The Last Ballad Reading Order
The two main reading orders are as follows:
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Melodic:
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This describes a thread of sound informed by two or more notes playing in tandem, capturing both expectation and suspense in its unfolding.

The Sound of Starfall
A Memory of Song
A Chorus of War
A dance in the Dust

The Melodic reading order allows the reader to experience A Memory of Song informed by notes from the past, causing increased tension.

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Volatile:
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This describes something that is liable to change rapidly, making the music's mood or direction mysterious and hard to predict.

A Memory of Song
The Sound of Starfall
A Chorus of War
A Dance in the Dust

The Volatile reading order allows the reader to experience A Memory of Song deaf to any previous influence. This will generate the most impact from the twists and turns of the story.
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A Note on Reading Order
I called this the Last Ballad Series with the idea that I could write an epic fantasy series like a song—a song that echoed across tens of thousands of years, across multiple continents, cultures, religions, families, and people. A song of myth, and legend, heroes, and of pure evil. By using the timeline of the world and moving back and forth in time, I hope to invoke the feeling that music provides, but through long-form storytelling instead. In the structure of a song, a verse drives the music forward, and the chorus keeps coming back and repeating itself. This action of back and forth, back and forth—anticipation and familiarity—creates the feeling of music.
I found in history that the timeline of the world worked much in the same way, with these long "verses" moving things forward until they are interrupted by certain events such as war, famine, and inequality that keep coming back and repeating themselves, much like the chorus of a song. So, using that as my guideline, I've tried to create the feeling and effect of a song through literature, with my main books, the "Verses", driving the plot forward, and these "Preludes" acting as the chorus, which are snapshots of history that seem to be repeating themselves in our current timeline.
Giving the reader a snapshot of history in the Preludes allows for recognition to occur while reading through the Verses. You may think “hey, this is like an echo of what happened a thousand years ago” and that creates anticipation and familiarity. And that is the beauty of music, because it lulls you in with familiarity, it builds anticipation, only to do something entirely different in its climax that upon recollection, was the only thing that ever could have happened.
The Last Ballad series is outlined with four Verses, and three Preludes in between each verse. I've also made the three Preludes move forward in time to create that feeling of the entire plot driving towards a collision. So the first Prelude was three thousand years before the first verse, the second prelude is seventeen hundred years before the first verse, and the last prelude will be three hundred years before. So by the time the Fourth Verse is coming, it will have created a crescendo effect with both timelines colliding for the finale. That crescendo is the Last Ballad.
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Scott