Being a Dark Lord sounds impressive until civilization decides that sending an endless supply of Chosen Ones to kill you is a perfectly reasonable plan. In I HATE Your Prophecy, Jeff Mach takes that familiar fantasy conflict into much stranger territory, filling a standalone story with sorcery, unlikely alliances, dark humor, and a Dark Lord who would really like everyone to stop behaving so irrationally.
Welcome to Alice’s Very Complicated Problem
The Dark Lord Alice has every reason to question what is happening around her. Civilized lands appear to have embraced a level of insanity where kingdoms, towns, homes, and their inhabitants repeatedly make decisions capable of causing enormous destruction. Somehow, the pattern continues. Within this already unstable environment, Alice becomes a convenient target for those looking for someone to blame.
The response from the wider world involves Chosen Ones. Lots of them. They are repeatedly sent to stop Alice despite the grim likelihood that they will die in the attempt. The concept turns one of fantasy’s most celebrated traditions into something distinctly uncomfortable and absurd. A heroic destiny sounds considerably less inspiring when it becomes a system for continually sending people into lethal confrontations.
Alice eventually disrupts that cycle by keeping five of the Chosen Ones. From there, the situation grows even more unconventional. This peculiar collection of supposed enemies becomes involved in war, creation, magic, and an effort to move Alice somewhere safer. Her potential destination could even be the Moon, provided she can finally find a place where she can conduct her research without another prophecy-driven crisis arriving at the door.
When Fantasy Rules Stop Making Sense
The premise becomes especially enjoyable because its world is packed with recognizable fantasy ingredients. There are dragons, knights, White Wizards, Orcs, Goblins, Hobbits, keeps, magic, prophecies, and Chosen Ones. These elements create an immediately familiar landscape, while Alice’s perspective encourages readers to reconsider the logic behind some of its oldest traditions.
A Dark Lord would normally occupy a straightforward position within this structure. She represents the threat, heroes arrive to defeat her, and destiny explains why the confrontation must occur. Alice complicates that arrangement simply by having her own thoughts, priorities, and survival instincts. She is trying to avoid becoming the scapegoat for widespread madness while everyone else continues participating in a system that seems increasingly unreasonable.
There is an appealing satirical question running beneath the magical chaos. If everyone accepts that prophecy determines who is heroic and who is evil, how much thought is actually being given to the people trapped inside those roles? Jeff has long shown an interest in stories that examine conventional ideas surrounding villains, good, and evil, and Alice provides a fitting perspective for that creative territory. His own writing describes villains as multifaceted figures capable of exposing the limitations of simplistic heroism and predetermined narratives.
The comedy also benefits from the scale of the situation. Alice is dealing with potentially catastrophic conflict, yet one of her objectives is remarkably relatable: she wants enough safety and peace to get some research done. Pairing that practical frustration with magical warfare and a possible journey to the Moon gives the story a delightfully peculiar personality.
About the Author
Jeff Mach is a longtime writer, creator, musician, and event promoter whose creative interests include strange and dark humor, science fiction, dystopias, and unconventional approaches to good and evil. He has been writing for around three decades and created the Steampunk Rock Opera Absinthe Heroes. In 2017, he also wrote Beneath, a work focused on relationships between humans and monsters.
Jeff’s background includes creating and running The Wicked Winter Renaissance Faire, The Steampunk World’s Fair, The International Steampunk City, The Midsummer Magick Faire, The Anachronism NYC, and Halloween in December. He lives in Hackensack, New Jersey, surrounded by a collection of several thousand books, and enjoys giving used books another home. He prefers drafting longhand before editing while typing, and his stated literary influences include Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin, Daniel Pinkwater, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett.
Where the Madness Leads
I HATE Your Prophecy has an entertaining foundation for readers who enjoy fantasy willing to question its own traditions. The familiar pieces are present, yet Alice’s predicament gives Chosen Ones, Dark Lords, magical warfare, and heroic destiny an amusingly different significance.
Jeff turns a world gone spectacularly strange into fertile territory for satire. With five unlikely recruits, dangerous magic, questionable prophecies, and one Dark Lord searching for an escape from everyone else’s madness, the story gives humorous fantasy fans a compelling reason to see destiny from the villain’s side.
