With the establishment of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1689 and its enforcement in 1692, the affairs of the Muggle world gradually slipped from the attention of magical society. What began as a policy of concealment hardened over generations into a culture of disengagement. Behind their wards and glamours, magical communities preserved familiar institutions and inherited customs, increasingly content to mistake their separation from the wider world for independence from it.

The two branches of humanity consequently drifted further apart. The smaller magical population dwindled, its losses only partly replenished by children born unexpectedly into nonmagical families, while beyond its hidden boundaries the Muggle world grew in numbers, industrial capacity, and technological sophistication. News of its upheavals still reached wizarding society, but often stripped of context or dismissed as a distant concern. By the twentieth century, much of magical Europe understood neither the scale of the societies surrounding it nor how readily their resources might be turned toward magical ends—a blindness the Order of the Last Dawn had no intention of sharing.

The Order was an ancient organization on the fringes of European magical society, its beliefs abhorrent even to most practitioners of the Dark Arts. Where others sought conquest, immortality, or racial supremacy, the Order sought renewal through annihilation. To its adherents, magical and nonmagical humanity alike had become a stagnant pool, sustained by institutions that preserved weakness and suppressed transformation. Whatever survived the destruction of that world would deserve to inherit what followed—and the Order intended to stand among its masters.

Its forbidden texts spoke of primordial powers said to have shaped creation before being imprisoned beyond the reach of ordinary magic. Their release would unravel the conditions upon which human civilization depended, a prospect the Order regarded not as a warning but as a promise. For centuries, however, its ambitions exceeded its means. Scattered cults, wealthy patrons, and stolen manuscripts could sustain clandestine research and isolated atrocities, but not the vast excavations, territorial access, and human sacrifices its undertaking demanded.

The collapse of Imperial Germany and the rise of National Socialism provided an opening. With occasional, discreet assistance from Gellert Grindelwald, the Order infiltrated the movement through influential patrons, trusted advisers, and obscure but indispensable officials. Grindelwald believed its discoveries might serve his own ambitions; the Order encouraged that misunderstanding. As Germany rearmed and expanded throughout the thirties, its members gained access to industrial resources, protected research sites, transport networks, and a machinery of persecution whose victims could be made to disappear into secret projects.

The Nazi leadership remained responsible for its own ideology and crimes; the Order neither created those ambitions nor needed to direct every decision. It offered services and promises of power while concealing its work within military budgets, confiscation records, and restricted facilities. Excavations became strategic surveys, ancient sanctuaries became research installations, and prisoners vanished behind falsified transfer orders. By the time something began answering from beneath the oldest sites, the Order had finally acquired what centuries of secrecy had denied it: a state willing to open the doors it had found.