The Lantern at Kell's Reach

Kell’s Reach is an ice moon with nothing on it worth taking except a deep seam of promethium and a lighthouse. The lighthouse is older than the mine. The miners call it the Lantern, and every ship that drops out of the Warp in the Ferros system does so within a day’s burn of its light.

That is not how Warp travel works. The Navis Nobilite were very clear about this when the Inquisitor asked them. Navigators steer by the Astronomican and by nothing else. A lamp on an ice moon should be invisible from the Empyrean.

The keeper, Oswin Tarr, met the Inquisitor at the foot of the tower. He was courteous and very thin. He had kept the Lantern, he said, since his father died, and his father before that. The mine’s records showed that Oswin Tarr had died in a roof collapse nine years earlier, and that his body had been recovered and cremated.

He did not dispute this. He said the Lantern needed a keeper and that he could not very well leave it untended.

The lamp itself burned no fuel. Its light was a pale, sickly gold, and when the Inquisitor’s psyker looked at it directly she began to count backwards in a language she did not know, and did not stop until she was sedated.

The Inquisitor did not attempt to destroy the Lantern. Her report states that the light is not the danger. The light is a door held open, and what matters is who has been walking through it. Every ship that followed the Lantern into the system for sixty years has been accounted for, crew by crew, and eleven of them came home with more souls aboard than they left with.

The lamp was hooded, not extinguished. Kell’s Reach is now under perpetual interdict. The keeper was last seen climbing the tower stairs with a cloth over his arm, to polish the glass, as he did every evening.