There is a world given over almost wholly to water, reachable by a public veilway and welcoming to those who route to it, on which the only spectacle worth the crossing happens after dark and on the surface of the sea. The destination is written B559-O, The Lantern Shoals, and the name belongs first to the creatures and second to the warm shallow waters they keep to, the two having long since become one thing in the saying. A crosser arriving by day will find a pleasant and unremarkable ocean world, gentle in its weather, thin in its land, and will wonder, for a while, what they came for. They came for the night.
The creatures are small, no longer than a hand, and they swim in numbers that the survey has given up trying to count, in schools that gather toward dusk and disperse toward dawn and spend the dark hours doing the one thing they are catalogued for. They light. Each carries within it a soft and steady glow, blue going green going gold, and a single one held in a cupped palm of seawater is a quiet and lovely thing. A school of them is something else. When they gather, they light in concert, and the lighting moves through the school in slow tides, so that the whole shallow sea for as far as a crosser can see is lit from below in sheets and rivers of shifting color, rising and falling, answering itself across distances no single creature could signal across.
What the lighting is for is not established, and the survey notes the absence plainly, because the absence is the only unanswered thing in the finding and it is a small one. The creatures do not light to feed, so far as any account has shown, having been observed to feed by day in no particular pattern of glow. They do not light to warn, no predator of consequence sharing their shallows. They do not light to court, the lighting being a thing the whole school does at once rather than a thing one does toward another. They simply light, together, through the dark hours, and stop at dawn, and the survey has watched them do it across many seasons and has not found the reason and has stopped being troubled by the not-finding, because nothing in the creatures or their world suggests the reason is one a crosser need fear.
The waters are warm, and shallow, and safe to enter, and the keepers of the small harbor towns encourage crossers to do so. This is the matter the entry sets down with some gladness, because findings a crosser may walk into without cost are not so many that the catalogue can afford to undersell one. A person may wade out into the dark shallows, or float in them, and the creatures will gather around the warmth of them without alarm, and light, and a crosser standing waist-deep in a glowing sea while the color moves past them in slow tides reports, almost without exception, that they forgot for a while to think about anything else at all. The creatures are not harmed by the company. They do not cling, or bite, or feed on the warmth, and they disperse from a crosser as readily as they gathered, going on with the lighting elsewhere.
The Servatory rates the Lantern Shoals at Open, and the rating is exact, and a crosser should read nothing into the one open question that the entry has not already said. There is no turn here, no cost held back for the careful, no later paragraph in which the lovely thing reveals a price. The lighting is not a lure. The warmth the creatures gather toward is only warmth, and they ask nothing of the body that carries it, and a crosser leaves the Lantern Shoals carrying nothing away but the having floated in them and the memory of a sea that lit from below.
Go to the Lantern Shoals, and go at night, and bring those you would have see a thing that is only beautiful. Wade out, if the keepers say the night is a good one, and let the school find the warmth of you, and watch the color move. The survey can tell a crosser what the creatures are and where they keep and how to stand among them. Why they light, it cannot, and on this finding alone it counts that the smallest of failures, and would not trade the watching for the answer.
There the matter rests.
~ The Lectors
