Name: Antonin Dominik Baracnik
Gender: Male
Age: 791
Apparent Age: Late Twenties
Place of Birth: Bohemia
Species: Vampire
Coven: Ishak
Appearance: Dominik is tall and distinguished. He has short, straight black hair and blue eyes. His face is a squarish one with hard lines. His hands, once hardened by the labor of a mortal farmer, are strong and firm. He is muscular, but not grotesquely so. He is often seen wearing clothes of a dark nature – reds and grays and black, mostly, though sometimes he wears dark blues as well. A large, ornate gold ring with a faceted round ruby set into it rests upon his right forefinger; on the middle finger of his right hand rests another gold ring, this one with a black square upon it that bears a silver emblem: a sword crossed with a spear.
History: He was born into a simple family in Bohemia over seven hundred years ago. He was not a poor farmer, but neither was he rich. He worked hard and his hands became calloused and rough. He took a wife named Adele when he was twenty-four and eventually inherited his family’s land. He did well by his wife and the three-year-old daughter, named after his wife, that he eventually came by.
But then tragedy struck.
The Mongols came hard and fast to Bohemia. Many farms were burned, many families were killed, and those that lived were force to flee their homes and villages. Dominik was one of these. He and his wife carried their daughter away from the Mongols’ brutal assaults – only to be ambushed by men as desperate as they. Thinking them to be collaborators, they killed Dominik’s wife and daughter and tried to kill Dominik. Dominik escaped with his life, if only barely, and spent several days without food or shelter mourning his loss.
Then he found the means for his revenge.
Banislav was a very powerful vampire of over three thousand years. He had known and seen much. He took pity on Dominik and turned him, giving him the chance for revenge. Immediately, he slaughtered a group of Mongols that came upon him only a few weeks after his turning. In truth, he’d been waiting for them. He slaughtered every last one of them. Then he hunted down and killed the men that had slain his wife and daughter. The Mongols had started the war, but those too desperate for words had killed the only people still with him in the world that he truly cared for. Friends were good, but they were fleeting; family was what was most important, and the monsters had slain his. Before the last one died, he called Dominik a monster. Dominik slowly began to realize then what he had become, but he slew the last man nonetheless.
He became dead inside. He quickly grew to love few things and ceased to care for anything but his own advancement. His sire, Banislav, taught him to wield a sword with a skill few achieved. He became a sword master of some repute, and it wasn’t long before he was slaughtering every Mongol raiding party that he came across with extreme prejudice. Indeed, the void that had developed after the loss of his wife and very young daughter was now being filled with hatred and rage that the Mongols could not compete with. In the end, though, he eventually withdrew. His anger toward the Mongols was only fleeting, and the void returned. He became as cold and heartless as his sire, who delighted in manipulating mortals for his own pleasure and gain. He eventually used this against his sire by manipulating the Mongols into attacking him; while he was busy, Dominik himself rushed and slaughtered every last one of the combatants – including his own sire.
With his sire dead, his last ties to his home country were severed. Banislav, according the journals found in his study, wasn’t Banislav at all. Banislav had been an alias. That was why he had spoken such fluent English. That was why he had been able to teach it to Dominik so well. Now Dominik had a place to go. He used the maps in his sire’s study and his notes on the various societies he’d visited to master the language he’d learned. He traveled casually, selling much that the Mongols had taken from others (and which he had taken from them) in order to fund his private excursion to England.
His accent, he knew, would mark him as an outsider. Yet he had little other choice. He knew no one and nothing now, and had no one and nothing to go back to. Besides that, he could not bear to go back to his home country. There was too much pain there. He chose to forget.
He quickly built himself a new life in England. First he joined a stage group that put on plays, and he quickly ‘convinced’ them to stay in the area and let him take the lead. He learned well the trade of stage acting and managed to grow quite wealthy. He slept in a sewer to avoid the sun and acted during the night. At the end of the night, he would take a victim to feed upon. He saved his wealth, needing little (if any) of it, and eventually purchased a small plot of land upon which he had built a large house. It was no mansion, but it was elegant enough. It was there that he began to ‘fortify’ himself. He realized then just how powerful he really was, for he began to tap into the wealth of local patrons. It wasn’t long before he married a woman for her wealth, murdered her and her family, and then disappeared from sight. This was the beginning of a campaign that lasted for almost two hundred years.
He took on many names during this time, seeking to remain as anonymous as possible. He married 17 women in a row before he finally started using his wealth to bring in victims. Rumors began to grow around the area now known as West Wiltshire that there was a monster roaming the countryside and killing people. Most of these rumors were laughed off, of course, but this only helped to keep Dominik well-hidden – except from the Tarepha. It seemed that attention was eventually drawn to the group with which Dominik acted; the Tarepha noticed. The man who’d called himself Banislav was an independent, but the Tarepha didn’t like independents in their district. They invited Dominik to stay with them; he welcomed them, as they were the first vampires he’d met other than his sire. They then began weaving their web to trap him, continually placing more and more duties upon him within the coven until he was reduced to nothing more than their lap dog. When he tried to rebel, they chained him to a dungeon wall and left him there – after weakening him first, of course.
He didn’t know how long he was there, but when he finally escaped he killed several Tarepha. They began to hunt for him, not wanting it to be known that people could join the Tarepha and then leave whenever they wanted.
It was late in the fifteenth century that they finally tracked him down. He killed over a dozen of them before the Amman intervened. He was deemed a protected member of the Amman and left the abandoned farmhouse in which he’d taken refuge in order to join them. He did not become a member with the duties generally bestowed upon a member of the Amman, but rather a guest under their wing. They allowed him to build his own castle and furnish it in whatever manner he thought fit so long as he did not draw too much attention to his existence as a vampire. His wealth had been recovered (mostly) and half of it was returned to him. The other half went to the Amman both as payment for their protection and as payment for the trouble they went through to keep the other twenty or so Tarepha that had been there to kill Dominik that night from completing their task.
Indeed, the only reason Dominik was alive and hidden from the Tarepha was that the Amman had saved him from certain destruction at their hands. So he kept quite and safe in his castle until the seventeenth century. It was during that time that the English Civil War came about. It had both political and combative properties to it and was actually a series of three civil wars with a small period of peace between each of them. He manipulated a large number of people in both wars, greatly increasing the wealth and influence of the Amman over Great Britain and earning himself a bit of respect among the Amman in the process.
When the Battle of Worcester came about, it lasted long into the night – and that’s when Dominik stepped in. He helped to win the third of the civil war on the side of the Parliament by slaughtering dozens that had been holding the line. His strength and speed, combined with his skill with the sword, had made him a fearsome opponent; the mortals didn’t stand a chance. In the end, though, he disappeared from sight once more. Only the Amman knew where he was, for he had taken his wealth with him; he had even gone so far as to sell the castle and remove himself from Wiltshire completely. His house was a modest one and his wealth was well-hidden in underground passages that ended in a series of underground living chambers. This was his real home, of course. He began to take on familiars at this time, who dwelt in the house above-ground under his rule. His wealth kept them fed and safe, and they kept him hidden and secret. He eventually began to spend more and more time underground, sending his ‘lackeys’ out to do things in his place. It wasn’t long before he became somewhat of a mythical figure. Few knew his name and fewer still knew his whereabouts. As time passed, even the Amman ceased to watch him – for there was clearly no need – and the Tarepha forgot about him.
By this time, though they were not completely forgotten, the wife and daughter of the no-longer-mortal Dominik had faded into distant memory. Dominik’s campaigns of war and his manipulations of the mortal world in order to further his own goals had brought him to a point where he was no longer anything like the peasant farmer he had once been. As a mortal, he had been a kindly farmer with a love for the simple things in life: family, friends, and coming home to them after a hard day’s work. After nearly four centuries of life, however, he had become something far different. He was cold, calculating, methodical – and brutal. He had, perhaps of necessity, become a warlord – in nature, if not in practice – and had survived by becoming both a cunning warrior and a suspicious noble. No longer affiliated with the Amman, Dominik was nonetheless a dangerous opponent indeed.
Perhaps that is why he spent so long underground. Perhaps he had finally come to grips with his new life and had realized just how different he was. Perhaps he was simply biding his time. Whatever the reason, he came out of his underground home, unassuming and unknown, only when England was at a dead standstill. In truth, there was much going on that he didn’t know about – but the area in which he dwelt was open country, on the Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge lies, and little news came to him there.
He did meet another vampire during this time, though. She had been sired over a century earlier, and so she was younger than Dominik. But oh, she was beautiful. Her name was Rebecca. The two of them spent a lot of time together, becoming very good friends. Indeed, they might have become romantically involved had they been inclined to. But Rebecca, though she had some inclination to do so, was willing to respect the fact that her ‘companion’ of the time was more a businessman than a lover. She knew little of his past and didn’t care to know any more than what little she already knew, for it was in the past and not her concern, but she often got the feeling that there was a bit of sadness in Dominik where love was concerned. She never pressed the issue, though, even when they talked in jest of marriage. Eventually, Rebecca decided to pursue certain interests in Egypt. This was the last time Dominik saw her, and after a while he grew to long for her companionship once more – her laughter, mostly. He has longed for her ever since to varying degrees.
When Rebecca went to Egypt, Dominik traveled to London to see what had become of England during his absence. It seemed much of the city had been destroyed some years earlier by what is now known as the Great Fire of London. It had happened in 1666. Some of the city had remained, though, and some parts had been rebuilt. Trade, though, had also begun to grow again. Indeed, heavy trade was taking place with such distant countries as Japan and China. To keep himself busy and learn what he could of present climate and society, Dominik took on the name John Harper and began to invest heavily in the oversea trade industry. His wealth was a wonderful asset and enabled him to purchase a large mansion in the heart of the city and two large trade ships called the Silk Prince and the Dominating Reef. Indeed, much of his gold and silver were then transferred to secret holds on board the Silk Prince. When the Dominating Reef was attacked and burned beyond repair in 1713, he decided to make an exit. It seemed people didn’t like him dominating anything, especially the south London trading district. He sold his mansion and moved onto his ship. He moved the ship about, staying on the seas, for a number of years. He did visit port on a regular basis to obtain victims and food for his familiars, but he eventually came to realize that his familiars were only slowing him down. He finished them off one by one and soon became completely alone once more.
Dominik eventually came to France and remained there. It was a country that had some dealings with England, but it was not a part of Britain and in fact was in no way closely connected to it. He docked there and lived on his ship, learning the French language and schooling himself in French society. At the time, the Monarchy ruled France. Portraying himself as a foreign noble, he eventually managed to get into King Louis XVI’s court and became a casual friend of his. However, the two were in much disagreement on a number of issues and the king was eventually so offended by Dominik’s views on slavery and other such issues that he cast him out of the court. Dominik was severely irritated by this. He could have simply given him a few suggestions to resolve the matter, but the French Revolution had started by this time and he decided to just end it. He had the perfect excuse, too. He helped the revolutionaries to get to the king and his wife.
When told of the execution after, he laughed. It appeared that the king and his wife had been pompous fools who care more for their own safety than for one another’s, and both seemed to struggle far too much for the revolutionaries’ tastes. It was all for naught in the end, though, as they both fell to the guillotine.
When Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of the Republic at the end of the eighteenth century, Dominik disappeared yet again. He was considered just another noble slain in the aftermath of the Revolution only ten years earlier and he was quickly forgotten. Dominik, however, stayed near France. He sold his ship and lived just outside Paris. There was something about France that appealed to him; he just couldn’t take himself away.
Beneath his house, Dominik began to slowly but surely dig out a series of seemingly endless passages and secret tunnels that he used both for his personal living quarters and for his newfound taste in alcohol. By the middle of the nineteenth century, he had amassed a vast collection of bottles anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old in his underground wine cellar. He used a number of the rooms down there to hold victims for later feedings, but he was beginning to realize that people were growing suspicious. So he moved himself away to Marseille. It seemed that the city was starting to become an industrial enterprise. Marseille had embraced the French Revolution by sending five hundred volunteers to help the revolutionaries, and now they were thriving on manufacturing plants. Dominik stayed out of the public eye, taking only brief news here and there but otherwise enjoying the luxury that his wealth afforded him. The rise of the French Empire only helped to make the city wealthier and Dominik spent his time as a French noble named Donatien Bertrand. He worked as an artist and contributed heavily to the Louvre’s wealth of beautiful ‘modern’ art (works from the last two to three centuries). He mostly did paintings, though he also donated a number of sculptures. He also took up the violin during this time and eventually became quite a talented musician. He played in a number of operas that earned him a place in the French history books documenting musicians of the nineteenth century. Of course, no one realized that Donatien Bertrand – about whom little was actually known – was really a six-hundred-year-old vampire named Dominik who’d played a major role in France’s recent history. That, of course, was as it should have been.
Eventually, though, he had to stop dressing up as an old man and move away from Marseille. There was only so much time one could spend in any given place, after all, when one was a vampire. He returned to Paris and found that much had changed. As the twentieth century came to fruition, Paris was becoming what would now be called an almost ‘modern’ society. The city was becoming wealthier and developing much in the way of its present style of buildings and streets. Indeed, much had changed and was continuing to change as Jacques Bordeaux came into Paris. It was also here that Dominik met the Ishak.
The Ishak knew much about Dominik’s activities and they were amused. His paintings and sculptures were beautiful and his music was very well-done indeed. However, the Ishak apparently also agreed that independents that went unchecked for too long were dangerous. They ‘inducted’ him into the Ishak and he accepted it. He quickly found that his own opinions were much matched by those of the Ishak, and it wasn’t long before he became a respected member of their coven.
He was different in his abilities, though. While he did drink ever night as most of them did, any sunlight at all burned him very badly; to him, it was like pouring acid on his body. Most of the Ishak, he discovered, could survive in diffuse sunlight. There were a few who were like Dominik, but not many. He also discovered that none of them had any talent whatsoever with telekinesis. Dominik, on the other hand, was a very powerful telekinetic. The Ishak did not mesmerize and command mortals the way Dominik did, but they did kill their victims – and violently – just as Dominik did. Dominik had not developed the ability to fly, but he could become a tide of rolling mist, though, and this gave him at least some status within the coven. He had also discovered by this time that he could blend into the shadows as easily as though he were a shadow himself. Dominik, though, had no fear of crosses. He had a reflection, but was always pale until he fed; then he became slightly more flesh-toned and appeared more as a slightly pale fellow rather than as a walking corpse.
Despite the differences, though, Dominik quickly learned that the covens – while unchanged for the most part over the last few centuries – were no so spread out as they once were. They now had much more closely-knit groups and members kept in touch with one another on a regular basis. The Ishak themselves had numerous businesses and contacts outside of France, including overseas in the United States and Canada. Only the Amman seemed to be absolutely everywhere; they had spies in virtually every city that had a vampire in it in Europe and Asia and policed a number of major cities in the U. S. and Canada. The Amman might not be that large, the Ishak said, but they were certainly very well-informed. In response, though, the Ishak were starting to get bolder with what they did. They were starting to feed in more public places, and already several French nobles were under suspicion of murder because of the Ishak’s activities. In short, they were getting cocky – and Dominik smirked at the whole affair. It amused him, watching the Amman run around trying to watch the Ishak and keep their activities from alerting the mortals to their existence. All in all, Dominik himself – already rather arrogant in regard to mortals – became rather pompous due to his affiliation with the Ishak. He became much more like a politician than a noble, with a bit of cocky rebellion thrown in for good measure – just like the rest of the Ishak.
When Marseille was bombed and the Germans occupied the city in the 1940s, the Ishak used Dominik’s ability to influence mortal minds to control their own movement to the part of the city that was not being ‘dealt with’. The entire world, it seemed was in an uproar. A massive war was sweeping the globe and the Nazis were out in full force. Then the Germans occupied Paris and Dominik – who’d returned from his trip to Marseille rather swiftly – managed to keep them out of the Ishak’s hair for the most part. In truth, though, the Ishak prospered under German occupation by providing numerous so-called ‘rebels’ to the Germans and helping them keep order throughout the city. They ordered their members in Marseille to do the same – and so they did. Things fell apart when the Germans were overthrown and Paris was freed; many of the Ishak in the city took their wealth and vanished as a result, ending up in cities other than Marseille and Paris. Dominik went with them.
Dominik and a few others, however, eventually took a plane to New York City, New York, in the United States. It was a completely different experience for Dominik, one he’d never before imagined. It was nothing like Paris or Marseille, industrial centers though they were. It was far denser than either of them and the population there seemed to double each year – if not triple. If there was something NYC didn’t have, they could get it fairly quickly. Dominik had never had a need for automobiles or planes in the past, yet he’d used a plane to get to New York and had actually enjoyed the experience. He’d taken a night flight, of course. Now, too, he was using automobiles to get around the city – specifically a limousine with a hired driver. He owned the limousine himself, of course, but the driver he hired separately. The Ishak were already there and had a rather large mansion on the outskirts of the city that housed a number of members, but the real housing was underground. Hundreds of miles of underground passages furnished as luxuriously as the rooms in Paris stretched from one end of the state to the other and back again. There were several deep levels housing well over four thousand members of the Ishak. Indeed, they had their own internal society down there and rarely went surface-side. There were numerous Ishak throughout the above-ground city, of course, but countless victims were often brought from all over the state by the underground societies’ designated hunters and there was always more than enough blood for everyone despite the large population. There was also a private vault for each member of the Ishak that desired it; Dominik had no problem using it.
When the sixties came around, though, he started investing in a bank in the Cayman Islands that had just sprung up. He later learned it was controlled by the Ishak, which was why he’d been referred to it by a fellow coven member. This pleased him and he left his money there to grow in value over time.
Much news came to Dominik and the other Ishak through the radio and television. The TV, of course, was a rather ingenious invention. There were only three channels, and Dominik could only get two of them in – one of them with only semi-efficient reception – but the news that was given there was quite useful. Most intriguing was how women and blacks were coming up in the world. The Black Panthers were growing highly rebellious and quite dangerous, they said, and women were constantly fighting for the ability to vote and hold office. Indeed, he heard more about the blacks and women’s lib than he did about anything else.
When MLK Jr. started preaching about peaceful demonstration against the racist Caucasians, many laughed it off as just another nigger spouting off against the whites. Dominik, however, did not laugh it off. He knew all too well how dangerous a rebel with a voice could be. True to his word, he watched as tens of thousands rallied to him. He became a lightning rod, but even Dominik was surprised at how quickly the preacher became a national icon.
The twentieth century thus became known to Dominik as the ‘century of change’. Rarely throughout history had Dominik seen one country change as much as the United States did during the latter half of the twentieth century. The fifties were an era of rock n’ roll, the sixties were all about free love, disco dominated the seventies, the eighties was all about rebellion against the ‘New World Order’ and ‘coming out’, and the nineties were something else altogether. During the seventies, he became quite amused by John Travolta’s roles in “Grease”, “Grease 2”, and “Saturday Night Live”. It was during this time that he also began using his wealth to form a bond between NYC and Demaitre, a Canadian city wherein all five known covens apparently resided at once. He was slowly but surely beginning to build up a trade route between the two, with major shipments coming in every week – and not legal shipments, either. By the time the eighties rolled around, some forty billion dollars were at Dominik’s disposal. He finally decided, however, that he wanted to see this city for himself.
Thus it was that Dominik took his leave of New York City then. He went with several Ishak that were planning a two-way trip to Demaitre anyway, but he had most of what he owned (which wasn’t much, but it was enough) shipped to an address in the city. He remained when they left and started moving into a rather large mansion he’d had built there before his trip almost immediately. When he was done, he began to explore the city.
During the course of the eighties and nineties, he continued his illegal trade of such products as cocaine, heroine, automatic weapons, and so on. When the feds started to get to close and it was clear that he couldn’t dissuade them even with his influential practices, he closed up shop and put the blame on someone else. He played the feds’ game and ‘cut a deal’ to point the finger at some Tarepha that had been trying to infringe on his trade territory and the Ishak’s hunting grounds. Needless to say, he had earned the Tarepha’s ire and the Ishak’s respect once more.
Since that time, Dominik has acquired several familiars and has spent most of his time ‘living it up’. He has found that the vampiric presence in the city has spawned some of the hottest clubs he had seen yet, and he had seen many posters in New York of some pretty hot clubs. Presently, he is enjoying life in the heart of Demaitre.
