The Groan lineage unfolds as a great flowering vine – Sepulchrave, Gertrude, Titus, Fuchsia, and the wider cast of all three books each blossoming as an individual flower, faces rendered within gilded petals in the manner of a medieval Tree of Jesse.

White cats curl and stretch among the roots.

A monkey clambers through twisting branches.

Steerpike’s own thorned, invasive growth erupts through the gilded ballroom floor below, splintering the ornate parquet as it claws upward through the genealogy – ambition rupturing the ancient, ritual order of Gormenghast itself.