Cirque de Freya, A History

[severus allen snape]

Every great story has a beginning. Someone or something is born into this world and it changes and alters some aspect of life. When Freya King entered this world, people should have known she would be a revolution. She had this presence, even in her infancy, that suggested there was more out there. As she grew older, she could only ever be described as unique. She was this proud woman who was filled to the brim with eccentricities that were waiting to be discovered and cherished. Freya was beautiful and strange and dark and mysterious. She represented so many things to those around her and she didn’t mind being in the spotlight.

The young Freya King ran away from home at twelve. She had been raised by a very conventional Wizarding family. She could never belong there and she couldn’t possibly be content with such a mundane and ordinary life. She started to travel the world and fill her mind with ideas. She gathered them up like treasures. She opened her mind to cultures and magic and how the two mixed together and clashed. And she met people. Freya loved people. She began to surround herself with them. Some, she asked to join her in her travels. Other, she kept correspondence with. Each of these people was unique, like her. She had plans for them. She would wait and then she would call them to her side for her greatest project yet.

She was nineteen when she summoned all her acquaintances forth to take part in her show. She had made enough contacts and gathered enough resources to make her life almost too easy. She had a dream. She dreamt of creating a place where people like her would be normal, would be a family. That was all Freya craved, a family. Most of the people she had met were eager to join her. They loved her ideas. Freya dreamt of a world where magic and muggles could inter-mix and seem ordinary. A circus. That was how Freya would do things.

Being the proud young woman she had always been, Freya named her circus after herself. Around the age of twenty-three, she had a son whom she insisted upon giving her own last name. She would pass down her circus through the King family name. It was her way of carrying the family that she had so long ago left behind with her. Part of her wished they had accepted her as she was.

Freya King passed away at only forty-years-old. Her son buried her in the cemetery that her parents had been laid to rest in years earlier. He continued on with her circus and kept their family going. He respected and loved his mother and believed in many of the things she did. He wanted to keep her memory pure and to make sure Cirque de Freya was never tainted. He never knew that all his efforts would be wasted.

As the line went on, Freya’s great grandson was brought into the King family. He was promptly named Arcturus King and would be the new ringmaster of the circus someday. As a child, Arcturus listened to his mother and father preach the things Freya had believed in. Arcturus had never understood those beliefs. Arcturus was more like Freya than anyone would ever imagine, yet he couldn’t manage to see her ideas in the same light she did. He didn’t think it was important that magic and muggles mix. He didn’t want anyone mixing. Arcturus wanted them all hidden. He wanted everything hidden. He couldn’t possibly stop running his family’s strongest legacy. But he could stop preaching the things they had preached his entire life.

Arcturus took to drinking and going off on his own. It was in a pub in Ireland on a late night in October that he met a man who said he could help Arcturus change. Arcturus had spent far too long feeling depressed, feeling confused. He listened to the man who seemed capable of reading his mind. He liked the things he was being told. It was only a week before Arcturus King had been marked and brought among the elite numbers of a certain group. He was told that someday, his circus could be put to good use. Someday, he would be asked to step forward and bring his people with him. Arcturus eagerly agreed that it wouldn’t be difficult for him to do so. He was dragging his family into a war that he didn’t realize he had been fighting since he was a child.

Arcturus had been contacted and told that he would need to take a few new faces into their family. They would also be stationed right next to Freya King’s birthplace for a year’s time. No more travel. Cirque de Freya was taking a break. They were coming home. Many people were happy to settle, not knowing what was in store. But now, as things amongst the performers and workers grow darker, people are beginning to question why they have stopped moving. Some of the oldest circus families are dying out strange deaths that are unexplainable. And too many new people have been joining their ranks. People are worried. What’s coming of their family? Arcturus King refuses to give out any real explanations. Cirque de Freya has taken a turn and nothing will ever be the same.