Leander the Loser

Cloaks, Cups, and Curses.

I was so inspired by the new community event Asteria Geisterblum launched this week, Leander the Loser. What a fantastic idea!

This week’s prompt was a perfect spark: Leander is at the market, “asked not to bring any enchanted goods,” and the tarot card is the Two of Cups.

My mind immediately latched onto this idea of a performance. What if Leander’s “loser” persona is just a carefully constructed cloak? And what if that “Two of Cups” moment, that fated meeting, wasn’t a romantic one, but a chaotic, unwelcome reunion with someone who sees right through his act?

That single idea sent me down this rabbit hole, and the story of Leander, Mrs. Gavell, and a very disruptive old classmate just poured out.

A huge thank you to Asteria for providing such a rich prompt to play with. Here is my version of events for Week 1.

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The market was too loud, the sun was too bright, and Leander was, as usual, too sober for this. As such, he was sulking, his cloak, a slightly tatty malachite green piece of material that went down to his ankles, wrapped tightly around him like a petulant child.

His stall was a monument to his reputation: a sad collection of polished river stones that he had etched charms into, three slightly broken lanterns that he claimed magically replenished oil, and a single, suspiciously clean boot that purportedly gave the wearer the kind of hair that would stay as you brushed it, even in a stiff wind.

The stall was as much a cloak as his literal one. A carefully curated ruse that was becoming harder and more arduous to maintain since the war had slowed.

He’d been asked not to bring any enchanted goods this time by the master of trade, a request delivered with the same weary sigh as the last time his ‘rain-proof’ charm had accidentally caused a person to nearly die of thirst.

The time for sulking was short lived however, as a certain Mrs. Gavell approached. At first she looked at his wares. He sprung out of his cloak and jumped into his other cloak, the cloak of the clumsy trader and failed witch. Waxing lyrical about the boot in particular, he commented on its unassuming quality. Neither ostentatious nor austere. Its stitching was fine and showed the talent of the craftsmen. Its material is both breathable and waterproof so that your one foot might never get too hot, nor wet. And most importantly, it would allow Mrs. Gavell to untie her beautiful thick hair and not worry about it.

Given the fact that her hair was tied up in one of the tightest, most pinned knots, he had ever set eyes on, there was a sense that the sale might be lost. Instead she glanced over to his cups.

“I’ve a knack for that, so I do! I can follow the pea no matter where it goes”.

Leander glanced over at the cups, and grinned.

“Mrs Gavell, you are keen as a daisy in spring, but this is not a game to be taken lightly. I have hands swifter than a card shark, and I can make that pea move in a way that is phantom-like. Few people ever win against me.”

Leander smirked inwardly, it was going exactly to plan. He had been scoping out Mrs. Gavell for months. A single mother and farmhand, with too many children and too little acreage. The war had decimated her outputs after two of her strongest sons had gone to war and not come back. ‘Bastards’, he thought to himself, as he thought of the people who had sent these young men off to die.

“Aye, you cannae fool me, I wager. I’ve got seven children left to me, I have eyes in the back o’ my head”.

“Well then Mrs. Gavell, it seems as though you cannot be dissuaded, let us set down to play a game”. Leander leapt to his perch behind the box where he had three clay mugs turned upside down on an old wine crate, making sure to kick his stall as he passed, just hard enough to make everything wobble dangerously but ‘somehow’ not fall. He flourished his hand and produced a perfectly round, perfectly green pea. The kind of pea you might see in a painting on a fancy greengrocer’s painted facade. It seemed to positively catch the light.

“Here, Mrs. Gavell, is your quarry. Three cups -” he waved his hand dramatically over them, knocking one of them over and hastily placing it back in place, “- will hide this pea, and all you have to do is tell me which one. What could be simpler, except for the fact that I have Witch in me. Trained by the finest minds in Ellendor! Of course, there will be no magic, do not fret.”

He took a moment to move his hands in a way that would have implied making the pea disappear, except for the fact that it didn’t. Mrs. Gavell’s smile, bless her, grew wider. An ability to disguise her feelings was not one of her virtues, she would make a poor card player.

“But magic is just part of the witch’s toolbox. Illusion, sleight of hand, wordplay are all the wicked ways we can employ to make sure that you will never find this pea. You have my permission to leave if you wish” He pulled his cloak up around him dramatically and gave her a look of fumbled faux mystery. She was not taken in by his act, he was glad to see. She crossed her arms defiantly and loudly declared that she would not be put off.

“Well then Mrs. Gavell, put in your stake, whatever you think you can afford to lose.”

He proffered a box lined with scuffed silk to her, and she placed a single coin in it.

“I give you odds of 1:5” Leander commented loudly, and placed in the box alongside her one, a further five coins. She looked at it in amazement, knowing full well that this could feed her family for a month. Leander only wished he could put in more without making the con more apparent.

And so the game began. Leander placed the pea with an exaggerated swish of his long sleeved arm in the first cup. His hands slammed down on the tops of the two on each side of the third, and he began to clumsily move them around. Careful to let cups catch on the grain of the wood sometimes, so as to slightly reveal the location of the pea.

“Oh, my!” Leander yelped, his voice cracking beautifully as he “accidentally” knocked over the wrong cup. “Where’d she go? That little pea! My apologies, Mrs. Gavell, I’m all thumbs today...”

Mrs. Gavell watched with keen eyes and when the display was over, she pointed to the center cup. The wrong cup. ‘So much for her eyes in the back of her head,’ Leander mused to himself. He didn’t have much time, but concentrating, he gently wiped his thumb against the crate, careful to disguise the movement as part of his patter towards the big reveal. He felt that familiar tingle as a slight nudge of magic wove through him, through the wood, through to the pea.

Good, Leander thought, right... now. Lift the left cup on the ‘and’ of ‘three.’ Angle the right hand to block her eye-line from the stall’s shadow. Perfect. She’ll have a proper dinner tonight for her whole family.

“Well, I’ll be!” he announced, faking his sulk as he handed her the coins. “Cleaned me out again. You do not lie Mrs. Gavell, when you describe your talent.”

He kept up the forlorn display for a further few minutes as she collected her winnings in disbelief at her good fortune. His performance was perfect. Disdain, mock indignance, faux gratuity, and of course, the occasional mishap to make sure his cloak of the loser remained intact. And then as she disappeared into the crowd, he resumed sulking. Though, less intensely, a slight smile crept into his heart as he thought of that family surviving well for at least a few more weeks. He pulled his malachite cloak back around him, the familiar weight a comfort, and prepared for another hour of tedium.

The tedium lasted, by his count, exactly fifteen seconds.

She didn’t so much arrive at his stall as collide with it. One moment, he was enjoying his internal victory; the next, a blur of mismatched fabrics and flyaway hair was tapping on his magically replenishing lantern.

“This one’s burnt out,” she said, her voice a cheerful, airy thing. She wasn’t talking to him, but to the lantern itself. She jiggled it discontentedly, like a child wondering why the clockwork toy has stopped. “Poor thing. All that light, just gone.”

Leander’s internal smile vanished. This was not a customer. For a start her accent was far too refined. This was a disruption.

She looked to be one of those kinetic thinker types, a person who seemed to process the world by touching it, rearranging it, and generally knocking it off-balance. If he wasn’t such a master of the performance himself, he might well have been duped. He noticed she had a cloak too, and it made him question whether having one might be too much of a giveaway. Was it time to reconsider his attire again? Her own cloak was a patchwork of what looked like a dozen different garments, from beautifully stitched floral patches, to polkadot, a chaotic defense all its own.

Before he could jump back into his clumsy trader role, she had moved on, picking up one of his etched river stones. “This charm,” she mused, tracing the symbol with a fingernail, “it’s meant for... what? Warding off measles?” She squinted at it, her head tilted. “No, wait. Attracting Weasels. Oh, that’s much funnier.”

Leander’s sulk deepened into a genuine, prickling annoyance. It was, in fact, a measles ward; he had hidden it in plain sight, as a silly toy to attract small animals. The children loved it, and he gained the peace of mind knowing one less death might be avoided.

His annoyance however was tempered by a competing awareness. He recognized the type. He recognized her.

Clover.

From the school. From Ellendor. She’d been in the year below him, a girl infamous for making potions that almost worked. Usually they looked okay until someone would test them and grow another limb, often by design. She was a trickster through and through. She was also another outcast like him, another failure the school had been glad to be rid of. She hadn’t been kicked out for being a thief like he had however; she’d been kicked out for accidentally turning the mental health of the Madame of the house into full blown post traumatic stress disorder. Last he had heard, the Madame was still living by the coast and jumping at any slightly obnoxious sound. Not that he cared much for the school or their resident witches after the way they treated him. But it was in his best interests to know who was where.

What is she doing here? he thought, his mind racing. His ‘Leander the Loser’ persona was a carefully built fortress; chaotic, unpredictable people like Clover were a crude battering ram. Suddenly he had a new war to contend with. A decidedly unwelcome one.

She finally stopped fiddling with his wares and fidgeting about. The whirlwind of kinetic energy ceased, and she focused, her eyes, sharp and amused, landing on his three clay cups. She beamed, a sudden, blinding ray of sunshine that he instantly distrusted.

“Oh,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper as she plunked herself down on the stool Mrs. Gavell had just vacated. “You play games. I love games.”

She knew his game for sure. Leander could see it in the way her smile didn’t quite match her eyes. She had been watching him; she’d been watching his magic. The faint, familiar tingle of the moment the pea had been nudged. She’d felt it. Her eyes gave it away. The glint in them wasn’t just amusement, it was recognition. It was the look he had grown accustomed to in his own mirror.

Still, it was better not to leave it to chance. He adorned his second cloak.

The clumsy trader cloak felt heavy and hot, however, despite being just an act. Leander forced it back on anyway, his mind no longer the calm, controlled engine of a master of disguise, but a racing mess. It had been a while since he had played a game against a relative equal. ‘The script. Back to the script.’

He swept his hands toward the cups, a pale imitation of his earlier flourish. “A game! Why, of course!” his voice pitched a little too high. “You’ve come to the right place. Leander the Loser, at your service! Though... I must warn you.” He leaned in, giving her his best fumbled faux mystery look, eyebrows raised. “I’m really... quite good.”

Clover’s smile didn’t waver. “Oh, I’m not worried about you.”

Her eyes, sharp and amused, flicked to the clay cups. “I’m just worried about that pea. It seemed awfully jumpy earlier, the way you moved it around, it was almost as if it had a life of its own.” She clasped her hands together, a perfect picture of bright, innocent concern. “I simply hate when things get misplaced.”

The rambling, comfortable rhythm of his internal thoughts stopped dead. She saw it. How did she see it though? Some of the best witches in the world could barely sense magic…

He forced a high-pitched, reedy laugh. “Always getting misplaced, I’m afraid! My things are... terribly clumsy. They fall all the time. Sometimes it does feel as though they do it to spite me.” He turned to her directly, layering on a small hint of the serious patter. “And anyway, this game is all about misplacement. To be deceived is the game, how well are you able to keep up with my trickery? A game of the mind as much as the senses miss…”

“Clover,” she responded, eyes shrewdly studying him “Clover Daley.”

“Well miss Clover, If you ‘simply hate when things get misplaced.’ Perhaps this is not the game for you? No, not the game at all” He gestured vaguely to his stall, nearly knocking over the very lantern she had just jiggled. “Perhaps you would be better off with a Weasel charm?” He pulled his malachite cloak tighter, a nervous, jerky motion and wobbled a little, feigning awkwardness. “Ugh, dratted cloak.” He decried, flinging it back around himself in a perfectly performed moment of self annoyance.

This was the test. Discipline was the cudgel that the school at Ellendor had used to beat them both. ‘A witch is only as good as her own personal code of conduct.’ He couldn’t let a fraction of his performance falter.

Clover’s smile tightened, the blinding ray of sunshine vanishing like a snuffed candle. Her voice, still airy, dropped just enough to be laced with cold frost. “But I was watching that last game. With Mrs. Gavell.”

She leaned forward, her patchwork cloak brushing the edge of the wine crate. “That little pea should have lost her that coin.”

Leander’s breath hitched.

“I’m almost certain,” she whispered, her refined accent clipping the words, “it... flew. Almost like it was... pushed.”

Leander’s suspicions were being confirmed. She saw the nudge. The word ‘pushed’ hung in the air between them, a naked, unsheathed knife. His fortress hadn’t just been battered; it had been breached.

He broke eye contact first, “fumbling” for the pea he’d used with Mrs. Gavell. His fingers, usually so precise, felt thick and stupid. “P-pushed?” he stammered, his clumsy trader voice now sounded much more real, littered with genuine panic. “Oh, no. Mrs. Gavell... She’s just very lucky. And I...” He straightened up, pulling his cloak tight as if it could hide him. “...Whoever heard of such a thing as flying peas! Hah,” his laugh landed slightly unnaturally loud, a brilliant execution. Just enough to extricate a rolled eye there from a passer by, a slightly wider circle around his stall. “Now then.”

He met her gaze, his own suddenly cold now that they had an iota more privacy. “Would you care to play? Or just... critique the wares?”

Clover’s frosty smile returned, warmer this time, but no less sharp. “Oh, I’ll play.”

She slid a coin from her patchwork sleeve, not a dull copper, but a bright silver piece, and placed it inside the proffered silk line box. A real stake. A challenge. He rummaged through the recesses of his purse and pulled out three silver pieces. Enough money to take him across the sea and back. Just revealing that amount of money made him nervous.

There was no turning back. ‘The script. Stick to the script.’

Leander took a steadying breath and snatched up the perfectly green pea. He placed it under the center cup. His hands, which had felt so stupid and thick a moment ago, moved with a forced, jerky speed, trying to replicate the “clumsy” shuffle he’d used for Mrs. Gavell. But his heart was hammering. His performance felt thin.

“Watch closely!” he chirped, his voice strained. “The hand is quicker than the—”

A large shadow fell over the table, swallowing the cups, the coin, and the light in Clover’s fiercely penetrating eyes.

“Still swindling children and old women, Loser?”

Leander froze. He knew the voice. Guard Handibald. A man who ironed the creases into his uniform until they were sharp enough to be weapons. Handibald was the worst of peacetime. A petty tyrant with no war to distract him, free to harass the small folk instead, as if he was important.

This, Leander thought, his panic momentarily eclipsed by a familiar, bitter anger. This is the ‘order’ the war’s slow end brings? Peacetime made his real work, like scoping the vault of the Warlord who’d started the whole bloody conflict, a nightmare of suddenly attentive accountants totting up their ill-gotten spoils. Much harder to steal when everyone is doing an audit. The war had been good for a thief’s cover, but he’d still toast its end, if only to see men like Handibald’s masters finally pay.

With his hand still moving the cups around, he performed a daring play, a trick where he lifts the cup in the air, flicking the pea up for all to see before slamming it back into its hidden prison. Whilst this charade happened, he managed to close the lid of the stakes box unnoticed. The last thing he needed was Handibald making off with four silver pieces as ‘evidence’.

His hands ceased movement under the guard’s stern gaze, but he didn’t dare lift the final cup. He didn’t have to. He could already feel the cold tingle, magic under his palm. She’d taken it!

“Just a bit of harmless fun, Officer,” Leander stammered, his “clumsy” act now painfully, genuinely real.

Handibald snorted, his gaze falling on Leander’s illegal three-cup game. But before he could issue the fine, his eyes flicked to Clover. His expression shifted. He wasn’t looking at a market rat, he was looking at a refined lady, her patchwork cloak suddenly seeming less chaotic and more bohemian. Leander had to admire her sudden shift in perception. Subtle magic indeed.

Clover, sensing the sudden change of Handibald’s gaze, beamed at the guard, her blinding ray of sunshine turned up to full power. “Oh, Officer, he’s just terrible at it! I was about to win, wasn’t I, Leander? He’s quite the character.”

Handibald grunted, momentarily disarmed by her city accent. He gave Leander one last look of profound disgust. “See that you move along, loser, I don’t want to see you bothering refined young ladies anymore. Make sure she gets her winnings and skidaddle. We don’t want any gambling here, not in my town.”

“No trouble, Officer! None at all!” Leander bobbed his head, the malachite cloak swishing.

Handibald stared for a second longer, then marched on into the market, casting his contemptuous shadow over other poor souls, leaving Leander feeling exposed.

The instant Handibald was out of earshot, Clover’s cutesy mask vanished. The frost was back, and with it, a triumphant, cutting grin. As if the implied power in Handibald had just transferred to her.

“Now,” she said softly, her voice pure snake oil. “Where were we? Oh, yes.”

She held up her hand, palm closed. “Looking for this?”

Leander stared coldly, knowing full well what she had done. Apparently he wasn’t the only oddity that could sense magic intuitively. ‘This was it. The checkmate.’

She opened her hand.

The perfectly green pea sat in her palm. Glowing its brilliant emerald, basking in the sun. Warm light spilled into her hand and Leander felt sure that it was illuminated enough for nearly the whole damn market to see. He couldn’t yet decide if this would help or hinder his Loser persona. But something was wrong.

A wisp of black smoke started snaking up from it, like the wispy entrails of a burnt out match.

Clover’s grin faltered. “Oh. That’s... not...”

The smell hit Leander first, a sickeningly sweet wave of burnt sugar and ancient dust. A sudden, unnatural cold radiated from her hand, blotting out the sun in her palm and casting it in shades of gray. So sudden and intense was the cold that Leander saw her next breath fog in the warm market air.

“Clover,” he said, his voice low and sharp. “Close your hand.”

But it was too late. The pea began to crackle, the green skin blackening and splitting. The sound was like sticks being broken underfoot, or worse, bones. It warped, growing and reforming with sickening speed. In a second, the pea was gone, and in its place sat a tiny, grotesque skull with dark, blossoming flowers sprouting from its empty eye sockets. Where it sat in her hand, little veins of inky black fungal like entrails wriggled outwards.

Clover’s triumph shattered into pure, stark terror. This wasn’t her magic. This was no magic that Leander himself had ever encountered in its pure form. This was the kind of magic that he had been expelled for even glancing at when he had stolen that forsaken book out of the library for some extra-curricular study.

Leander froze. He noticed something else familiar about the mask of terror placed in her hand. He looked at the skull with creased eyes. He knew that skull, it was part of a sigil. He’d spent the last six months studying it, sketching it from memory, dreaming of the family it protected.

The Black Rose Skull. The personal crest of Warlord Thibault.

The man who’d sent Mrs. Gavell’s sons to die. The man Leander was going to rob blind.

And this... this chaotic, failed witch from his past, was somehow, impossibly, cursed by him. He had it all wrong, there was no way that the Thibault family were in possession of this kind of witchcraft, it had been outlawed for centuries. But then if they did… he needed to find out more, he needed to keep Clover close.

Clover saw the recognition in his eyes and her blood ran even colder than her hand. He knew the sigil. This changed everything.

“Oh, hells,” she hissed, her voice a sharp, brittle thing. She snapped her hand shut, but the unnatural cold was already seeping through her fingers, and those little black inky lines were wrapping around her hand, numbing her fist. Her eyes darted around, bright with panic, but she forced a tight, annoyed grimace.

“Drat. It’s doing it again. So... tiresome.”

She was trying to play it off, masking her terror with irritation, but her facade was paper-thin. She was braced for him to recoil, to call the Guard, to have to run, again.

Leander did none of those things however. He didn’t hesitate.

He launched himself sideways, his arms flailing. “OH, PEAS!” he shrieked, his voice hitting a register that could shatter glass.

He slammed his hip into the stall, and the entire monument to his reputation went over. It was a tidal wave of junk. The single, clean boot flew into the path. The broken lanterns clattered loudly, drawing the ire of Handibald. And the basket of polished river stones overturned, sending a cascade of weasel-attracting charms scattering across the cobblestones with a deafening rattle. But beyond all of that, peas in abundance spread out all around him.

It was a pure blinding whiplash of sounds, shrieks and chaos.

“MY PEAS!” he wailed, quickly reaching down to try and grab a few within reach. “NOT THE PEAS!”

The entire market turned. Handibald, now only twenty paces away, paused to roll his eyes at the spectacular, clumsy meltdown. Perfect, he was still a loser.

In that one second of shared distraction, as Leander fumbled on the ground, scrabbling for his river stones, legumes, and other knick-knacks, his eyes locked onto Clover’s with a penetrating look. His left hand made a show of grabbing the boot; his right, hidden by the lip of the overturned wine crate, flashed in a single, silver-quick gesture. A complex, layered spell that his one decent mentor at Ellendor would have called recklessly advanced.

Clover felt it. The unnatural cold in her fist vanished, replaced by a sharp crack, like a frozen twig snapping back into wholeness. The smell of ancient dust and burnt sugar was gone.

She slowly uncurled her fingers. The skull was gone.

A single, perfectly green pea sat in her palm.

“Oh, dear,” Leander panted, still on his knees and theatrically brushing dust from his malachite cloak. He looked up at her, his pretence of Leander the Loser firmly back in its rightful place, eyes wide with forced embarrassment. “My goodness! You’re... you’re simply too quick for me! A winner! A winner!” He declared loudly.

He scrambled to his feet and fumbled for his money pouch. He scooped out her silver stake and a few of his own coins to make up the prize.

“Your winnings, madam! Fair and... well, fair.”

He pressed the coins into her still-open hand. They were all cold metal silvers, the full cost of her bet and her winnings, an exceptional amount of money, but one coin was different.

One coin was warm.

It prickled against her skin. A tiny, familiar, intentional jolt of magic hidden in its depths. Her breath caught. She knew that spell. It was the rudimentary lock-pick charm. A spell so basic, so thief-like, that Ellendor had forbidden it after the first week of its invention some thousand years ago. A spell they had both, undoubtedly used a few times in their tenure as young magically imbued school-kids to play pranks with their classmates’ desk drawers and cupboards. A spell that only a thief, and someone with a great degree of skill would have bothered to perfect to this level.

It was a question. Are you one of us? Are you an outcast too? Are you a thief?

She looked up, her eyes wide, the question on her lips.

But Leander was already gone. The master witch had vanished. Leander the Loser was back, apologizing profusely to the market at large as he tidied his spilled, and scattered stones, lanterns, and peas.

Clover closed her fist, the warm coin a secret, solid weight in her palm. The invitation was sent.

And it was accepted.

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And that’s where the prompt took me! It was so much fun exploring the tension between Leander’s “clumsy trader” act and the sharp, calculating mind beneath it . Clover’s arrival felt like the perfect way to shatter his control and raise the stakes, all springing from that “Two of Cups” connection .

I’m so excited to read everyone else’s entries and see all the different directions this single prompt can take us. What a brilliant way to build a world together.

I’d love to know what you thought, what did the Two of Cups spark for you?

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