(~900 Years Ago)
Humans had lived in Nod for millennia before the Order existed. They survived through ingenuity, numbers, and the pragmatic alliances they built with sympathetic non-humans. The Order arose from the chaos of the Theriea war and failure such alliances.
The pivotal event for formation of the order occurred in a human district in the eastern quarter that had maintained a mutual defense pact with a Theriae pack for several generations. When the pack's leadership changed, the new alpha repudiated the agreement and claimed the district's territory. The human residents were given the choice of submission or expulsion. A group of them chose neither, and fought the pack to a standstill, using tactics and experience developed operating learned as mercenaries during the Theriae wars.
The survivors of that fight formed the nucleus of the Order. Their original purpose was defensive: organized human self-protection in a city where humans were prey. Within two generations, the organization's leadership had shifted from pragmatic defense to ideological supremacy, driven by a succession of leaders who found it easier to recruit through hatred than through caution. The current Regent, Gregory White, is the culmination of that trajectory.
The Order's founding is recent enough that some of the older human communities remember what existed before it. Several of the smaller human districts in the western quarter still operate under the older model, maintaining their own multi-species defense arrangements and refusing Order presence.