Archivists guard a battered volume they call the Desert Manual, the lone survivor of a master’s teachings, copied so often that no one agrees which sentences belonged to the author and which to later disciples. I study it anyway because it refuses to stay in one genre. The opening chapters lay down ethical law: diet, discipline, and the moral debts owed when you bend will into action. Midway through, the tone shifts into war memoir, recounting a desperate flight across sands after a failed rite. By the end, it becomes the toolbox every initiate wants, definitions of Words, the Law of Balance, and the looping “Signs” that promise mastery if you can stomach their circular logic. It’s effectively the field guide for everything I argue in Will Against the World.

What fascinates me is how the book treats speech. Every utterance is a word, and every word leaves a mark. The only way to avoid imposing on the world, the Manual claims, is to surrender so completely that your natural will and the world’s will align. Most readers scoff until they try to practice; then they realize the text isn’t preaching passivity but precision. Bind yourself to the world, it whispers, and the Expression will answer without tearing you apart.

Clerics still memorize those Signs even if they argue about authorship. They walk the circular path laid out by the text, statement feeding paradox feeding back into the first line, hoping the loop jolts them out of ego. Whether it leads to liberation or madness depends on who you ask, but everyone agrees the Manual remains the backbone of formal Expression training, which is why modern salons in Expression Societies endlessly quote it, even when they barely understand the discipline it demands.