OH YOU CHESTNUT

I’m honestly not sure if this is actually a New Year’s card, but for the sake of this project, let’s say it is. Your ancient ones are welcome? I misunderstood the card when I first saw it, and my brain translated it to an invocation to the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, Elder Gods, or Dreamlands’ Great Ones, so let’s run with that, too.

This scent is no mere nut of hearth and harvest, but a squamous chestnut, born of ancient groves whose roots knot through strata older than memory, necrophagous and ravenous, sucking nutrients from long-buried carrion. A whiff of roasted shell, scorched coffee bean, and smoldering husk billowing in tenebrous clouds of nutty, cacodaemonical incense. Beneath this lies a resinous sweetness, dry and fungal, as though the chestnut had ripened not beneath familiar suns but under a swollen, unwholesome moon.

A paean to the dad jokes that the King in Yellow tells his kids, this chestnut’s warmth carries the faint echo of a pun told too many times and the comforting dread of knowing the punchline before it lands.