Riven
From MYSTlore
- For the game called Riven, see Riven (game).
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| Riven | |
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Written by Gehn | |
| Riven's ecosystem | |
| Type | Inhabited Age |
| Connected places | K'veer, Tay, Gehn's 233rd Age |
| Link-in points | Fissure plateau, Moiety caves, fire |
Riven is the fifth Age of Gehn.s construction. Gehn's tendency to value quantity over quality and write by way of imitation led to some hundreds of experimental and doomed Ages, and so even those he favored were not built with any long-lasting foundation. Either due to Gehn's predisposition for the number or simply because Riven was his fifth Age, the number five is a constant undercurrent in the natural and constructed aesthetics of Riven; plants are five-lobed, there are five islands, and doors and symbols tend to appear regularly in sets of five.
As Gehn merely numbered his Ages, rather than giving them names, he refers to Riven as Age Five or The Fifth Age.
Contents |
[edit] Age Constitution
Riven is an Age built around the island concept that both Gehn and his son seem to prefer, featuring a semi-tropical, coastal climate and a potentially verdant and thriving ecosystem.
Originally one massive island dominated by an unimaginably huge tree, years of degradation have led to the land mass rifting and splitting into five separate segments. Populations of the native plant and animal life did exist on the islands, though they were greatly reduced in number due to Gehn's destructive and careless nature. The Great Tree has been felled (its remains could be seen as the base for Prison Island), much of the forest had been leveled, and many of the animal species had been hunted to or near extinction. Though it was permanently scarred by Gehn's neglect, it nonetheless remained a beautiful Age until its collapse.
[edit] Topography
Temple Island (known to the Rivenese villagers as Allapo, water pool, and to the Moiety as Allatwan, pool of stars): The primary link location for Riven's descriptive book, Temple Island is visually dominated by the Gold Dome and features a small number of other structures including the Gate Room and Gehn's Temple. It is on this island that the Age's instability is most overt, due to the repaired Star Fissure and adjacent telescope.
Jungle Island: The one properly populated island, containing the entirety of the Rivenese population within its village. The island consists of a lush forest and large lagoon, the latter of which is navigated by way of a small, railed submarine in order to access the schoolhouse and other village amenities.
Book-Assembly Island (also Crater Island, Boiler Island): One of the three islands strictly forbidden to the Rivenese and used solely for preparing various bookmaking materials and compiling Gehn's research on the Age.
Survey Island: Arguably the most menacing of the five islands, as it is flanked by rows of Wahrk tusks and huge spires of stone. Gehn used this island to (appropriately) survey Riven's deterioration by way of a Map Room, though the island had alternate uses considering the monumental Wahrk Throne Room found on the lower level.
Prison Island: Accessible only by linking to it from Age 233, Prison Island is what remains of Riven's Great Tree. Gehn uses the single structure on it as a prison, though who would have been kept within it before Catherine's arrival and capture is unknown.
[edit] Plant Life
Riven's botanical potential is seen best on the aptly-named Jungle Island. While the coasts are dotted consistently with short, rounded palms, the island's interior consists of a lush rainforest made up of ferns, huge mushrooms (some notably phosphorescent), and both red- and white-barked trees. Several of these are fruit-bearing, as piles of fruit can be found in both the schoolroom and on Temple Island, and, while it isn't easy to connect each fruit with its parent plant, it is known that the five-lobed star fruit is harvested from the jungle's mushrooms.
Unsurprisingly, Riven also hosts underwater vegetation such as colourful lichen, algae and seaweed, all of which seem to comfortably adapt to Riven's atypical water supply in both the lagoons and surrounding islands.
The red- and white-barked trees are also odd in nature. They have large white-barked ridged "bases", similar to the trunks of many northern Earth tree species, that end abruptly at about a sixth of the way up. From there, these bases curve inward like the layers of the trunks of certain mushrooms, forming a sort of "lip". What appears to arise out of the bases is a smooth red/white trunk similar to that of a birch. These trunks end at roughly the same height, giving way to branches that extend horizontally which again, end at roughly the same height, capping the tree. When looking into Riven's jungle, one can literally see a "tree line" which separates the sky from the jungle.
In a short B-Roll video of the making of Riven, we see Robyn Miller at the Cyan drawing table describing to the staff a type of Rivenese vegetation as "squat", and "hiding out all light", followed by the statement that when "you look up, you'll see pieces of light filtering down". The most obvious and logical answer is that he was describing what would become the Rivenese red- and white-barked trees.
[edit] Animal Life
Though they're not all seen upon exploring the Age, the standing stones used to access Tay suggest that Riven hosts- or did at one time- a wide array of creatures. Two of the Age's larger creatures can be observed easily enough, the Sunners when coming down the steps of Jungle Island and the Wahrk in Gehn's massive underground chamber on Survey Island. Other animals, such as the elusive Ytram and Scarab Beetle, can also be found with enough patience and exploration.
[edit] Water
Main article: Rivenese water
The water of Riven exhibits strange properties due to, according to Gehn's premature studies, a small, unicellular bacterium residing within it. The bacteria seem averse to higher temperatures, and so the water can be shifted and molded according to well-placed heat sources (as it was used for the 3-dimensional island maps on Survey Island) or boiled to become potable. Digesting Riven's water in its natural, un-boiled state results in choking and stomach trouble, and so the Rivenese villagers have developed a powder to neutralize the effect.
[edit] Transportation
The original composition of the Age allowed inhabitants to merely cross the entire big island merely by foot. Later, as the five segments started drifting away from each other, in to their own smaller islands, connecting bridges were created, but as the drifting continued became clear that a more flexible means was necessitated.
This led to the construction of the mag-lev system, a set of trams and stations, with only cabling (which was flexible, and easily replaceable) needed for connection.
[edit] East Path
A photo in the 1997 Myst calendar shows a wooden path apparently leading from one major section of Riven to another. RAWA explains in detail why this particular section is inaccessible (and, indeed, almost completely invisible) in the Riven game; the calendar image depicts a stage of Riven many years before the events of the game.
[edit] Gehn's Influence
Having grown up during the fall of D'ni, Gehn is obsessed with the concept of reviving its traditions and practices no matter the cost. Because of this, several of Gehn's ages, including his Thirty-Seventh Age and Riven, were used as training grounds to teach book-worlders the Art. Gehn had already established the skeleton of a bastardized Writers Guild on Riven, teaching Rivenese natives (the most important of them being Catherine) how to write D'ni and construct Ages of their own.
During the battle with Atrus, Katran from Myst wrote five giant daggers into the Age which fell on the island and remained ever since (one fell on Gehn's temple); the shape of the one found near the Star Fissure was adopted by the Moiety as their symbol; other daggers could be found in the Jungle, and the Plateau Island. Upon being banished to Riven by his own son, Gehn proceeded to take his place as a god amongst the Rivenese people and began shaping and constructing the age to his own liking. While he was successful in achieving a position of godly power, he managed it only by way of terror and brute force. Petroglyphs and inscriptions around the age give evidence of this.
[edit] Riven's Collapse
Among the numerous instabilities of Riven were "the structure of the tectonic plates beneath the planet's crust, the type and strength of the oceanic currents, fluctuations in gravitational fields, and the composition of the crust..."[1] The world's moon was also in a low enough orbit that great tides would eventually drown the island, and in the long run the two bodies would collide. The most severe flaws were corrected by Atrus temporarily, but his fixes began to fail around the time of Catherine's return and captivity.
The final demise of Riven came about upon the re-opening of the Star Fissure. Atrus had been keeping the Age together with his writing and let it die when the people of Riven were evacuated to Tay. The Age began to collapse at last, exacerbated by the Fissure's pull.
Remnants of Riven can be found near the Cleft, having fallen through the Star Fissure.
[edit] External links
[edit] Appearances
[edit] Featured
[edit] References
- Atrus mentions Riven in his Rime journals.
- Jeff Zandi mentions the "Riven remnants".
- Yeesha summarizes her family's history in her journals.
References
- ↑ Book of Atrus, chapter 21, paperback edition p. 352-353
