Riven was the fifth Age written by Atrus' father, Gehn. He began working on the Age in AD 1761.

Gehn was self-taught in the Art of Writing, and his work was usually flawed. His first through fourth Ages all ended with the worlds becoming uninhabitable. He thought Age Five was his first stable age, but was wrong. The signs of deterioration simply took longer to show.

Riven was inhabited by a native people before Gehn's writing altered and destabilized it. "Riven" was the locals' word for both their world and the large island they lived on. Gehn, however, almost always referred to the world as "Age Five".

Sometime around AD 1773, Gehn brought Atrus to Riven. While there, he met Katran, a young Rivenese woman who'd always felt out of place among her people. She fell in love with him, and they married. For some reason, Atrus never quite got used to her name and called her "Catherine". This annoyed her, but eventually she became resigned to it.

Eventually, Katran met Ti'ana, and together they wrote the Age of Myst as a refuge where Gehn would not be able to reach them. When the day came for Katran and Atrus to escape from Gehn's control, they fought with him on Temple Island. As part of their plot, they destroyed all of the linking books that Gehn could have used to get away from Riven, and after Katran linked to Myst, Atrus jumped into the Star Fissure with the Myst book and linked while falling. He hoped that his book would be destroyed or lost forever, but fortunately for him, that did not happen. The book instead landed in the desert of New Mexico, and was found by the Stranger. In the meantime, Atrus and Katran joined Ti'ana on Myst and eventually had two sons.

Atrus and Katran were successful in trapping Gehn on Riven, and he remained there for thirty-three years. He was not idle, though. He continued his experiments with making his own Ages, and eventually succeeded with his two hundredth and thirty-third attempt.

The deterioration of Riven was discovered by Atrus and Katran when she was tricked into returning there by their sons. In an attempt to save her, and the natives of the Age, Atrus worked to correct some of the problems by amending Riven's descriptive book, attempting to patch the flaws in Gehn's writing. In the end, however, he too was unable to save the Age. When he realized that the destruction was inevitable, he asked the Stranger to go there and save his wife. He had also been tricked by the boys, and was trapped for a second time in K'veer; his sons had torn an important page out of his Myst linking book, which was eventually returned to him.

When written, Riven was a single large island. After the instability set in, it broke up into a group of five smaller islands. At first, bridges were used to get from one to another, but the drift was rapid, and soon they grew too far apart for wooden bridges to reach. To solve that problem, Gehn constructed a system of magnetic levitation vehicles with tracks that could be expanded as the islands continued to separate. The tracks connected four of the five islands, and steam pipes were rigged between the islands to power various devices, although they were intended mainly for Gehn's linking book domes.

This is the only surviving picture of Riven in the early days of the Age, and shows a pathway in an area that became a water-filled channel between two islands. This area no longer existed by the time the Stranger arrived.

Below: a movie of a mag-lev car being used by a native, and you can clearly see when the car levitates above the rails. Next to it is a movie of the ride between two of the islands.

Four of the islands were restricted. Only Rivenese who were members of his guilds could travel to them. Gehn established five guilds on Riven, based on those he knew of from D'ni. These were the guilds of Builders, Educators, Maintainers, Surveyors, and Book Makers. D'ni, of course, had many more guilds, but Gehn thought that five was a significant number.

The villagers and the families of his workers had to remain on Jungle Island. The other islands were devoted to various projects. Crater Island was a factory to manufacture books and ink for his experiments in the Art. On Temple Island, he built a temple complex that doubled as a power generation plant. Plateau Island had a three-dimensional scale topographical model of the Age. The fifth island drifted much farther away, and was not connected physically with any of the others. It was originally home to a gigantic tree called the Great Tree by the Rivenese. During the escape of Atrus and Katran, it was struck by lightning and caught fire. Once the fire was extinguished, Gehn had it cut down and pulped for paper. He hollowed out the stump and built a penitentiary inside it, and the island became known as Prison Island.

About "Cho"

The first person the Stranger met when he arrived in Riven was a guardsman of Gehn's, whose name was never mentioned. Explorers since then have given him the somewhat affectionate nickname "Cho" after his pronunciation of one of the first words he was known to have spoken. Cho was on duty on Temple Island when the Stranger arrived and tripped the cage trap Gehn had set on the linking book arrival point.

According to the records, when the Stranger arrived carrying a trap book, Cho stuttered something in barely discernable D'ni. What Cho said was: tahg-em-ah... re-ko-ah... tah... tah... tah...tahg-em-ah b'soo re-ko-ah.

Richard A. Watson once said something to the effect that Cho was proof that Gehn had problems finding good help. What Cho actually said translates roughly to: give-you (imperative mood)... the-"ko-ah".... gi...gi...gi...give-you (imperative mood) to-me (mispronounced) the-"ko-ah" (whatever that is).

Had the D'ni lessons he studied in the village school actually stuck with him, he would have known to say: tahgemah b'zooah rekor, which translates as give-you (imperative mood) to-me the-book. Or in plain English, "Give me the book!"

The Islands:

Other Ages:

Wildlife:

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