As a boy, he was gentle, introspective, and unusually kind. He rarely spoke unless spoken to, but when he did his words were careful and deliberate, as though he weighed them before letting them leave his mouth. Among the carnival children, Dominik was known as dependable and steady — the one who would walk you home without complaint, hold a ladder steady, or listen without interrupting. Ceija adored him. Roza followed him everywhere. Lalitha loved him before she knew what love was, and Dominik — despite every warning his upbringing impressed upon him — loved her back.
Despite his dependability he was never rigid, nor cold. There was warmth in him, a quiet charisma that made others trust him instinctively. People confided in him. Children clung to his hands. Animals calmed under his touch.
He did not seek admiration, but he earned it without trying.
Born to the Vas Carnival
Dominik was born into the Vas family, where discipline and superstition intertwined like braided rope. The Vas Carnival did not thrive on spectacle the way the Veros did. Its magic lay in subtlety, in illusion polished to perfection, in performances that never revealed how close to truth they came. Renáta Vas, his mother, was both leader and oracle: a woman whose tarot and palmistry guided the carnival’s path and whose authority shaped her children’s lives. To be Vas was to understand that some things were not questioned, and that personal desire came second to stability.
From an early age, Dominik learned restraint. Where other children ran wild between the tents, he watched. He listened. He learned to read people and situations, to anticipate tension before it surfaced, to take responsibility without being asked. He did not resent this burden; it felt natural to him, as though some part of him had always known that his role was to serve, to protect, to endure.
The Weight of Leadership
As the eldest Vas child, Dominik carried responsibilities that extended far beyond the stage. Renáta watched him closely from an early age, teaching him not just illusion, but the burdens of command. She expected him to understand the balance of the carnival as a living entity: the schedules, the tensions, the rivalries, and the fragile loyalties that kept families together and the carnival moving.
Renáta’s lessons were subtle. She rarely issued direct orders; instead, she presented situations and let Dominik navigate them, correcting missteps later with quiet guidance or a pointed glance. Sometimes she tested him publicly, letting him mediate disputes in front of performers or visitors, watching how he handled tension without revealing frustration or indecision. Each success earned her a nod, each failure a silent weighing in her mind.
Dominik understood that being the eldest meant he would one day inherit more than an act — it was the future of the carnival itself. He learned to negotiate with suppliers, balance the needs of families, and anticipate logistical crises before they arose. Every mistake could ripple outward; every decision had consequence. In this way, Dominik became more than a performer. He became the anchor, the steadying hand behind the music, the illusions, and the spectacle.
Despite the weight, Dominik never resented Renáta. He respected her mind, admired her authority, and recognised the sacrifices she made to maintain the Vas legacy. But their relationship was a delicate dance. She could be exacting, critical, and unyielding, and he had to learn to take instruction without letting it harden him. The lessons of restraint, discipline, and foresight were intertwined with his deepest fears: that he could fail those who relied on him, that the wildness of his soul might one day overwhelm his careful balance.
Renáta’s influence shaped both the man and the performer. Onstage, Dominik learned precision and control; offstage, he learned strategy, foresight, and patience. His natural charisma and quiet authority made others trust him instinctively, but the trust was earned through diligence, care, and adherence to responsibility. Even as he danced on the edge of latent power and untamed instinct, he understood that his life had always been larger than his desires.
Echoes of the Grove
Roza has always inspired him in ways he cannot name. Even as a child she was brilliance and motion, fearless and unrestrained where Dominik was cautious and precise. She spoke through music and movement, while he spoke through structure and intent. Together, they became the Vas act — not a performance of spectacle, but of presence.
Onstage, Roza led with her violin, her melodies pulling the audience’s attention where she willed it. Dominik stood beside her, the magician in plain sight, his hands steady and deliberate as he shaped the illusion itself. Objects vanished at his touch. Lights bent and lingered. Motion flowed where motion should not have been possible. Everything moved as though guided by an unseen rhythm, too fluid to be fake.
The act felt alive.
Dominik could feel it most sharply in those moments — the strange, electric sense of standing at the edge of something vast. Roza’s presence, the way her music flowed with instinct and emotion, unlocked a freedom he rarely allowed himself offstage. His movements loosened. His instincts sharpened. The careful discipline drilled into him since childhood did not disappear, but it became a frame rather than a cage. In her company, he could let just the tiniest spark of himself slip through, enhancing the act and giving it a vitality that captivated audiences. It was not recklessness; it was trust, choreography bound not only to precision but to intuition, emotion, and the unspoken dialogue between him and Roza.
Here, within the circle of the stage, the wildness was permitted.
The illusion was flawless because it felt true. Animals reacted to him differently after performances. Children watched him with unblinking focus. Adults left unsettled, unable to name why the tricks felt less like deception and more like revelation. Dominik noticed these things, filed them away, and told himself it was nothing more than talent honed to its peak.
They told themselves it was craft.
Dominik told himself that whatever stirred beneath his skin — whatever made the act feel closer to ritual than performance, closer to invocation than illusion — could be controlled. That as long as it remained bound to choreography, timing, and Roza’s guiding music, it would never slip beyond his grasp.
The stage was sacred because it had boundaries. And Dominik had always believed that boundaries were enough.
Lalitha Vero
Lalitha was the exception to his careful equilibrium. If she was firelight, Dominik was the stone ring around it.
Her music was wild, untrained, incandescent. She sang as though the world itself were listening, improvised as though rules were optional. Being near her made Dominik feel exposed, unmoored, aware of everything he kept carefully contained. She was chaos, brilliance, and hunger for life all at once — and he loved her for it. Their relationship unfolded slowly, cautiously, watched by everyone and sanctioned by no one. For Dominik, loving Lalitha felt like stepping into sunlight without armour.
With her, he could let the smallest hint of himself escape: a shared glance, a hand brushing hers, a quiet smile in the middle of the carnival’s noise.
Each fleeting moment felt like stealing sunlight.
Dominik’s love for her was patient but fervent. He admired her spontaneity, her unfiltered creativity, the way she could coax music from the simplest gestures or the dimmest instruments. She reminded him, in ways he could not articulate, that life could be more than discipline, control, and service. That joy could be unmeasured. That wildness was not inherently dangerous if approached carefully.
By the time he was twenty-two, he could no longer imagine a future that did not include her. He proposed quietly, sincerely, believing that love and loyalty would be enough.
Renáta did not hesitate. In front of the carnival, she performed a reading for the union, as she often did for matters of marriage and legacy. The cards and symbols she laid out were interpreted for all to see. Whispers spread immediately: the fortune suggested the marriage would be barren — not only in children but in spirit. The audience murmured, uncertain whether this was warning, ritual, or spectacle. Lalitha’s fiery gaze met Dominik’s, questioning, but he said nothing.
Later, when the crowd had dispersed, Renáta spoke to him privately. Her voice was measured, deliberate, carrying the weight of authority and truth.
“It is not that she cannot bear children,” she said, anticipating his unspoken objection. “That lie is convenient, yes—but you cannot argue it. The reading must stand publicly. What matters is that she is not suited to share your life as a wife or a mother. She burns too brightly, too unpredictably. You need someone who can carry the burdens alongside you, not become another one. You are the eldest Vas. Your life is not only yours.”
Dominik understood immediately why he could not argue.
To challenge her would fracture the fragile balance of the carnival, strain already-tense rivalries, and place Lalitha in the center of conflict she never asked for. He loved her too much to do that to her. And so he accepted the refusal, not because it was easy, but because it was right.
If he could not offer her a future, it was kinder to stay away.
From that moment on, he kept his distance. He did not linger where she played music. He did not seek her out. He did not explain himself, because explanations would only reopen wounds. Loving her became something quiet and private, something carried rather than acted upon. It was the first great sacrifice of his life, and it shaped everything that followed.
The Awakening
They had reached Moscow when the act, once purely craft, began to shift. At first, it was subtle: a light lingering too long, a shadow moving unexpectedly, an object disappearing and reappearing with a grace that defied mechanics. During one performance, as Roza’s violin swelled, the world seemed to bend. Curtains lifted in a gust he had not summoned, shadows danced independently, and the air hummed with a vibration that made his chest ache. He did not know what channeling was. He only knew that something immense and dangerous answered him when he reached for control.
A week later, the price of reaching beyond craft became painfully clear. Dominik grew violently Sick. Fever burned through him, shaking his body, searing his mind. He dreamt of impossible lights, of space folding around him, of roaring forests and rushing rivers, of standing alone on a stage vast enough to swallow the world.
When he recovered, he emerged changed. The illness had been brutal, but it had also been a crucible.
The realisation terrified him.
Power, to Dominik, had never been something to enjoy. It was something to restrain. Something that could destroy if mishandled. Instinctively, he bound it to rules: to choreography, to gesture, to Roza’s music. He allowed himself to touch it only within the rigid structure of performance, believing that if it lived only onstage, it could not consume him elsewhere. Echoes of the Grove transformed from performance into a controlled space where he could explore the power safely. Each illusion, each gesture, each movement became a binding, a ritualised channel for the wild energy that surged through him.
The power was intoxicating and horrifying in equal measure. He feared losing control — not for himself, but for those around him. For Roza. For Lalitha. For the family and carnival that relied on his steadiness. Every use of his power felt like walking the edge of a blade. For Dominik the first lesson of power, desire, and duty was that the most dangerous magic was not the one he wielded — it was the part of himself that wanted to let it go.
The Anchor
When the Vas Carnival finally anchored itself in Moscow, Dominik withdrew further into responsibility. The wandering life of tents and open roads was over; now the family had a permanent home, and with it, a new weight of expectations. He oversaw the logistics of daily operations, negotiated permits with wary city officials, and acted as Renáta’s emissary to the outside world. His words, measured and deliberate, carried authority, and his presence alone often quelled disputes before they could escalate.
He still performed with Roza, but only when necessary — and always with caution. Every movement, every gesture, every note of her violin became a framework to contain what he had glimpsed in the power. The act retained its magic, its pulse of wildness, but Dominik’s role had shifted. Echoes of the Grove was no longer just a performance; it was a rehearsal for self-control, a stage on which he could practice mastery over a power that terrified him. Vigilance had become second nature.
He avoided Lalitha still.
Not because his love had faded but because love, for Dominik, had become something demanding vigilance and restraint. To be near her was to risk wanting what he could not allow himself to take: freedom, joy, a life unbound by caution. To love her openly would have been a betrayal, not of her, but of everything he had sworn to protect — the family, the carnival, and the fragile balance of control he clung to.
Even as he watched her from a distance, he carried the ache of absence quietly, tucked beneath the careful composure that defined him. He allowed himself fleeting glimpses of what might have been in private, in the briefest sparks of memory or music, but he never reached for them. To do so would be to invite chaos into a world he had spent a lifetime learning to manage.
Fracture in the Grove
The final unravelling did not come from Dominik.
It came from Roza.
When Renáta discovered her with Esper, the confrontation ignited immediately — voices raised, fury echoing through the house, the thin walls between family and spectacle collapsing all at once. Roza, defiant and incandescent, raised a barrier between herself and her mother, not in fear but in declaration. The magic held firm as Renáta shouted her name in Hungarian, pounding against an invisible wall she could not pass.
The entire household woke to it. Then the carnival.
There was no quiet resolution, no private reckoning. Roza announced her decision plainly, without apology: she and Esper were leaving together. That the caravan was not the life she chose. That love, once named, could not be folded back into obedience.
Renáta raged, but even in her fury, there was a performative edge to it. The spectacle was deliberate. Authority had to be seen defending itself. Pride and punishment tangled in her voice as she condemned the choice publicly, even as some deeper, complicated part of her understood it. Children, after all, were meant to find their own paths — even when those paths cut away from the family.
Their departure was immediate and irrevocable. No farewell performance. No explanations offered to the wider carnival. By morning, their rooms were empty, their instruments gone, their absence echoing louder than any argument could have.
For Dominik, it felt like losing the ground beneath his feet.
Echoes of the Grove ended not with a final bow, but with silence. Without Roza, there was no act — no music to guide the illusion, no shared rhythm to anchor him. He did not attempt to perform alone. The act had never been about spectacle; it had been about balance. Without her, there was nothing to hold the wildness safely in place.
And so he stopped.
The stage, once sacred, became forbidden.
Dominik bore the aftermath without protest. He mediated arguments, absorbed blame, and redirected fury away from Roza and Esper as much as he could without openly defying Renáta. He became the quiet wall between his mother’s authority and the carnival’s fracture, working tirelessly to prevent the rift from splintering the community beyond repair.
He became quieter after that. More contained. The warmth remained — people still trusted him, still sought him out — but the part of him that had once felt alive onstage went dormant. The wildness did not disappear; it simply went underground, coiled tight and waiting.
Dominik Vas did not break.
But something within him closed.
Family
Roza: Their bond is profound, forged through years of performing together. Dominik admires her fearlessness, creativity, and emotional expressiveness, while she leans on his steadiness. Their act, Echoes of the Grove, was a shared language long before words could convey their trust. Even after the act ended, he feels a deep, almost paternal protectiveness toward her, though tinged with sorrow at her leaving.
Viktoria: As the eldest sister, Viktoria is independent and self-assured. Dominik respects her autonomy and often serves as her confidant when family tensions rise. Their relationship is one of mutual respect more than overt affection, but there is warmth beneath the formality.
Kada and Albert: Dominik is naturally nurturing toward his younger brothers. He teaches through example, offering guidance rather than commands, and quietly ensures they avoid dangers he has seen firsthand. The boys trust him instinctively, often seeking his approval or just his calm presence in times of uncertainty.
Nusa: With the youngest sibling, Dominik’s role is almost protective in the most literal sense — watching over her, entertaining her, and ensuring she is safe within the circus’s chaotic world.
Esper : Though not a blood relative, Dominik treats Esper as family, offering mentorship and guidance. He is cautious around her, knowing her bond with Roza, and after her departure, he carries a quiet sense of loss — not just for the act, but for the family unity that once was.
Personality
Dominik Vas is, at first glance, calm, deliberate, and dependable – the embodiment of steadiness in a world built on spectacle and chaos. As the eldest child of the Vas family, he carries responsibilities beyond his years, understanding intuitively that his choices ripple through the lives of others.
Dominik is fiercely loyal. He keeps his word, protects those he loves, and will sacrifice his own desires for the safety or happiness of others. He is a protector, a guide, and often the silent force behind the scenes, ensuring that the carnival functions flawlessly even when his contributions go unnoticed.
Fear is a constant companion. He knows the danger inherent in the power that has awakened within him. He understands that without careful control, the same power that enchants could also destroy. This fear sharpens him, teaching vigilance, patience, and precision. It makes him cautious in love, in magic, and in life itself, and it fuels his drive to master his abilities rather than be mastered by them.
Despite this, Dominik is not without passion. He feels deeply, loves fiercely, and is drawn to brilliance and beauty wherever he finds it. Music, performance, and artistry stir something primal in him — the part of his soul that has lived through wild gods and restless knights. Yet he tempers these impulses with discipline, aware that the line between inspiration and catastrophe is thinner than most can imagine.
Past Lives
RAFO
0 Comments