Paladin

Focus, discipline, service, and a code.
Perhaps a simple guru set you on your path, taught you the code, and everything you have now, you simply gained along the way. You might have learned it from a book or the example of one whose deeds you saw. Perhaps they saved your life. Perhaps you watched them die.
Or you might be a rare self-igniting spark who had a vision, a weird idea, a strange encounter with the other side, or you just started doing it, whatever it is. Can you really submit yourself to a self-created code? Let’s just say you are in the act of finding out.
Hope for the hopeless, you can truthfully say you are. A shield to the weak and death to the unjust and the corrupt.
You know that the true battle is inside you, but the body shapes the mind, and external evil must still be fought, so you choose to walk the path of swords.

THE PATH OF SWORDS
You know the true danger is not to your body, death will only return you to the eternal truth, but to your soul. For you do more than offer aid, or simply heal - you kill.
Out in the Grey, beyond governments and laws, the only judge of life and death circuits round your cutting edge in a chariot of gleams cast from the nacreous sky.
When to fight, who to defend, who and what is 'monster', when to raise the shield or draw the sword - all down to you, and the will of the sleeping gods, whose true servant you are.
Principals are lethal. Every teacher, every book, every lesson and example has taught you that. Mediocre creatures might turn monstrous for money, or to climb a dominance heap, but the real monsters, the most terrible destroyers and insidious corruptors, those who scare you more than you can grasp, are always principled people.
They might be deluded, deranged, manipulative, cold, calculated, insanely violent, omni-destructive or simply wrong, but they always know, absolutely, they are right.
You envy the worldlings, their motivations, money, status, love, will never fail.
They have an idea. A belief. And they pursue it to the very end, no matter the cost.
Just like you.
Your belief sustains you when nothing else will. It lets you, literally sometimes, accomplish miracles.
And there lies the danger.
First, there must be discipline. Then vigils, tests, training, prayer, meditation, more training, and more tests. Test upon test upon test. It has to be hard. You want it to be hard. You do not face these things for some brute material goal. At least in part, it is the challenge itself you seek.
And if that challenge is impossible, you will face it to the very end.
No-one normal wants to be like this. You know that now. There has to be something complex going on inside.
Violent souls are ten-to-the-coin in Blackwater’s bitter margins. And of Sophonts, quite a few; kick over a kettle in the tea-shops of Yga, and learned creatures scuttle out. The faithful also, are not lacking in this land, a shrine here, a congregation there. A few, like you but slower, clanking around enthralling crowds. Even some who, it is said, have been gifted miracles.
But to mash all three up in a sanguine philosopher-priest, then set them loose on Uud with a sword and a high cause; there is the quick of it.
The Tolerance means armed members of the same faith are strongly discouraged from going about together. Exact laws vary, but if you are a theist with a sword and you spend time in public with people of the same faith, who also have swords, then you can expect a visit from the Priests of Tolerance.
But one 'fanatic' hanging out with a bunch of more reasonable, material, secular worldlings is fine, usually.
More importantly, you need to learn, to become a deeper person. The paradox is that to exercise judgment of the world you must have experience in the world. There is much to understand. To act without awareness, without the understanding of context, is a sin, and the route to true fanaticism. So, you value these strange beings, each teaching a different lesson.
And because you like the chatter. In whatever temple or isolated spot you trained, from whatever master or Sifu taught you, there was very little chat. Philosophy, instruction, faith, and technique, yes. Conversation, less so. People talk endlessly about a myriad of interesting and pointless things. You had no idea.

THE ORDERS MILITANT
A name to conjure fear with, in another age, now lone wanderers, pilgrims in most cases who, except for the glint of mail beneath a surcoat and the shield upon their back, could easily be taken for a mendicant in path-worn boots and a tattered cloak. Haunting crossroads and the lower sort of inn. Drifting across the water-margin where bandits and bog-men, accustomed to the soft meat of civilian vulnerables, find themselves foiled by the unexpected grit of an indigestible armor-clad chunk, with a blade and a maniacal attitude to death.
They protect pilgrims, defend isolated villages, rescue people from monsters off in the swamps, mountains, or wastes, investigate crimes and apparent monster attacks, man isolated needle-towers that guard endangered passes on the margins of the Waste and the Blackriver Plain. They often act as roving judges in communities out in the country and far from civilization. They are, after all, paragons, and so are expected to have the wisdom to resolve terrible disputes.
And they make the cold clinging guard of the Grey Cities very nervous. Everyone is fine with a paladin out in the wilderness, a long way away somewhere, beating up monsters - but having them in town suggests they are going to get involved in power structures and actual politics which, considering its always a corrupt mess, rarely ends well.
And, when no other can be found, they act as healers.
There are a multitude of Orders, the smallest made up of two individuals, a teacher and a student, or one. But some of the more well-known include;

The Knights of Ark
Ark is a popular monotheist interpretation of the Father or the Creator. His adherents spend a lot of time on the Mountains of Reality, which many believe to be, literally or symbolically, the fallen body of their God. There, they largely rove around looking for creatures to fight, irritating the Gloom Queens and their knights.
Their largely, but not exclusively male membership tends to run in powerful and devout families, meaning they are often highly educated and well-supplied.
Though all of humanity hate Yggstrathaal, the Knights of Ark really hate Yggsrathaal. Their practice is highly martial and strongly focused on destroying her children. More, their critics would claim, than it is on rescuing their victims.

The Iron Minds of Honiko-Oct
Oct of the Iron Mind was a prophet or servant of the Goddess 'Thought', or just an extreme philosopher depending on who you ask, who used his intelligence and staggering willpower to seek and defeat daemons in Uud before the Waste.
His temples are big on mental acuity, they like to spring complex moral-maze questions and strange logic-puzzles on their aspirants. Their paladins tend towards the philosophical and often make excellent investigators and trackers of the more subtle horrors of the world.
It has never been clear to outsiders if Honiko-Oct’s Iron Brain was a metaphor, or an actual relic the temple preserves.

The Grievers of Gaia
These adherents of the Mother are usually female. They were traditionally defenders of women and the Earth. And perhaps before the fall, they were not even a militant order
Since the Waste, they have all gone into mourning for the broken and set-upon state of Uud, who they view as the body of the mother and who they failed to save. They often have tattooed tears and other signs of ritual grief. They can be extremely dangerous in their berserker rages.

Slaves of the Sleepers
A denomination so common that 'Slave of the Sleepers' has become a common phrase to refer to a devout person on Blackwater.
Those who received missions of faith in dreams. They are the largest and most egalitarian of orders - anyone can apply to join and must pass tests, mental, physical, and spiritual, not just to be declared a paladin, but to even enter. A sufficiently highly-qualified member can administer these tests 'in the field' without supervision, meaning paladins are sometimes discovered and trained far from society.
This means they have one of the largest orders on Blackwater, and one of the most diverse. It also means that the eyes of the Priests of Tolerance are always on them.

Reconcilers of the Heart
A rare but well-known adherent of the Pantheon Goddess “Love”. They are concerned with maintaining human relationships, which they refer to as a “web of golden thread" which holds society, and humanity, together. This applies to any positive interpersonal relationship; parental, romantic, or that of friends, clan, or village. They fight to protect this web of connection between people, which is threatened by monsters, Yggsrathaal, but also by social and political forces.
They are into dressing well and shooting arrows. This order has quite a few young women in it, and is considered 'femme', at least by the Knights of Ark.