The shimmering air above his slopes was flecked with the circling forms of eagles large enough to carry a child off in each claw. For now the King was docile and hazy with the heat, but he too was a volcano and of uncertain temper. Skein gave her a wide berth and instead veered toward her husband, the King of Fans, the tallest, middlemost mountain of the ridge, his cratered head forever lost in clouds. It was Sorrow, the white volcano, sweet, pure, and treacherous as snow. One such peak stood a little apart from the rest, its coloration paler. He veered toward the mountain ridge that ran along the western coast, seeing the individual peaks emerge from the fleece of clouds. In fact, there might even be other Lost minds floating near him now, indiscernible to him as he was to them.

Scrying for bandits in the jungles, tracing missing children on the rises, spotting sharks in the deeps, reading important trade notices and messages long-distance. Lost minds occupied with the business of the island, keeping it functioning. Scattered around the isolated island of Gullstruck, dozens of other minds would be adrift. It was a relief to see the world plummet away from him so that everything became smaller. He had to take his body on a difficult and possibly perilous journey the next day, and he was spying out the land. Raglan Skein, however, was doing nothing so whimsical. Indeed, a gifted Lost might feel the grass under their knees, taste the peach in your hand, overhear a conversation in the next village, and smell cooking in the next town, all while watching barracudas dapple and flit around a shipwreck ten miles out to sea. Most Lost could move their senses independently, like snails' eyes on stalks.

He could let them out, then reel them in and remember all the places his mind had visited meanwhile. Like all Lost, he had been born with his senses loosely tethered to his body, like a hook on a fishing line. There was no point in bringing those senses that would make him feel the chill of the sapphire-bright upper air or the giddiness of his rapid rise. He took only his sight and hearing with him. And so Raglan Skein left his body neatly laid out on his bed, its breath as slow as sea swell, and took to the sky. It was a burnished, cloudless day with a tug-of-war wind, a fine day for flying.

The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge