Year 662 — The Proto-Alchemist Organization Formalizes
Demetria, Thanatos Order Practitioner
Daphne had died in the year 658, at the age of ninety-seven, having spent her final decades establishing the specific framework that the Thanatos Order would eventually be built on. The Order itself, however, had continued to develop beyond what Daphne had established, moving toward something more formal, more organized, more explicitly committed to the documentation and understanding of the supernatural world.
By the year 662, the Thanatos Order had approximately one hundred and forty practitioners spread across multiple territories. The organization had developed specific protocols for documentation, for the training of new practitioners, and for the relationship between human practitioners and the various supernatural communities.
The specific tension that was beginning to emerge was between those practitioners who believed the Order should focus purely on documentation and those who believed it should take a more active role in managing the relationship between human and supernatural worlds.
Demetria found herself in the pragmatist position — she believed that documentation without engagement with the communities being documented was insufficient for accuracy. The human practitioners needed to understand the supernatural world from the inside, not just from external observation.
"We cannot document the moroi courts' internal structure without access to the courts," she argued, in one of the formal meetings where the Order's approach was being debated. "We cannot understand how the dragon clans make decisions without participation in those decisions. The framework that allows us to do this documentation is the Covenant, and the Covenant works through engagement with the communities."
"Engagement compromises objectivity," another practitioner argued — his name was Severus, and he represented the faction that wanted the Order to maintain complete independence from the supernatural communities. "We become advocates for the positions of the communities we engage with. We lose the capacity to see them clearly because we are inside their frameworks."
"We gain the capacity to see them from the inside," Demetria countered. "Which is where they actually exist. External observation produces a specific kind of knowledge, but it is a limited knowledge. It is the knowledge of observing a system without understanding the logic that drives the system."
The debate continued across multiple meetings, with neither side entirely willing to accept the other's position. Eventually, a compromise was reached: the Order would maintain engagement with the Covenant and the various supernatural communities, but it would also establish protocols for maintaining objectivity in documentation, procedures for ensuring that practitioners did not become too aligned with specific communities' interests.
It was an unstable compromise, Demetria understood, but it was the best that could be negotiated between the two positions.