Gehn

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Gehn is a character in Riven, the sequel to Myst. He is played by actor John Keston.

Note: Fictional details from the Myst franchise follow, and may sometimes be referred to as facts. It may need to be edited to conform to the guidelines for writing about fiction.

Gehn (D'ni: Gehn/[Gen]) was the father of Atrus and the husband of Leira (Keta). As one of the last D'ni people, Gehn was born in the City before the downfall, as the son of the D'ni noble Aitrus and the human Ti'ana (Anna).

Gehn spent a great deal of his life trying to rebuild the fallen empire. He considered himself semi-divine due to his ability to link to Ages he thought he created — a change from the normal D'ni view, which held that the D'ni only linked to existing Ages rather than creating them. Gehn was impatient and did not fully understand the Art of Writing, and as such his flawed ages always fell to decay and ruin over time, unlike those of the earlier D'ni or those of his son Atrus, which flourished. This lack of ability to write stable Ages caused great frustration in Gehn, and he blamed everything and everyone but himself - and was ready to murder his own son for it. To calm his nerves, Gehn smoked a pipe filled with an extract taken from a species of frog found in Riven, his 5th age.

Gehn never fully understood the D'ni, and as such he made many false base assumptions: for example, he mistakenly overrated the significance which the number five held in the D'ni culture, trying to connect items to it, and considering those which are unrelated to be inferior.

Gehn's goals of restoring the D'ni culture were laudable, however his methods were horribly cruel and misguided. He had no regard for the inhabitants of the Ages he linked to and eventually destroyed, believing the inhabitants to be his creations and therefore his to control. He destroyed and plundered many Ages in order to gain knowledge and resources for restoring the D'ni empire and its people. Gehn's twisted worldview likely arose due to the loss of his father during the D'ni downfall: Gehn was already alienated from his human mother, and to an extent from D'ni society (being regarded by some as a half-breed, an outsider), and blamed her for the fall of D'ni. Soon after reaching the surface Gehn left Ti'ana, and found a wife in a nearby tribe. When his wife grew ill near childbirth Gehn finally returned to his mother, but too late: Leira died after giving birth to her son, and Gehn left without even naming the child.

Gehn returned years later when Atrus, as named by Ti'ana, was already in his teenage years. He took his son with him to K'veer in D'ni, and tried indoctrinating Atrus, intent on making him his pupil and servant. However, Atrus realised that his father was twisted, and rebelled against him: an act which almost caused Gehn to murder his son. Trapped in a room in K'veer with only a link to one of Gehn's Ages as an escape, Atrus eventually Linked through, ending up on Riven, which Gehn only refers to as the Fifth Age, since it was Gehn's fifth attempt at a Link to an Age. There, Atrus met Katran (Catherine), a young Rivenese woman. Once Gehn found out, he decided to marry her - without her consent - within 30 days to secure his control over the Age and intimidate Atrus. Working together to stop Gehn's malice, Atrus and Catherine succeeded in trapping Gehn on Riven by removing all linking books from the island, so that there was no escape for him. In a final showdown, Catherine linked to Myst, an Age she had written in secret together with Ti'ana, and Atrus threw himself into a strange void-like anomaly in Riven called "The Star Fissure." He linked to Myst while falling, but his linking book continued to drop through the darkness, eventually finding its way into the hands of the Stranger and leading to the events covered in the game of Myst.

However, Atrus's choice of punishment was hard on the people of Riven, and many had suffered under Gehn's regime. And to complicate matters further, an investigation by Catherine when she returned to Riven revealed that he was not truly imprisoned at all, merely hindered. Gehn had sufficient foresight to ensure the ages he wrote would contain the raw materials to continue producing the special papers and inks necessary to write more linking books. He constructed a factory and used the Rivenese as workers to gather the necessary materials, causing significant pollution and deforestation in the process. However, the materials he produced were just as imperfect as his writing, and Gehn found that, while he could produce workable links using authentic ink and blank books salvaged from the ruins of D'ni, his flawed writing combined with his own imperfect materials would not work at all. Blaming his failure entirely on the materials and not his own skill, he eventually devised a machine capable of stabilising his flawed books, although its inefficiency meant it required a colossal amount of power to operate. Catherine was later imprisoned herself by Gehn: in the game Riven, it is the player's task to free her and trap Gehn in a more secure manner.