The Definitive Country Almanac: The Outer Lantern League — Part 1#

Kethra Almanac • Approved 19 September 2026 • drafted 18 September 2026 • Sections 1–4 (Sections 5–8 are in Part 2)

Status: approved. Briana approved the whole almanac on 19 September 2026 (the Almanac Approval Decision). Where this file calls something a proposal, read it as approved, except the open points that decision lists.

Status before approval:

• Established in earlier files, and taken as given here (proposals there too, unless the spine's canon table covers them):
  • "Asteroid-based veterans and insurgents opposing orbital central authority" (the faction roster).
  • "Belt and outer-system settlements resisting coercive orbital and Coalition rule", about 0.5 million people in the Cinderbelt, about 50 AU out, with a 7-hour signal delay (the spine).
  • The Wick, the League's harbour, about 140,000 people, whose location is "known to everyone and admitted by no one". The Lamps, about 360,000 people across about 30 small yards: "kill one and the others go dark". Dimlight on Kronos XI, a hidden repair yard and fuel cache that "the Imperium doesn't officially know about". League crews raid the Seam. (Chapter 11.)
  • A captains' coalition in which "negotiators and militant captains compete for the League's voice", and Lantern "captains' justice" in the belt (Chapter II).
  • Spacing is "a charge against the Lantern League that the League denies" (Chapter V).
  • League crews raid the Imperial concessions, and the Imperium wants them suppressed (the Vardane almanac). Dimlight has about 6,000 people and "smuggles people out and chits in" (the Kronos colony almanac).
  • From the register: its objective is to win accountable services and freedom from coercive orbital rule; its fear is debt and seizures converting frontier settlements into permanent dependants; its leverage is local navigation, dispersed repair yards and community loyalty; its split is that negotiators seek autonomy while militant captains regard compromise as surrender. Its positions towards the Vesper Orbital Compact and the Rovessa Caravans, and theirs towards it, are used throughout.
• Proposal: everything else. It is built on the spine, chapter 11, the Cinderbelt Coalition almanac, the Kronos colony almanac, what Chapters II and VI say about Vesper's outer rings, and what Chapter V says about unrostering.
• Correction made while writing this almanac: the Rovessa almanac had attached the register's warning that "militant escorts can make a civilian voyage a combat operation" to Free Banner escorts. The register says it about the League's escorts. That line has been corrected there.

Reading note. The League is not a country of rocks. It is a promise kept between about thirty small settlements and one harbour: keep a light for the next ship, and let no debt follow anyone through your door. It has no seat anywhere, no money of its own and no one who can sign for all of it. Every League place named here is on the interactive Atlas, on its Cinderbelt map or, for Dimlight, its Kronos map. The full list is the generated Register of the Outer Lantern League.

Section 1: National Overview & Identity#

Official Name & Etymology#

• Formal name: The League of the Outer Lanterns, as its Covenant of 2242 calls it. Everyone else says the Outer Lantern League.
• Short name: the League. Its settlements are the Lamps, and its harbour is the Wick.
• People: keepers (the settled people of the Lamps), captains (the masters of hulls) and moths (newcomers). The adjective is Lantern or lamplit.

Where the name comes from. The Outer Lanterns were Vesper's. Between 2148 and 2206 the Compact's Lantern Office built 24 of them through the belt: beacon stations that tracked the moving rocks and broadcast their positions, with air, water and a berth for any ship in trouble. "Outer" was the orbital word for everything beyond Kethra's orbit, as in the Coalition's first name, the Outer Works (the Coalition almanac).

Vesper staffed the Lanterns with families from its outer rings, "the least maintained habitats", where residents who fall behind on their dues are sent (Chapter II). So the keepers were outer twice over. In 2242 the keepers of 19 Lanterns bound themselves into a league. The name stayed; the Lanterns became the Lamps.

What others call it:

Greeting: "Is your lamp lit?" Reply: "Lit, and for you." Lit means safe, as it does in Hearthport's slang (the Kronos colony almanac); moths from Hearthport brought the word.

National Symbols#

Leave a Light, first verse (original lyrics):

Trim the wick and turn it high, the dark is deep tonight; Someone's running with no chart, and steering by our light. No debt follows past the sill, no collar and no chain — Keep it lit, keep it lit, till they come in again.

The State Profile#

Chronological Timeline#

Section 2: Geography & Environment#

Physical Geography#

The Wick and the Lamps#

Seventeen of the 31 Lamps were Vesper's Lanterns, and they still carry Vesper's numbers beside the names their keepers gave them, as the small moons of Kronos carry catalogue numbers beside their crew names (chapter 11). The other fourteen were founded by the League.

"Climate"#

• Vacuum, cold and radiation outside. The Lamps are small rocks, 1–6 km across, and their shells are thinner than the great Coalition rocks'.
• Spin. The Wick gives 0.3 g at its floor, but it is narrow and spins fast, once about every two and a half minutes, and newcomers suffer the wick-reel, a week of dizziness. Most Lamps spin a drum inside the rock at 0.2–0.3 g.
• The dark. There is no daylight. The lamp is not a metaphor: every Lamp keeps a beacon lamp on its mast, and every household keeps one in the window.

Life and Resources#

Section 3: History & Chronology#

The Outer Lanterns (2148–2206)#

When the Coalition reached the belt in 2140, its ships needed to know where the rocks were. The belt's rocks move, and Hyperion's pull shifts them year by year. Vesper, which ran all traffic control, built the answer. Its Lantern Office lit Lantern One in 2148, on a long black rock at the head of the northern approach, and Lantern Twenty-Four in 2206. Each Lantern tracked the rocks around it and broadcast what it saw. Together they made the Light: the chart every ship in the belt steered by. Each Lantern also kept air, water, a berth and a doctor for ships in trouble.

Roster-work and the gravity trap#

Vesper did not send engineers to keep the Lanterns. It sent debtors. From the 2150s, a family in the outer rings could clear its dues with ten years' roster-work on a Lantern and come home to the inner rings.

Few came home. The Lanterns were spun at 0.3 g at best, and children born there were Cinderborn (Chapter I): their bones and hearts were built for low gravity, and Vesper's 0.8–1.0 g rings were as far beyond them as Kethra. The keepers put it plainly: Vesper promised us a home we could no longer stand in.

Bolters and the lamp in the window#

Until 2203 the Crown transported convicts to forced labour in the belt (Chapter II), in the Coalition's yards (the Coalition almanac). Some ran. A bolter who reached a Lantern found air, water and no questions, and the keepers' custom began: a lamp in the window meant you may come in, and nobody will ask. When transportation ended, the custom stayed.

The Dark Years (2233–2238)#

Vesper Fever killed about 40,000 people in orbit (Chapter I), and Vesper's tenders stopped coming. The Coalition closed its docks to orbit for two years (the Coalition almanac), and the Lanterns were Vesper's, so it would not sell them parts either. In 2235 the air plant at Lantern Nine, which its keepers called Spill, failed. No tender came, and no spare was sold. 187 people died.

In 2238 Vesper's tenders came back, bringing a bill for the dues of the Dark Years. The keepers' answer is the League's oldest saying: "You were not there."

The Covenant (2242)#

On 14 Mist 2242 the keepers of 19 Lanterns met at the Wick and signed the Lantern Covenant (Section 5). They chose Dunya Crane, Keeper of the Wick, as the first Lamplighter. Of the other Lanterns, Spill was dead, two had become Vesper's Belt Line posts, and two had been leased to the Coalition's yards.

The Seizures, the First Dark and the Beacon Settlement (2247–2251)#

Vesper's Habitat Marshals (Chapter II) came to collect. Between 2247 and 2251 they seized three Lamps for debt. The League answered with the third article of the Covenant, One dark, all dark: in 2247 every Lamp withdrew the Light for 40 days. Ore trains wandered and yards stood idle for want of ore, and the Coalition, whose trains steered by the Light, made both sides settle.

The Beacon Settlement (2251), brokered by Yardmaster Yusra Onwu:

• The League runs the Lanterns and the Light. Vesper keeps the title, and the duty of structural maintenance: air plants, hulls and reactors.
• Ships clearing Vesper's docks for the belt pay a light-fee, and Vesper passes 70% of it to the League.
• The Lamps pay Vesper station dues, Cr 31 million a year for all of them, for maintenance and the Belt Line.
• Disputes go to a joint audit. It has never met.

One seized Lamp was returned. Vesper sold the other two to the Coalition in 2252, and they are Coalition yards today.

Moths (2251–2279)#

The League grew by taking people in. Moth, founded in 2253 on the Imperial side of the South Lane, received them: Bonded runaways from the Imperium's claims, Coalition crews bolting from scrip debt and company stores (Chapter VI), unrostered families from Vesper orbit (Chapter V), and free prospectors. Newcomers are still called moths, because they come to the light. Spill was re-lit in 2261. Prospectors founded Wisp (2270), and Ingle (2274) was founded for the moths.

The Withholding and the Offset (2268–2270)#

Vesper collected its dues and did no maintenance. After seventeen years of broken air plants mended by the keepers themselves, the Council stopped paying: the Withholding (2268). Vesper answered by keeping the League's share of the light-fee against the unpaid dues: the Offset (2270). Since then neither side has paid the other, and each keeps a book showing what the other owes (Part 2: the Arrears). In 2272 the League began selling lamp-keys to the full Light directly.

The Corridor War and the Lamp Raids (2279–2291)#

When the Corridor War began, the Council declared the Lamps neutral: lit for all. After the Taking of Hearthport (2284), escaped crews and guards reached the Lamps, and in 2286 League keepers and Hearthport escapers built Dimlight on Kronos XI.

The Crown had no base in the belt (chapter 11). In 2285 First Voice Cassia Thorne's war government found another way. Through the Crown Assay House it gave secret letters to League captains, commissions to raid Imperial claims and shipping. 38 captains took them, one by one; the Council never approved them. These were the Lamp Raids (2285–2291). They are why the League's militants are veterans, and why the captains won eight seats on the Council, the Hull Bench, in 2288.

The Revocation (2291)#

At the Armistice of Saltline, First Voice Emrys Callow's government revoked every letter, on 11 Kindling 2291, and denied that the Crown had ever issued them. The Imperium's Belt Marshal took the denial at its word. In 2292 eleven captured Letter Captains were executed at Castellan Rock: the Castellan Eleven. Imperial law executes only for treason and Accord crimes (the Vardane almanac), so the Belt Marshal's court convicted them of treason: it held that the concessions are Imperial ground, and that anyone who bears arms there against the Imperator owes him allegiance for as long as they stand on it. The League calls them pirates' deaths, the Imperium calls them traitors' deaths, and the Crown calls them nothing.

The survivors call themselves the Revoked. Each keeps their letter; the Crown calls them forgeries. They are the core of the League's militant wing, the flints, and the reason the flints trust no treaty: we made a peace once, and it was made without us.

The Long Dark (2299)#

The Imperium's claims grew from 23 to about 60 after the Armistice (the Vardane almanac), and the prospectors they displaced became moths. Flints raided the claims. On 6 Blaze 2299, Imperial frames boarded Ingle to take back runaways. The fight wrecked Ingle's air plant, and 340 people died. The Imperium called it "a pirate base destroyed in a fire-fight".

The Lamps went dark. The flint Lamplighter Maks Harte had even the hazard lamps doused, and for 61 days nobody in the lanes could see the rubble. A Coalition ore train struck debris, and 26 crew died. The Coalition has not forgotten it. In 2300 the Council adopted the Hazard Rule: the Dark withdraws the full Light, but never the hazard light. Ingle was left dark, as a grave.

The Present (2300–2314)#

• Dimlight runs quietly under Kronos's "understanding" (the Kronos colony almanac), smuggling people out and chits in.
• The Dues Order (2310). Vesper's Compact Board ordered that League messages on the Belt Line be carried only for family and distress. The League calls it collective punishment. In Vesper's own outer rings, households began hanging a lamp in the window, withholding their own dues until their rings are repaired. The Compact counts about 11,000 such households.
• Bond-yard Nine (2312). Captain Kasimir Sokol's crews broke into the Imperium's barracks-rock for Bonded crews and brought out 417 people.
• The Lamp Hunt (2313–). Belt Marshal Iskander Vosk, whose family owns the Castellan Concessions (the Vardane almanac), ordered every hull in the South Lane stopped and searched. Moth and Rushlight have been boarded. Nobody has died yet.
• 2314. The Rovessa High Houses offer an openly inspected relief convoy to the southern Lamps, with no League escort. At Lampfall the Council will vote on the Binding Articles and choose the next Lamplighter (Part 2).

Historical Rulers & Leaders#

Lamplighters of the Council of Lamps (complete)#

24 terms and 23 Lamplighters since the Covenant of 2242. The Council elects the Lamplighter at Lampfall, every third year, and no one may serve two terms running, so that no Lamplighter grows too strong. (All proposal. Generated from a fixed seed with mixed name pools; see the naming principles.) The Harte family, spread across three Lamps, has held the office four times. "From" is the Lamp or bench the Lamplighter sat for. The current Lamplighter is in bold.

Figures every Lamp child knows#

Section 4: Demographics & Society#

Population Metrics#

About 70% of the League is Cinderborn: born at about 0.3 g or less, and most cannot live at full surface gravity without medical support (Chapter I).

Language#

• Beltspeech (Chapter IV): compressed and curt, because every message is packed tight.
• Glove-cant, the belt's hand signs, as in the Coalition.
• League cant:

Religion & Belief Systems#

• The Free Roll is kept by families that came out of the Bond. The Imperium's Roll of Service is a written family record, read at funerals (the Vardane almanac). A Bonded family's roll was a record of debts. A Free Roll begins again on the day the family reached a Lamp.
• The Keeping. Every household keeps a lamp lit, for the dead and for whoever comes next. It is kept by believers and unbelievers alike, like the Hearth Vigil in the Coalition.
• A few Lamps tolerate the "shelling" cults that treat illegal deep-linking with a frame as transcendence (Chapter V). The Council condemns shelling, because it kills pilots. It cannot stop it everywhere.

Public Health#

Relief convoys of medicine, most of them Rovessa, matter more to the League than anything else it imports.

Education#

Every Lamp child learns three things before they can read: glove-cant, the seal drill, and the lamp-signs (Part 2).