Atrus is one of the most important central figures of post-D'ni cavern history, during the period known as the Era of Abandonment. Atrus was the grandson of Aitrus, one of the people whose actions inadvertantly lead to the Fall of D'ni. He was instrumental to reuniting the survivors of that event and provided them with a new home. Atrus was a prolific writer of Ages, and had somewhere around twenty in his known catalog, although many were destroyed under differing circumstances. Atrus loved to explore the Ages he wrote to see where they differed from the mental image he had when writing them. He was also a good architect, engineer, and mechanic, and invented and created a great many unique devices and buildings.

This is a photo of Atrus and Katran in Riven.

Early years

Atrus was born in the Cleft to Gehn and Keta in AD 1755, and was their first and only child. Keta died shortly afterward from complications in the delivery. Gehn had brought her to the Cleft because she had a difficult pregnancy, and Gehn hoped that his mother, Anna, could help with her knowledge of D'ni medicine. After Keta died, Gehn abandoned Atrus with Anna. She raised the young Atrus for fourteen years, until Gehn returned to collect him in AD 1769. Gehn took Atrus down to D'ni to aid him in his quest to learn the Art of Writing.

Atrus turned out to have a talent for the Art, and four years later he wrote his first successful Age, which he called Inception, prompting Gehn to hold a Korfah V'ja, a D'ni term meaning "first book celebration". To the D'ni, Korfah V'ja were held the day when a young Writer presented his masterpiece to the guild to prove he'd completed his training, and was awarded the right to begin writing Ages for actual use. It was around this time that Atrus discovered his father was a madman; Gehn believed that that the Korfah V'ja was a ceremony that conferred godhood on the writer.

Gehn took Atrus to Riven sometime around AD 1771 or 1772, and it was there that he met and fell in love with Katran, a Riven native who was also very talented at Writing. This was despite the fact that both had learned the basics from Gehn, who had only had four years of basic education in the Guild of Books as a young child. Atrus and Katran both learned to write better Ages than Gehn, mainly by trial and error. Katran discovered that Anna had been secretly following Gehn and Atrus, and the two women collaborated on an Age that was called Myst, written to be a refuge from Gehn.

From the start, Atrus called Katran "Catherine". This irritated her, and she tried on several occasions to correct him. However, as she grew to love him, she became resigned to what she considered a mangling of her name. The young couple resolved to put a stop to Gehn's ambitions; he wanted to rule as a god over as many Ages as he could get his hands on or write. After a struggle, they managed to trap him on Riven in AD 1773. Katran linked to Myst, where Anna was waiting for them, and Atrus joined them after jumping into the Star Fissure with his copy of the Myst linking book.

The Myst years:

On Myst island, Atrus and Katran had lived with Anna for a year when their first son, Achenar, was born out of wedlock around AD 1774. It wasn't until AD 1776 that the couple were formally married. Their second son, Sirrus, was born a year later, in AD 1777. The five members of the family lived together on Myst until AD 1785, when Anna died. She was buried on Myst under a simple metal plate engraved with her D'ni name, Ti'ana.

The two boys, Achenar and Sirrus were home-schooled. They were not taught the Art by their parents, although it was intended that they would be. Atrus wrote the Ages of J'nanin, Edanna, Amateria, Voltaic, and Narayan to teach the boys basic principles they would need to know before he started teaching them how to Write.

In 1785, Anna died in Myst from a disease she contracted while visiting a new Age written by Katran. This was devastating to Atrus and his family, and had long-reaching effects that directly shaped the events to come. Atrus was so grief-stricken that he neglected his wife and children, single-mindedly throwing himself into his work in an effort to keep from thinking about it. Katran gave up on the Art, refusing to ever write another Age, and she also neglected the boys, instead choosing to support Atrus as he worked. The boys suddenly found themselves cut off from parental affection and direction, and began wandering through the Age written by Atrus looking for something to do. One version of events claims that they were sailing a boat in the Mechanical Age when they were captured by the pirates of the Black Ships, who adopted them into the crew of their flagship. This version explains that they learned to have a taste for the perverse during that time; Achenar for hunting and killing, and Sirrus for weath and power. According to the story, they escaped by assassinating the crew of their ship when it anchored near the fortress Atrus had built for his friends among the local populous. It's certain that at least one pirate ship lies sunken near the fortress today with a man's skeleton hanging from a yardarm.

After that period, Achenar and Sirrus went mad among the Ages, murdering and looting the inhabitants. They began burning the linking books in Myst's library to hide the evidence of their crimes. Atrus didn't know which of them was causing the damage, so he hid the few remaining linking books in locations around Myst. He also wrote two new Ages called Haven and Spire, and told the boys that Haven was a world with diverse wildlife and that Spire held a great treasure. He said that they were forbidden to link to them, although he gave them no reason. Atrus didn't actually suspect that the boys were the perpetrators at that point; he thought someone was linking from another Age and causing the damage. Still, he didn't explain to them that the books were intended to be a trap.

In March of 1803, Achenar and Sirrus had already begun to plot against their parents, and decided to get them out of the way. They told Katran that Atrus had discovered a problem with Gehn on Riven, and that he would meet her there. She linked to K'veer, where the book to Riven was being kept, and then to Riven. While there, she discovered that there really was a problem; Gehn had written his first stable Age in 1803, and was already moving much of his operation there. While searching for Atrus, she was captured and imprisoned by Gehn in May of the same year.

The Years of the Stranger:

After tricking their mother into going to Riven, they told Atrus that she had discovered a problem with the descriptive book of Riven, and that she wanted to meet with him in K'veer, and to bring a Myst linking book with him. Atrus did so, not knowing that the boys had sabotaged the Myst book by tearing out a page. This made the linking panel of the book inoperative, trapping Atrus in K'veer for the second time in his life. He decided to begin working on the Riven book again to attempt to stabilize it, a task that was still underway when the Stranger arrived on Myst in December of that year. Achenar and Sirrus had each linked to one of the forbidden Ages in October, Achenar to Haven and Sirrus to Spire, where they soon discovered that they had no way back.

This is a photo of Atrus in K'veer.

The Stranger explored the remaining Ages for a short time, and then returned to K'veer in January of 1807. Atrus requested that the Stranger link to Riven to rescue Katran, which led to the events covered in the second game created by Cyan, called Riven after the Age. After Katran was saved and the people of Riven were sent to Tay to live, Atrus and Katran could no longer bear to live on Myst with all of the bad memories it stirred up in them. Atrus wrote a new Age called Chroma'agana for them to move to, which resembled Myst in many ways, but was different enough not to cause emotional distress.

In 1810, while living in Chroma'agana, Atrus wrote an Age called Averone, where he and Katran encountered a native population. Its inhabitants agreed to help Atrus and Catherine break out of K'veer and into the D'ni cavern under the condition that when they were done, Atrus would destroy everything he had created when writing the Age and sever the link between Averone and D'ni. However, once they were done with the work of clearning the way out of K'veer, the Averonese elders changed their minds as Atrus had kept his word without a single argument about the matter. The Averonese became instrumental in the search for survivors of the Fall of D'ni, assisted in the first attempt to rebuild the city, When Atrus and the D'ni survivors decided to give up on restoring the caverns in 1812, some of the Averonese decided to stay with them to aid in building their new home.

Sometime during that time, Atrus began constructing a new home for himself and Katran on Earth's surface, which he named Tomahna, which simply means "home". They moved there by the end of the year, and Atrus began writing the new Age for the D'ni.

It was the next year, in April of 1813, when Atrus completed his design notes for the new Age, which he named Releeshahn, a D'ni word that meant "the whole". This name was meant to honor Anna, who when teaching Atrus how to write, had constantly emphasized that he had to keep an eye on "the whole", her way of saying that he needed to keep in mind how all the little things he was writing might affect an entire Age. He immediately began the task of writing Releeshahn.

Releeshahn was completed in 1816, a few months after the birth of Yeesha, Atrus and Katran's youngest child and only daughter. Atrus invited the Stranger to visit, intending to link him there to see how the Age had turned out. Just after the Stranger arrived, a man named Saavedro linked in and stole the book. This resulted in the Stranger chasing Saavedro down to reclaim it.

The next year, 1817, Atrus' thoughts turned back to his sons. He'd been trying to keep an eye on them using a crystal viewer he had in the Age of Rime, and decided to build one in his workshop in Tomahna, so that he could save himself from the journey each time. He did, and in 1818, he added a sound reciever to the Tomahna viewer. This was followed up by the inclusion of an improvement that allowed him to move the field of view in 1819. At the same time, he added armored visiting chambers to both Spire and Have that he had constructed by the D'ni in Releeshahn. This allowed him to take linking books to Tomahna to those Ages so that he, Katran, and Yeesha could visit his sons, and return safely. They were completed in October of 1819. He also made a chamber to hold the Spire and Haven linking books in Tomahna, and had the D'ni craftsmen make an armored hatch to guard them.

This was to have disastrous consequences. Sirrus was able to develop bombs in his prison Age, and escaped, whereupon he went to Haven to free Achenar. They kidnapped Yeesha as part of a plot they'd begun in the years before they were trapped, and took her to Serenia, an Age they had familiarized themselves with all those years before. Achenar loved his little sister, and when he discovered that Sirrus had amended the plot be adding a plan to tear her mind and soul from her body, he began searching for a way to save her. The Stranger, in the last adventure that person was involved in, stepped in and with Achenar's aid was able to free Yeesha and stop Sirrus. Both of Atrus' sons lost their lives in the action. The betrayal by Sirrus, the death of Achenar in her rescue, and the mental damage caused by Sirrus when he tore her mind from her body left deep scars on Yeesha's psyche, and she was never the same afterward.

The Later Years:

Atrus, Katran and Yeesha continued to live in Tomahna until 1832, when Yeesha, at sixteen years of age, left her parents behind on a journey to try to find herself again. The two of them stayed in Tomahna until Katran's death. It is never said how, when or where, but it is very likely that she died of old age sometime well before AD 2000. Katran was not D'ni or of D'ni descent, so she would not have had their lengthy lifespan.

With the love of his life dead and his daughter away living on her own, Atrus moved to Releeshahn, to live among the D'ni. As of 2007, he was still there, although he was very old and frail. After the freeing of the Bahro, Yeesha returned to him and presumably is living with him in Releeshahn to be by his side in his final years.

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