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description: "\\\"When philosophers take up arms and definitions become weapons, even victory loses its meaning. We won every battle and lost our souls—a perfect paradox for a paradoxical war.\\\" —General Semanticus Void, Reformed Meridian War-Scholar"
article_type: full
taxonomyContext: "Pivotal moments that shaped the world's economic, magical, and philosophical landscape, from the First Minting of Mana Coins to the initial Nullity manifestations"
image_prompt: Battlefield strewn with shattered scrolls and broken philosophical symbols, glowing definitions clashing like spectral weapons in misty twilight. War-torn scholars in torn robes wielding conceptual blades, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, dark fantasy oil painting style.
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# The Meaning Wars
*"When philosophers take up arms and definitions become weapons, even victory loses its meaning. We won every battle and lost our souls—a perfect paradox for a paradoxical war."*
—General Semanticus Void, Reformed Meridian War-Scholar
## The Battle for Definition
Twenty years before [[The First Covenant Assembly]], [[The Meridian Empire]] nearly tore itself apart in a conflict that began in university lecture halls and ended with reality itself as casualty. The Meaning Wars erupted when three schools of philosophical thought discovered they could weaponize their competing definitions of existence.
The Literalists, led by Archscholar Mundus, insisted reality was exactly what it appeared to be. The Relativists, under Sage Florentia the Mutable, argued all meaning was contextual. The Nihilists, commanded by the man who would become [[Elena Voidtouched]]'s mentor, claimed meaning was humanity's desperate fiction against an uncaring void.
What started as academic debate became warfare when each faction's mages learned to impose their worldview on reality itself. Literalist battle-mages made metaphors physically manifest—enemy soldiers literally drowned in their own fears. Relativist sorcerers transformed battlefields into philosophical puzzles where victory and defeat exchanged places. Nihilist void-speakers simply erased the meaning of their opponents' existence.
## The Weapons of Interpretation
The war's most terrifying innovations included:
**Semantic Bombs**: Devices that exploded definitions, leaving victims unable to understand basic concepts
**Paradox Fields**: Zones where contradictory truths existed simultaneously
**Meaning Drains**: Nihilist weapons that extracted purpose from living beings
**Reality Anchors**: Early prototypes of what would become [[Nullity Anchors]]
The conflict reached its crescendo at the Battle of Dictionary Hill, where all three armies met in a massive engagement that left the landscape permanently altered. Survivors reported seeing grammar itself bleed, watching sentences unwrite themselves from existence, and witnessing soldiers fade as their names lost meaning.
## The Hollow Peace
[[Treasurer-Archmage Valeria Goldhand]], then a young imperial mediator, brokered the Peace of Ambiguity by proposing a fourth position: that meaning was neither fixed nor arbitrary, but negotiated through consensus and exchange—essentially applying market principles to reality itself. This economic philosophy of existence would later prove crucial in fighting the Nullity.
The war's end came when the three faction leaders simultaneously realized their conflict was attracting something far worse—the attention of the void itself. The first proto-Nullity manifestations appeared at sites of major battles, drawn by the ontological instability. Faced with true meaninglessness, the philosophers united in desperate defense of meaning in any form.
Veterans of the Meaning Wars founded [[The Grand Calculus Academy]] and [[The Academy of Syncretic Sorcery]], institutions dedicated to preventing another such conflict. [[Prophet-Accountant Lysander]] would later identify the wars as "the moment we taught the void that meaning could be killed." The scars remain—zones where reality never quite recovered, where travelers must be careful not to think too deeply about existence, lest they cease.
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*Entry in Historical Events taxonomy*
