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description: "\\\"I held a fortune in my hands—ten thousand Imperial Thaumic Marks in certified bills. I blinked, and they were blank paper. Not counterfeits. Not stolen. Just... nothing. That's when I knew the world was ending.\\\" —Marcus Copperfield, former Goldport merchant"
article_type: full
taxonomyContext: Manifestations and effects of the reality-devouring force that threatens all existence, from localized value-sinks to region-wide meaning collapse
image_prompt: A perfect sphere of absolute void consuming a grand merchant exchange hall, money and documents dissolving into grey dust in mid-air around terrified traders. Dark fantasy digital art with dramatic volumetric lighting, rich golds fading to ashen grey.
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# The Goldport Collapse
*"I held a fortune in my hands—ten thousand Imperial Thaumic Marks in certified bills. I blinked, and they were blank paper. Not counterfeits. Not stolen. Just... nothing. That's when I knew the world was ending."*
—Marcus Copperfield, former Goldport merchant
## The First Signs
For three weeks before the Collapse, Goldport's famously accurate Merchant-Seers reported disturbing visions: ledgers that balanced to zero regardless of entries, scales that weighed gold and air as equals, contracts that faded even as they were signed. [[The Meridian Empire]]'s authorities dismissed these as "market anxiety," prescribing confidence-building measures and increased liquidity.
The true warning came from street-level mages who found their simplest spells failing. A light spell would consume mana but produce darkness. A preservation charm would accelerate decay. The poor, who relied on fractional spell-sharing, noticed first. The wealthy, insulated by their mana reserves, noticed too late.
## The Manifestation
At precisely noon on the Autumn Equinox, a perfect sphere of absolute worthlessness appeared in Goldport's Grand Exchange. Not darkness—darkness has value as contrast to light. Not emptiness—emptiness can be filled. This was Nullity: a space where the concept of value simply ceased.
The sphere expanded slowly, precisely one foot per hour. Everything it touched became economically neutral. Gold turned to grey dust worth neither more nor less than anything else. Magical contracts dissolved into meaningless marks. Most terrifying, people caught in the expansion survived but emerged "value-blind"—unable to distinguish between precious and worthless, sacred and profane.
## Economic and Existential Impact
Within six hours, Goldport's economy evaporated. Not crashed—that implies movement from high to low. It simply ceased. Twenty million Imperial Thaumic Marks vanished from existence, taking with them the life savings of three provinces. The Imperial Central Bank's emergency response—flooding the market with new currency—only accelerated the meaninglessness as fresh bills turned blank upon entering the city.
The philosophical impact proved worse. Three prominent Rationalist philosophers, confronted with absolute proof that value was arbitrary, took their own lives. The city's Actuaries of Truth split into two camps: those who insisted this proved all value was illusion, and those who argued it proved value's fundamental reality by showing its absence.
## The Desperate Response
[[The Meridian Empire]] deployed its most powerful Fiscal Paladins, who attempted to create an "economic firebreak" by establishing absolute price controls in a ring around the city. This failed catastrophically when the Nullity began spreading through the financial instruments themselves—bills of exchange carried the worthlessness to distant markets like an economic plague.
The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a street beggar named Elena Voidtouched, who had survived direct exposure. She revealed that the Nullity could be confused by rapidly changing what things meant. Working with Imperial mages, they developed the "Semantic Shift Protocol"—constantly redefining the value of everything in the affected area. The sphere stopped expanding, though it remains to this day, a permanent wound in reality that devours two city blocks of meaning.
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*Entry in The Nullity Incursions taxonomy*
