I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands mightone day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.
Most games have a premise, dictating an objective which the player achieves through gameplay. Some games, however, have discovering the premise and the objective as part of the gameplay.Myst was a puzzle-heavy first-person adventure game which sparked off a new sub-genre. Developed by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller in 1993, the game became an unexpected hit, mainly due to its eerie, haunting atmosphere and, for the time, excellent graphics. It was swiftly followed by a host of imitators, most of which are decidedly inferior to the original.Myst is famous for its mind-bending logic puzzles and lack of character interaction - most of the games feature only a handful of NPCs and very little dialogue. Unsurprisingly, adventure fans are heavily divided over the merits of the game, with most players falling firmly into the 'love' or 'hate' camps. It has even been accused of helping to hasten the 'death' of adventure games, even though many gamers were introduced to the genre by Myst and its sequels.The late Douglas Adams, upon playing Myst, cheerfully declared the game to be a 'beautiful void' due to the lack of other characters or life of any kind. (He also created Starship Titanic, which was a game with a very similar premise IN SPACE, with snarky robots.)It is also worth noting that characterisation of 'The Player' (Sometimes called 'The Stranger') is achieved after an interesting fashion in that the few NPC's that play a primary role, Atrus and his family, treat the main character with familiarity that develops as the series progresses. This leads to the player's becoming something akin to their family friend, and subtly integrating the player themself as a character into the world of the game by avoiding dictating the nature of the protagonist.The Myst games deal with the D'ni civilization, a race of people (not humans) that lived in a cavern under the Earth until their civilization fell a few centuries ago. The D'ni had the ability to write about locations they imagined in special books that could then physically transport a person to the places they described. Atrus, the main non-player character in the games, is one of the last survivors of the D'ni (though he's three quarters human).See also "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".
The Myst series has six games:
Myst: The player is transported to a strange, deserted island by reading a magical book. Once there, he/she discovers two brothers trapped inside similar books, each of whom blames the other for the murder of their father Atrus and the destruction of his library. With the help of various notes, journals and recorded messages left by Atrus and his sons, the player must piece together what happened and decide who to free. According to Word Of God, Myst is set in the early 19th century.
Myst has also been remade several times: Myst: Masterpiece Edition is a Remaster of the original with unchanged gameplay, versions have been released for the Nintendo DS, PSP, and iPhone, and realMyst allows players to wander through a fully realized 3D version of the game.
Riven: The Sequel to Myst: Atrus, after being freed by the player in the previous game, sends the player to Riven (an Age reached by linking book), where Atrus's father Gehn is holding Atrus's wife Catherine captive. The player must free Catherine, trap Gehn, and find a way to signal Atrus. In the end, the player is returned home (which is presumably on Earth). Considered by many Myst fans to be the best game in the franchise, and also the most difficult.
Myst III: Exile: Several years after the events of Riven, the player visits Atrus in the latter's new home Tomahna (which is in the desert of New Mexico). While there, a man called Saavedro steals a book linking to the Age of Releeshahn (which Atrus was writing as a new home for the D'ni survivors) to get revenge for the evil acts perpetrated against Saavedro by Atrus's sons Sirrus and Achenar. The player must follow Saavedro and get the book back, while finding out about what drives Saavedro.
Myst IV: Revelation: Around ten years after Exile, Sirrus and Achenar return to kidnap Atrus's daughter Yeesha (around 10 years old in this game). The player visits the prison Ages in which Sirrus and Achenar were trapped, as well as a third Age called Serenia, to discover their plans and to try to free Yeesha.
Uru: Ages Beyond Myst: Set in the present day (2003, the game's release date), Uru is a spin-off of the Myst series. In the 1980's, a group of people discovered the D'ni cavern, and formed the D'ni Restoration Council. The player (who is obviously not the same character as the previous games, since it's 200 years later) is drawn to go to the desert and follows a journey set out by Yeesha that leads the player to find out much about the history and downfall of the D'ni, and about creatures called the Bahro that were enslaved by the D'ni. Uru also includes a massively multiplayer online component, which has been launched, canceled, relaunched, canceled again, and relaunched again throughout its history. After Uru Live was canceled (for the first time), two expansion packs were released with the planned future content for Uru Live. The first, To D'ni, allows the player to explore the D'ni cavern and deals with the fate of the DRC. The second, Path of the Shell, is about a prophecy concerning someone called the Grower (who would bring D'ni back to life) and a D'ni guild master named Kadish who claimed to be the Grower. It currently exists, for free but with no promises of future content updates, in the form of Myst Online: Uru Live.
Myst V: End of Ages: The final Myst game is also set in the present day and is more a sequel to Uru than Myst. The game doesn't state who the player is, but according to Word Of God it's Dr. Watson from the DRC (from Uru). The player is set a quest to release a Tablet, that controls/enslaves the Bahro. Both Yeesha and a D'ni survivor called Esher have attempted this quest but failed, and both will aid the player in their own way.
There are also several tie-in novels, authored by the Miller brothers themselves. Myst: The Book of Atrus tells the story of Atrus's early life with his grandmother Anna and his father Gehn. Myst: The Book of Ti'ana tells the story of the downfall of the D'ni (so this takes place before the Book of Atrus). And finally, Myst: The Book of D'ni tells of Atrus's attempts to find D'ni survivors and rebuild the D'ni civilization.Recently, an independently produced (but still approved by the Miller brothers) Film of the Book (the Book of Ti'ana to be precise) has been announced. The scriptwriters keep a daily-updated blog about their progress, with some rather odd digressions about their personal lives in connection with the project.
This game series provides examples of:
Achievements in Ignorance: Yeesha can do a lot of things when writing Ages that were previously thought impossible (even above and beyond what her mother does-see below). It turns out that a lot of things that were previously thought to be hard-and-fast natural laws surrounding the process of writing linking books were just ancient traditions which had been around so long they assumed they must be laws. By being raised and taught in an environment where those weren't drummed into her head, Yeesha is able to accomplish things that everything her forefathers knew told them should cause her worlds to self-destruct.
Adaptation Expansion: In realMyst, a new Age is added to the original game, and several areas of the island and previous Ages can be visited that weren't formerly accessible.
Alphabet Soup Cans: Atrus installed them into Amateria and Voltaic, and Wrote them into Edanna. Justified in the fact that all 3 of the ages were (in-universe) meant to be learning experiences, first for Atrus' sons, then for Atrus himself (whom the player so conveniently goes in place of).
Anachronism Stew - The games take place in the early 1800s. The D'ni have technology which can transport them to other worlds and record messages with holographic video. (They even had this in the 1700s, as Gehn's old technology demonstrates.) Yet they still use candles for light and rely on books.
And I Must Scream - The protagonist suffers this fate in two of the "bad" endings to the first game; i.e. if you bring the last page to either brother.
And Man Grew Proud: The D'ni as a whole seemed to have a problem with this. The process of Age Writing does not actually create worlds (see the Rewriting Reality entry), but many of its practitioners seemed to forget this after a while. It seems you can't swing a stick in D'ni history without hitting a King or other important figure who became drunk on his own skill and committed horrid atrocities to the inhabitants of one or more Ages. Gehn is a great example, thinking himself a god, and Sirrus and Achenar both seem to have fallen into this trap as well. Even Yeesha admits there was a time she felt the same.
Yeesha: It was the same with the D'ni. The same cycle. Light opens the darkness. It takes, it uses, and it keeps. The D'ni found power in these books. These books you use to travel. They were a gift from the Maker. These Ages that you travel, too, were their Ages. Remarkable places giving life and taking life. This shadow came over them, this shadow of light. For it was in their enlightenment that they considered themselves better, better than the least. And we were sad for them.
And in the backstory as well, because 5 is an important number to the D'ni culture. Because Gehn was a D'ni with delusions of grandeur (and sadistic tendencies - see Accidental Nightmare Fuel below), he brought the 5 motif to Riven with him.
It turns out 25 is actually the number holding the most cultural significance to the D'ni, as their number system is in Base 25 as opposed to our Base 10. Additionally, 25^2 is 625, the number connected to the Grower. The reason Gehn used the number 5 so powerfully around the islands of Riven is because Gehn misremembered this culturally significant number as 5 and not 25 (he was fairly young when the D'ni civilization collapsed), so he wrote everything in the link to Riven around the number 5.
Five still plays a major developmental part, in numbers and linguistics. Each number from 0 to 24 involves five symbols (0 is blank). To get numbers after 4, one rotates the first symbol 90 degrees ('1' rotated is '5', '2' rotated is '10', et cetera), then adds it to the unrotated symbol from 0 to 4 to get the full digit. After that, the '25s' place is one to the left. The phonemes work practically the same way...
Gehn is, as far as most Myst fans are aware, the only (half) D'ni who has ever named his ages after numbers; all the ages the player discovers in Uru and Myst V: End of Ages have D'ni names (and that's not even counting Atrus' ages, which are also all named and not numbered). Gehn named his ages after numbers because those marked the order in which those ages were written - Riven is the fifth age, therefore Gehn refers to it as Age Five, Age 233 is appropriately his 233rd age, and so on.
The Ages that the player visits are littered with astronomical tools and mechanisms that depend on specific dates or numerical correspondences. Of course, this is usually because most of the ages visited in the series are written by Atrus, who simply has to know everything about every new age he writes a link to. The D'ni also had very advanced technology, and certain ages like Toldelmer were built specifically for scientific research (Astronomy, in this case). Additionally, Uru revealed that the center of D'ni technology as a whole appears to be connected to a large device known as "The Great Zero". Said device serves as a GPS in the D'ni cavern, and itself is located at coordinates (0,0,0). Overall, however, the D'ni actually seem to have been much more connected to writing than to the sciences, though science and mathematics were certainly a large part of their society.
Even if you get the best possible ending instead, Saavedro has still lost twenty years of his life, including his daughters' entire childhoods. Makes the homecoming pretty darn bittersweet right there...
To say nothing of the fact that he's become a psychopath, easily capable of snapping and killing someone with little provocation. What kind of rehabilitation does he have ahead of him?
Atrus has his hands bound behind his back in Book of Atrus.
Call Back: Three of the Ages in the original Myst have separate rooms that Sirrus and Achenar have inhabited at some point, where their pages are. Not so in the Selenetic Age. Sirrus' page is in the middle of crystalline spires, while Achenar's is in the little spot of vegetation left - a haven. Then comes Myst IV.Three guesses what their prison ages are named, and why.
Canon Discontinuity - the comic book, Myst: The Book of Black Ships. Cyan's main gripe was that Dark Horse mixed up Sirrus's and Achenar's names. When the publisher refused to correct this in the remaining issues, Cyan had the series cancelled.
Crapsack World - Teledahn qualifies as it was used as a secret base for slave trafficking, as does Noloben, where Esher performed gruesome experiments on the Bahro.
Creepy Child: Later part of Myst IV - Sirrus possesses Yeesha's body. He does a good job at impersonating her, but his language slips through. Comes to a head in the bad endings, in which she smiles sweetly as she shoots you with a crossbow.
Fission Mailed - In Riven, if you enter the trap book when Gehn asks you to, the screen goes black. And stays black for the better part of a minute before something happens. The development team apparently wanted to make it longer, but the testers thought their computers had crashed.
come to think of it, this whole series seems to have a thing for big plants and fungi in general...
Gadgeteer Geniuses - The D'ni. Aside from the Art, they're also notable for their remarkable engineering skills.
Game-Breaking Bug - The infamous Mechanical Age bug that prevented you from rotating the fortress, requiring the use of a game guide to find the solution to the age's last puzzle.
The brightness of the images in Myst is set for the Mac screen gamma of 1.8. On the PC, with a gamma of 2.2 (and with monitors of the time often being even darker), a key switch in the Channelwood age is invisible in the shadows. You can deduce that there's something special about that location from the in-game maps, but you won't be able to see it. The Stoneship age has a similar problem with the doors to the compass room being too dark to see, but this time, there's no map.
Not just that. A huge chunk of any game in this series becomes this relatively quickly. Made a bit more tolerable by the narrative tone that the official guides take, serving as the voice of the protagonist as he writes a journal of the occurrences.
The puzzles in Uru: Path of the Shell revolve around waiting for long periods of time, 14 minutes for almost all of them to be precise. The only hint to this is Bible-style references written on the walls, referenced in books in Relto which force you to count each individual line, which require you to know D'ni math to figure out what 625 units of their time is in normal minutes.
Heel Face Turn - Veovis, ro'Eh ro'Dan, Achenar. Perhaps Shomat, as well.
Human Aliens - Well, the D'ni aren't space aliens, but they don't originate from this universe. Several of the D'ni-written worlds include effectively human—or rather, D'ni— inhabitants, though the D'ni largely didn't consider them equals to themselves. (And yes, Earth is an Age, with its own descriptive book and everything.)
If the civilizations on Riven (though its people now reside on Tay), Narayan, and Serenia have taught us anything, it's that most civilizations in this series are Human Aliens.
I Did What I Had to Do - There are a few. Gehn in Riven, Esher in Myst V, Sirrus in Myst IV.
I Lied - Saavedro offers to return Releeshann to the player freely at the end of Myst III when it turns out he can't return home without help. If you take up his offer directly, he gleefully tosses the book into an abyss and scampers off home.
Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence - Especially in Uru to block off unfinished areas, but examples of places that seem like they should be accessible but are not abound throughout the entire series. A notable exception is in Riven, where you can simply crawl under a locked gate.
It's Up To You - five times so far in the original series alone. This really begins to stretch credibility in later games. In Myst IV, Atrus can't participate because he's conveniently stranded in some kind of electrical storm. You only find this out if you repair his imager, which is not necessary for beating the game.
Myst: Go to D'ni without the white page (a type of Unwinnable situation), or bring all of the pages to either brother so you get trapped in the book yourself.
Riven: Forget to rescue Catherine (cue Downer Ending), open the fissure before trapping Gehn (Gehn escapes and kills you and Atrus), trap yourself in the prison book (if you do it in the Rebel Age, they burn the book), etc.
Exile: Return to Tomahna without the book to Releeshahn. Or, return to Tomahna, bringing Saavedro with you... The endgame of Exile is a very detailed, involved puzzle that comes with myriad ways to screw up; each one nets you a message related to how your mistake translates to "You lose, dumbass". All but two involve getting your sorry ass killed.
Literary Agent Hypothesis - Used to explain not only the existence of the Uru series, but to account for all the Ret Cons in the Myst games.
One might even say that Uru is all one big Retcon.
Lock and Key Puzzle: The central puzzle of a lot of the games (such the fireplace in Myst or the fire marbles in Riven) essentially boils down to an elaborate combination lock. The mechanism has so many possible states that you can't brute-force all the combinations, so the only way to solve it is to wander around solving sub-puzzles that will eventually reveal what the right combination is.
Resulting in a Guide Dang It scenario for many players.
Made Of Nara - Your Uru avatar can fall four stories without linking and not be harmed.
Multiple Endings: all of the games give you a choice. Choose wisely.
Some of the times you do have a choice aren't entirely obvious, either. The ending in Exile requires you to undo one of the puzzles you just solved in order to achieve your basic victory condition. To get the best ending, you then have to undo a different puzzle before resetting the first, and forgetting something at any point gets you an immediate failure.
Furthermore, forgetting one lousy thing in Exile but remembering everything else locks you into the best ending - that would be picking up the Tomahna book in the Narayan outpost instead of opening it like every single other linking book in the game, nay, the series. You have no choice but to let Saavedro go after that, if you want to get to the book without him killing you.
Mundane Utility: The D'ni have some incredibly advanced technology, the cornerstone of which is their ability to connect to other universes, specifying any type of universe they want with any contents they want, and travel to them at will. They use this ability as a municipal mass transit system, among other things.
Nostalgia Level - Atrus' study in Myst IV: Revelation, the Myst library, and K'veer in Path of the Shell. The Cleft might count, although it had only ever appeared in novels before. Also, the ruins of the original Myst in the bad ending of Myst V. It's worth getting the bad ending just to see it.
The Other Darrin - Katran was played by Sheila Goold and voiced by Rengin Altay in Riven. She was played by Maria Galante in Exile.
At least Goold and Galante SOMEWHAT resemble each other when in wardrobe and make-up. The actors who played Sirrus and Achenar in Revelation look and sound NOTHING like the Miller Brothers other than basic body types.
Press X to Die - Using the Trap Book from your inventory at any point in Riven nets you a bad ending. There is one point where you do have to use it, but then it's being offered to you by Gehn and isn't in your possession. Using the Tomahna Linking Book anywhere that Savedro can physically reach it at the end of Exile has a similar result.
Arguably, Uru: Complete Chronicles does this, as it gives you the base game plus two expansion packs worth of content all at once but doesn't even hint that they are separate plot-wise.
The current release of Uru Live has most of the same stuff from Complete Chronicles, but at least you have other people to help you along.
Averted in Exile, however, in which not only does the player reconcile with Saavedro and allow him a happy ending, but in a bad ending where you drive Saavedro to suicide Atrus yells at you about it. Of course, Saavedro's most serious crimes were arson (no one was hurt,) theft, and plotting bad things— and he did so for understandable reasons— so the game killing him to redeem him would have seemed pretty disproportional.
Retcon - several, but the transformation of 'Trap Books' into 'Prison Ages' is probably the most obvious.
Don't forget the placement of the Cleft. The novels heavily imply the Cleft to be located in the Middle East, while Uru moves it to New Mexico.
According to Word Of God (Richard A. Watson, the end-all authority on all things D'ni), the cleft was always in New Mexico, the novels got it wrong. He also states that trap books as shown in Myst and Riven don't exist; the brothers were always trapped in prison Ages (as shown in Myst IV), and that the trap books were simply a simplification made by Cyan for gameplay purposes. It should be noted that he wrote about this as early as 1998, so it wasn't something that was changed for Myst IV.
Rewriting Reality - The explanation for how the Art (of linking to other universes) works. With the proper ink, paper, and language, of course. What do you think this is, magic or something?
Well, technically, it's not rewriting reality, and a whole section of a couple of the stories is dedicated to making this clear, thanks to a few characters who started to think they were gods. As stated above, it's linking - writing a linking book simply creates a door to a world that already exists somewhere, if the theory of infinite possibilities is to be believed. It also points out that writers have to be ruddy careful, as the link is established to a moment when the world is exactly as it is described in the linking book. It doesn't matter if the linked world destabilizes into a hellish inferno after that moment - the book will still link there. Thus the existence of a guild dedicated to approving books as safe to use.
However, there have been times, like with the Age of Stoneship, where Atrus uses the Art to change the contents of a world. Word Of God states it's sort of a quantum-uncertainty thing; you can't change things, but you can specify things which could have been there all along but just haven't been noticed. For example, the dagger-from-the-sky from Riven: You can't write that a dagger falls from the sky. You can write that there was a dagger in orbit all along that's just about to fall, however. Even before you wrote it, there was a potential that the dagger was there, it just collapsed into a certainty when you put it to paper. If you write in a change that's incompatible with the existing world, then the link changes to a new world which matches all the facts...breaking the link to the original world permanently. Yes, this has resulted in at least one Shoot the Dog.
Scenery Porn - Sufficient, said many critics at the time, to solely justify the first game's record-smashing sales. You can probably buy the first three sequels with that excuse, too.
The Garden Ages, the Kadish Gallery and Ahnonay in Uru.
Taken to the extent that your reward for completing a stage of particular games - individual islands in Riven, complete Ages in Exile and Revelation - is a ride around the area you just finished in what might easily be called Scenery PornFanservice. (Amateria in particular makes no pretensions of being anything other than Ending Ride.)
Schmuck Bait: The Trap Books. Not counting the Linking Book you touched to start the whole adventure, of course...
Riven presents some interesting twists on the trope. There are at least two major pieces of Schmuck Bait in the game, and by the time you've found them, you should have figured out why they're dangerous. And yet, in order to win the game, you must use them anyway.
Sequel Hook - The "right" ending of the original Myst contains several blatant ones for Riven.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong - Non-time-travel variant; Gehn isn't a particularly good linking author, so the quantum-uncertainty thing the linking books have going on makes the Ages he links to dangerously unstable. Atrus is much better at writing linking books than his father, and reckons he can use those same quantum-uncertainty shenanigans to salvage Gehn's Ages, or even undo the damage Gehn caused; but it's a very time-sensitive endeavor because Ages don't stop deteriorating just because you're not in them, and some are beyond saving already.
Shout Out - The never-seen Osmoian Age is a nod to Cyan's earlier game Cosmic Osmo, which was set in the Osmoian solar system.
Steam Punk - Big machines rife with pipes, gears, and valves often serve as primary puzzle elements in ages, especially Riven. Atrus especially seemed able to crank out huge volumes of wacky machinery using nineteenth-century parts and a little Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
The upper part of the central tower in J'nanin appears to be fixed in place with bed-sized screws.
Take a Third Option - The solution to the first game. Do you trust the brother without the more obviously 'mad' and 'evil' attributes, or assume it's some sort of misleading trick and trust that one? The answer is to trust neither.
Tag Line - Myst III: Exile went with "The Perfect Place to Plan Revenge".
Town with a Dark Secret - Terahnee is a country with a dark secret. Atrus and company find this out almost too late.
Tree Top Town - Part of the Channelwood Age in the first game.
Narayan in the third game is made of treetop towns.
As is the hidden village of the Moiety.
Un-Canceled - The multi-player component of Uru was canceled before it came out of beta, but brought back to life a few years later by Game Tap as Myst Online. Then, after little over a year, it was canceled again. Then plans were announced for a version of the game using fan-made content... which was canceled. Cyan then decided to release the whole thing as open-source, and to just let the fans deal with it (as of this writing, the open source release of Myst Online is still pending, although there are a number of fan-run servers known as 'shards' up and running if you know where to look for them).
And now it's been Un-Canceledyet another time, and for free, to boot.
Unobtainium - Nara and deretheni, among other stones.
You ... IDIOT! Moronic lump of filth! You are nothing! Puh! AHHHHHH! I needed the power! I needed it! D'ni needed ME! You threw it away to this witch and her legion of scum, the demon slaves! You have released the slaves as masters! You've turned the small to great! Curse the Maker ...
Villains Out Shopping - The supplemental booklet for the Riven soundtrack contain extra pages from Gehn's journal where he discusses some of his hobbies.
Violation of Common Sense - To reach a certain location in Uru Live, you have to leap off an island in a drop which must be well over a hundred feet.
Wham Episode - The death of Willow "Wheely" Engberg in Uru Live, i.e. the slaughter of a teenaged girl, was roleplayed out over chat.
Not to mention the actual death of the player behind the character Pepsi in Uru Live. Years later, in the D'ni Games (a fan-created Olympics-styled event) of Until Uru, the Pepsi Memorial Marathon was named in honor of her.
What Happened To The Squee: You don't hear from Gehn after he is imprisoned. Does he mend? Does he die unreformed? Is he lost in the library fire?
What the Hell, Player? - At the end of Exile, you have the option of leaving Saavedro trapped. If you do this, Atrus calls you on it in the epilogue.
The official hint guide calls you on it in a particularly biting tone. Q: "I trapped Saavedro and he gave me the book. Can I go now?" A: "Sure. After all, Saavedro hasn't suffered yet. Twenty years is nothing, really. Think how much fun it would be to leave this tormented fellow stranded with the knowledge that his civilization (and perhaps family) thrives just out of reach... It might be interesting, in a clinical sort of way, to see how he reacts. You heartless cad."
Atrus also doesn't react well to your stupidity if you go to D'ni without bringing the missing linking book page at the end of the first game.
Word Of God - possibly the most frustrating instance in any fandom ever, as Myst's Word Of RAWAspecifically contradicts onscreen canon.
However, this may be assuaged by the fact that EVERYTHING that goes on in-cavern is automatically canon, regardless of who did it or what it is. If it happens in-game, it's canon; i.e. a player character sitting down in a specific spot.
World Of Chaos - The worlds created in-universe, rather than the universe itself.
Some of the worlds created in-universe. One of the underlying principles of the Functional Magic is that perfectly habitable worlds can be very, very different from each other; it's just that some of them have trees that grow inside-out (Edanna, Exile), or aquatic microbes that avoid heat and take the water with them (Riven), or wooden ships that are sticking out of the side of an island (Stoneship, Myst).
And that last one's arguably a mistake, as per Atrus's journal.
Taking this to its logical extent is Torus, which is perfectly habitable despite that everything Atrus knows about the Art says it shouldn't be - a two-sided disc, one light and one dark, the latter of which contains kitten-like flowers, air-swimming fish, and dividing snakes; Rain falls on the light side into a giant lake centered on a whirlpool through which pours through to the dark side, where it arcs up in an enormous fountain and evaporates before circling the perimeter and precipitating again.
Catherine seems to have a special talent for "breaking the rules" as it were: floating rocks in Serenia anybody?
Floating rocks? She wrote an age with magic in it! Spirits, memory jars, etc.
Floating rocks crop up a lot in the games. Exile features them as part of Voltaic's puzzle (levitated, as the Age's name suggests, by magnetism), and Spire in Revelation is made entirely out of them.
Zip Mode: Trope Namer and a handy way to get from one end of an Age to another.
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