Besides, I was disinclined to complain too much of the eccentricities of Twilight when one of them was the realm’s active antipathy for the Dead King and all his works.

The second manner of using the Ways was the one Akua and I had used tonight, which Archer – who’d effectively pioneered it, and still remained a finer practitioner of than anyone save perhaps the Grey Pilgrim himself – had named sidling. Those of us with senses that were not entirely physical could often sense where the fabric of Creation thinned, but with practice it could be learned to feel out where there were… cracks between Creation and the Twilight Ways. Cracks one could slip through when they were found, though they were ephemeral things and particularly capricious where gates of any sort had been recently used. It could take some time to find the cracks, and often required some luck as well as fine senses, which was why near everyone using the method was either Named or nonhuman. Given the difficulties involved one might be tempted to dismiss sidling as an inferior form of travel, save for two facts: sidled paths through the Ways were measurably faster and more precise than those come of gates, and there were also completely traceless.

A Twilight gate, even only a temporary one, could found by scrying, rituals or even just having a sufficiently sensitive entity close when it happened – whenever we used them to deploy troops against the Dead King, the surprise was strategic and almost never tactical. Our presence was known ahead of being seen, always. Archer, on the other hand, had once sidled out of the Ways with her entire band with only a crumbling wall between her and the Prince of Bones and the Revenant hadn’t had a clue before she shot it in the back of the head. Not that it’d killed the thing, but it’d been a gallant effort. Beneath me, the black swan Akua had shapeshifted into began a graceful arc downwards and I led Zombie into the same. The wind’s howl picked up, until my mount landed at a gallop and obeyed the touch of my hand by folding in her wings. I pressed down against her mane even as Akua’s graceful form passed between what seemed to be two raised stones and disappeared.

Zombie navigated the slope leading down to the raised stones and slipped between them: a heartbeat later, after a sensation like a hand passing through my hair, we were on Creation again.

As a testament to the accuracy of sidling, we’d emerged a mere twenty feet away from the camp’s main gate.

- Book 6, Chapter 5: Expired