goofy wrote:
What atrus accually did was (IMO) is keep the link stable to the age itself. I read somewhere that if you change anything in a discriptive book it will change the link to another age thats simular to the original. What I personally believe is that you accually can changes things in the discriptive book, but if done to much it will cause a cascading effect with the discriptive book which can cause the link to change or completely make the discriptive book useless. which is why the D'ni didnt do it.
mmmh imagine the great tree of possibilities. our riven is on a certain branch. if you change the descriptive book just a little, the link will move to a version a little higher up in the branch. but there is a threshold... (specially if you end up writing something that negates something you have written before) if passed, the link we have, backtracks all thew way back to another branch. Atrus couldnt try to maintain the link... he maintained the age. he tried to keep it as llong as possible stable. the descriptive book has only one way to become useless. that you do any change to it that could make the world unstable.
goofy wrote:
Now unless atrus had knowledge that wasn't spoke of. which is possible. Which makes me wonder if the original Riven was really destroyed or just the link in point was.
thats what we are talking about. is the planet still there? just a little destroyed? did all the stuff go through the star fissure? was there a supernova? we have no possible way to know how riven was destroyed, we only know that there is nothing left (at least nothing we could recognize as riven).
goofy wrote:
Remember the link in point was rather close to that fissure. Now if we linked in from one of the other link in points from other ages then maybe we would know if the age was accually gone. Mainly because the link would not work. Basicly if the accually planet was destroyed then none of the links will work. The linking books are short discriptions of the area within the age. once that area is destroy or drasticly changed then that link in point might be broken.
if you write a descriptive book (a new one, even if directly copied from the original age 5 book) will link you to a completely different version of Riven, it could be a destroyed one or one which is yet to be destroyed, the only thing we can be sure of its one that Gehn has never visited.
To write a linking book you have to write it at that point where you want to link to, as far as i know. so no linking to a moon or something... specially because there might be no moon or any planet or anything for that matter...