Status Updates From The Illustrated Gormenghast...

His remark meant nothing at all but it was the only thing he could think of to say.

Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders--there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present.