Father Gregorias sat with us and dismissed all talk of ghosts, discoursing instead about the Chronophagos, which, he said, was a remote cousin to the medusae, but far older, a thing made of living stone, out of the stone flesh of which this castle and the surrounding forest had grown, like hair from the head of a man who lies alive but sleeping in the ground for countless centuries; a thing older than Satan, about whom Satan had much to say; some monstrosity that fell from the unimaginably remote depths of the sky long before the birth of Adam; that which lay dreaming and waited until the
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