this prologue seems to exist is to show off the Aberrant Lands. You could probably cut it and we'd pick up the world as we went along. There's just not very much conflict here right now, which signals to me that we've started at the wrong place.
Prologues are notoriously difficult to do, anyways. It sort of needs to be separated from the main story--if it isn't, then why not make it chapter one--in either time, space, or character. I don't know exactly what makes a good prologue, but this one feels off.
Onto chapter one.
Okay, yeah, you can just cut the prologue. Nothing happens in it that I couldn't figure out from chapter one.
Still a lot of telling, like right after the prayer. How does Serra even know that in the past people prayed differently, and more importantly, doesn't she have more things to worry about? Is this really the next thing she would think about? Pretty much everything that starts with "When she had been younger," or a variant thereof, is something that you may want to look at very carefully and ask if this is necessary information.
The prose is fairly choppy, which sort of makes sense, given she's ten, but it needs smoothing regardless.
This chapter is repetitive. Wake up. She's lonely. Retrospect. Go to sleep. You could get away with one of them, but the second time this happens it became extremely obvious. Also, mentioning the word "still" so much is signalling "Yup, still trucking along. You didn't miss much last time you tuned in."
Okay, finished. I think a lot of my points about the prologue stand. We're distant from Serra. There's a lack of conflict. I mean, she's alone, so we're rather limited to either internal conflict or her fighting the environment. No interpersonal conflict is available. She's sad about her father, but that's the most conflict we have so far.
Slow beginnings are fine, but we're really just hitting the same notes here. Serra's dad died; she's sad. The Aberrant Lands prevent new babies from being born, so there is little animal life left. And I can't really identify any more conflicts at the present moment.