Gehn (Myst)

Note: Fictional details from the Myst franchise follow, and will be treated as facts.

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 links 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 anger 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 with frog extract in it.

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. 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 not real people. 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 at the D'ni downfall: Gehn was already alienated from his non-D'ni mother, 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. He made books out of the forests and used the Rivenese as workers to make paper and power his books. 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.