- "The story of Kehlehn" Show Spoiler
His first full Age seems to have been the one he called Klast. On his first visit to this world of vertiginously sloping rock islands in a sea of lava, he was horrified to find that it was inhabited. A race of small, hardy humanoids lived in houses woven from the tough, whippy wood of the trees that grew on the upper slopes of the islands, and suspended in the air over the edges by counterweights which had to be adjusted every time someone moved into or out of a particular building. Co-operation was central to this society's nature, competition or contention completely unknown. Food was scarce, danger a constant companion, and yet the people of Klast managed to derive enjoyment from their lives, particularly when they all piled their weights into the basket that supported their communal hall and sang and danced through Klast's long night. One such gathering was held to celebrate the arrival of the tall stranger with the pale skin.
Kehlehn returned from Klast, carrying the weight with which he had been ceremoniously presented, and shaken to his core. Try as he might, he could not fathom a way in which the life he had witnessed could have come about spontaneously. He went through the Book of Klast letter by letter, and while he saw the elementary mistake he had made with the geology, he could find no explanation for the existence of people in what should have been a barren, uninhabitable Age. At last he was driven to a conclusion which he dared not reveal to any D'ni: that he had created the Age (or at least brought it from possibility into reality), that the people somehow were implicit in that creation, and that in doing so he had done them a great wrong, which he must now redress.
He Wrote a new Age, one without geological flaws or inhabitants, and returned to Klast to offer the people a new home, but found them cheerfully impervious to all his arguments. This was their home, they were used to the heat of the day and the cold of the night, they could not even imagine ground that you could walk flat upon, and while it was a kind offer, no thank you. Kehlehn tried several families, crossing from island to island by means of the ubiquitous rope slides, and got the same answer everywhere. Eventually, he went home, determined to help the people of Klast some other way, and to keep their Age Book secret, lest it be condemned by the Maintainers.
Kehlehn Wrote several more Ages, designed to provide for the needs of the people of Klast. He panicked when he found that the food from one Age was making the people sick, till he realised that the nutrient balance he had so carefully calculated to match their systems contained wrong-way-round proteins, and built two huge machines on the food Age whose purpose was to transfer the food between them, reversing the protein structure in the process. The reversed food was a success, but resulted in an increase in the population which threatened to destabilise (in more ways than one) their society: Kehlehn Wrote an Age where he could experiment with different types of rock to make smaller and more manageable weights. And so it went. From time to time Kehlehn wrote letters to various people in D'ni, acknowledged experts in the Art, asking for advice in carefully guarded terms on this matter or that: it is not known if the letters were ever sent, or if they were returned unread. No replies have been found.
At some point in this period Kehlehn seems to have acquired a wife, though no record of her remains in Stormcastle or the related Ages. Of his son, Ee'hahn, there is more information. Kehlehn seems to have doted on him, raised him single-handedly, and, when the boy was twelve, taken him to see Klast, now nicely balanced and running well. It is clear that the boy never returned from that first and only visit: the event is nowhere directly described, but it is likely that through pride, carelessness, or sheer accident, he fell from the rock into the molten lava below. Such deaths were familiar to the people of Klast, an ever-present shadow on their lives, in which the light of their spirit burned all the brighter. Kehlehn, however, was inconsolable. From this time forth he spent more and more of his time secreted in Stormcastle, writing his letters, which gradually became longer, more frequent, and less in touch with reality, or in Klast, taking care of what he now thought of as his people, his only legacy. The only Linking Book to Klast in existence was secreted in one of the related Ages, behind a typical D'ni puzzle-lock which required elements from all the other Ages.
Kehlehn's last few letters are to a young friend, Ro'Kahl, whom he had secretly schooled in the procedures necessary to sustain the Klast people. Ro'Kahl seems to have been a rebellious spirit, proud to be initiated into a secret and to buck the authority of the Guilds. Presumably that is why he ended up in Gahreesen prison at the time of its fall, his Linking Book to Stormcastle locked in a cage. What happened to Kehlehn we can only speculate; he spent his life in service and atonement, and one can not but imagine his death to have come as a welcome relief. Klast is uninhabited now, the only signs of its people a few remnants of the hanging houses, and the single-chambered structure that Kehlehn carved into the rock of one of the islands for his own comfort. One small thread in the immense tapestry that is the tragedy of D'ni.