Ten thousand years ago, the D’ni (pronounced “dunny”) first arrived on Earth from a planet called Garternay, which means “Root of the Great Tree” in their tongue. Known as the Ronay (“People of the Root”) on their home world, these people had developed something they called The Art. This practice allowed them to write a description of a place, or Age, thus creating a portal they could use to travel there.

With The Art at their disposal, the D’ni could literally visit any place they could imagine, since a nearly infinite number of Ages exist in what they called The Great Tree of Possibilities. When they discovered that Garternay was about to become uninhabitable, however, the D’ni began leaving the world, traveling to the Ages they had written about. Most of them headed to a lush planet they called Terahnee (“The New Tree”), but a Writer named Ri’neref decided to lead a small group to a large underground cavern deep below the surface of another planet. He named the place D’ni (“New start”), but we call that planet Earth.

Writing the Books

The D’ni believe that the Ages they write about have always existed, used to exist, or will exist in the future, and that The Art enables them to link a book to a place that closely approximates what they described. Descriptive Books hold all the information available about a particular Age, the text continuously amended by future Writers who take great care not to contradict what was written before them, for fear that the Age will become unstable.

A Descriptive Book links to the Age it describes, but it is usually kept in a safe place and separate, smaller Linking Books are written in the Age and used to link to the Age instead. A Linking Book only takes a traveler to the specific place where it was written, and it cannot directly link one spot in an Age with another spot in the same Age. If the place written about in a Linking Book is changed in the Descriptive Book’s text, that particular Linking Book could become useless. And if a Descriptive Book is destroyed, all of its Linking Books will no longer work.

Descriptive Books were always written in the D’ni language. The people of Garternay created a guild that established precise procedures for not only writing Descriptive and Linking Books but also making inks, pressing paper and binding the manuscripts. The guild maintained these procedures with meticulous care for fear that a young Writer could contradict the details in a Descriptive Book or fail to pay attention to the exacting standards of The Art, thus endangering an Age and possibly taking the lives of those who traveled to it.

Fresh Starts

Upon arriving in D’ni, Ri’neref created a Writers Guild similar to the one on Garternay. The D’ni people spent over 9,000 years living in the cavern. During that time, they built a large system of ventilation shafts that accessed the surface and explored the surrounding area, occasionally finding new caves. They also suffered through at least one major war, but a plague unleashed 200 years ago by a man named A’Gaeris ended their civilization. Known as The Fall of the D’ni, this incident made the cavern, as well as many Ages written over the millennia, uninhabitable.

Before that happened, however, a surface dweller named Anna stumbled across an entrance to the underground cavern. Making her way down, she was captured and held in D’ni, where she eventually learned their language and they learned hers. Renamed Ti’ana (“Storyteller”), she married a D’ni Writer named Aitrus and had a son, Gehn. When the plague hit D’ni, Aitrus was exposed to it but still managed to map an escape to the surface for his wife and son. Before he died, he tricked A’Gaeris into following him to an Age that he had rewritten as an inferno.

Ti’ana raised Gehn on the surface until he ran away at the age of 14, hoping to learn The Art of Writing in the D’ni ruins. Later, she cared for his son, Atrus, until Gehn returned when the boy reached 14 and took him to the cavern to teach him what he had learned. Ti’ana followed them and watched them from afar for three-and-a-half years, until she was forced to intervene on Atrus’ behalf because of Gehn’s reckless behavior. She and Catherine wrote the Myst Age, where she went to live with her son and daughter-in-law until she died.

The Family Business

Atrus and Catherine had two sons, Sirrus and Achenar, who were both as devious as Gehn. When Atrus was away on a trip to an Age he had written, they burned many Descriptive Books in his library and disappeared. When they turned up again, they tricked Catherine into traveling to Riven, where she became trapped, and trapped Atrus in D’ni by sabotaging his Linking Book. They then used a pair of Linking Books, one red and one blue, that they were told to never touch and became trapped in them.

In the first Myst game, players freed Atrus but he remained in D’ni, where he had the means to create new Ages. His wife remained trapped, but he managed to burn the Linking Books that imprisoned Sirrus and Achenar. In Riven, the sequel, players freed Catherine and captured Gehn in a prison book.

Before the events in Myst III: Exile, Atrus and Catherine searched the D’ni Ages for survivors, locating 1,800 of them and setting out to rebuild the D’ni homeland in the Age called Tehranee. The natives there, however, had enslaved other races, and a war broke out between the Tehranee people and their slaves, who were assisted by the D’ni. Even though the D’ni won, Atrus decided to write a new Age, Releeshahn, for them.

In Myst III: Exile, a new enemy, Saavedro, appeared and stole the Releeshahn book. Sirrus and Achenar had exiled Saavedro from his home world, and he decided to take revenge on Atrus. Releeshahn was returned unharmed to Atrus by the end of the adventure. Atrus and his family then settled in Tomahna.

While Myst IV: Revelation reveals the true fate of Sirrus and Achenar, there are still more stories to be told, more books to write. The adventure continues.

Lurking in the Shadows. All manner of strange beasts populate this Age.

Greet the Day. Another view of Tomahna.

The Little Details. Myst IV’s Ages teem with life.

Riddles in the Dark. A puzzle you must solve.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream. This bedroom may yield some clues.

Come With Me to My Study. Another room that contains a variety of things for you to examine.