The Way of the Will

The Way of the Will is the central doctrine of the Deman philosophy of The Dark. It is a religion of unrestrained ambition that embraces personal whim-worship. It views all of life as a struggle for dominance, in which the only options are to rule or to be ruled.

The roots of this doctrine are not merely ethical, but metaphysical. The Deman philosophy shares the Provan worldview that the world of life is illusory and transitory, and that "true reality" is an otherworldly domain of the mystical and the spiritual. Like the Provans, they also believe that it is the realm of true meaning, and of eternal life. To both, a mystical union with this Divine is the ultimate goal of life, and of existence.
The Provans, however, believe that this ultimate embrace of the Divine must be achieved through surrender of the self, and of the ego. In contrast the Demans believe that the goal of life is not to surrender to the Divine, but to conquer it. This belief not only that the strong should impose their will on the weak, but that the culmination of the historical process is for them to impose it on true reality itself, is at the heart of why it is called "The Way of the Will."
It is worth noting that both the Provan and Deman philosophies preach an essentially collectivist ideal, not only as their moral goal, but as a metaphysical one. This contrasts with the individualist worldview of the ancient Narranic philosophers. Even during The Age of Lost Empires, however, these had been preserved only in the city of Janthala, and they were forgotten with its fall in the time of the Empire Wars. They were not rediscovered and reintroduced to the world until the Modern Age of Kalara, by the adventurer mage, Aldran Killraven, during The Codex War.