More, he exhibited a talent for writing that far surpassed that of the older man. To be continued soon. His rich description, his keen powers of logic and observation, the depth of his understanding and of his abilities to unleash the expressive, creative power of the D'ni script, unveiled worlds utterly beyond the ken of his father. Atrus never presumed to claim he was creating these worlds; nevertheless, it was true that his worlds endured while each of those opened by Gehn sooner or later collapsed.

So it was with the world, or age as these book-linked worlds were known, that Gehn called his Fifth Age...the world that would one day be known as Riven.

But it wasn't long before creative differences blossomed into deadly enmity dividing father from son. Atrus could not understand his father's parsimony of words, the cold and empty leanness of his descriptive passages, the editorial callousness that seemed, to Atrus, to all but guarantee each world's collapse. Worse, to Atrus' mind, was Gehn's overwheening pride and ambition, which drove him to abandon whole ages and their innocent inhabitants. Gehn seemed obsessed with creating more and more worlds, discarding each in turn when it proved less than perfect. For him, these worlds and their populations were his creations, imperfect sketches to be discarded when they failed to meet his artistic vision. He was, after all, their god.

For Atrus, however, these ages were pre-existing worlds, their populations people, not failed experiments to be swept away with the rest of the rubbish when the day's work was done.

Atrus had a personal interest in those people; his wife, Catherine, was from the Fifth Age. In Atrus' opinion, Gehn's books were merely means of linking to these new and pre-existing worlds and modifying them. But it seemed that those worlds invaded by Gehn were inevitably and swiftly doomed by the descriptions he inserted within their creative matrices.

The Fifth Age—Gehn never bothered to name his creations, preferring instead to give them only cold numbers—was a promising world, but like Gehn's other efforts, the seeds of its destruction were planted within its heart. Together, Catherine and Atrus decided to stop Gehn's rape of the worlds, intending to arrange things so that Riven would become his prison.

Together, they managed to trap Gehn on Riven, confronting him at the Star Fissure, removing the last linking book out of that age by dropping it down that eldritch rift in time and space. Many of the local Rivenese witnessed that confrontation, when Catherine stepped into another world through a linking book, vanishing like a wraith, and Atrus hurled himself after the book down the fissure. Gehn was, indeed, trapped as Atrus and Catherine had planned.

As a result, the natives learned that Gehn was no god, that Atrus and Catherine had bested him and trapped him in that world. Unfortunately, they leaped to several other, less solid conclusions: Believing that Atrus was a god who had stripped Gehn of his power, that