My morning started off wonderfully: I was warm and cozy in b..

My morning started off wonderfully: I was warm and cozy in bed with two dogs, got up to feed them, made myself a sweet coffee with milk, grabbed a chocolate-covered waffle. And then I opened OnlyFans, checked the latest fan message, and was greeted by a disgusting, rancid, rotten, pathetic sausage plastered across my screen. My mood instantly tanked. The brainless monkey that owns that sorry excuse of an appendage was promptly reported and blocked.

Also, I’m in total shock at how dumb my brother’s dog is—just absolutely stunned. But I still love her anyway.

So, I read A Terrible Vengeance by Gogol. The narrative is split into two parts: a “realistic” section and a mythological section. In the “realistic” part, the story revolves around a Cossack, his wife, and her father. Since I can’t remember their names, let’s call them Cossack, Wife, and Father. Basically, the Cossack and Wife are madly in love and have a little son. But the Wife’s father is… let’s just say, deeply messed up—he doesn’t live by local laws, he’s cold and detached, drinks something other than the usual, doesn’t pray, and has a creepy attitude toward his daughter. She constantly has nightmares about her father trying to, uh, “strengthen their bond,” if you know what I mean.

One night, the Cossack is hanging out with his buddies near an abandoned castle when he spots the Wife’s father inside. The man has turned into some creepy old sorcerer with a long nose, casting spells and summoning his daughter’s soul to threaten her. The Cossack realizes that the Father is a wicked sinner and a warlock. So, he locks him up and decides to have him executed. But the Wife takes pity on her father after he swears he’ll repent and change his ways. She lets him go. Of course, the warlock immediately kills the Cossack, then the couple’s son. The Wife goes insane.

She ends up living among the Cossack’s former people, who mourn and take care of her. One day, a man visits her, claiming to be a close friend of her husband, and says the Cossack wanted him to marry her if anything happened to him. That’s when the Wife realizes it’s actually her father, the warlock, in disguise. She attacks him, but he kills her too.

The warlock is then haunted by a vision from the Carpathian Mountains: a giant rider with closed eyes with a kid on a horseback. The warlock doesn’t understand what it means, but he feels a profound terror and tries to escape. Every path, however, leads him back to the rider. Desperate, he even begs a hermit monk to pray for him, but the monk’s holy book begins to 🩸, and he refuses. The warlock kills him in rage.

In the end, warlock’s horse brings him to a giant rider, who grabs him. The warlock is left neither alive nor dead, thrown into a pit filled with other damned souls who tear him apart. From the ground, with the force of a volcanic eruption, rises a giant undead being that joins in the warlock’s torment.

Now, the mythological part tells a legend. Ivan and Petro were great warriors, best friends who shared everything. Ivan once helped a king, who rewarded him with vast lands and riches. Ivan, in turn, split it all with Petro. They traveled to their new lands together, with Ivan carrying his little son on horseback. While crossing the Carpathians, Petro, consumed by jealousy, pushed Ivan and his son into a gorge. Petro became the richest man in the land.

When Petro died, he and Ivan stood before God. God asked Ivan what punishment he thought Petro deserved. Ivan, furious at the betrayal that cost him his life, his son’s life, and his lineage, declared that all of Petro’s descendants would be terrible sinners and, after death, would remain neither alive nor dead, trapped in the earth. The final descendant (the warlock) would be the worst of them all, and every time he committed an evil act, his ancestors would rise from their graves with great suffering, wanting to revenge him. Petro himself would never rise but would endlessly crawl underground, his bones stretching and breaking, gnawing on his own limbs from pain and hatred.

God approved of this punishment but told Ivan he couldn’t enter heaven either. Instead, Ivan would remain on the mountain, waiting for the warlock.

I found the story about the Cossack, his Wife, and the Father decent but nothing extraordinary. It’s very typical of Gogol’s work, drenched in an aggressive, Cossack folk atmosphere that doesn’t resonate much with me. However, I loved the scene where the Cossack, his family, and friends are rowing down a river, and corpses rise from the banks, moaning, “It’s stifling, it’s stifling.” That was genuinely chilling.

As for the legend, I absolutely adored it—especially the image of the great undead being crawling underground with its ever-lengthening bones. It gave me major Dark Souls and Elden Ring vibes, as well as reminding me of my favorite fan-made Oblivion mod, The Living and the Dead, which I’ll definitely talk about in the future.