I’m Brian Bennudriti, founder of Grailrunner. Growing up, I was alone alot and lost in sketchpads or science fiction books, 1970’s tv shows, or comics. I spent countless hours dreaming up shining futuristic cities and wise-cracking superheroes – even used to imagine Spider Man crawling on the walls of my room to chat with me. Probably because of all that and momentum from how it felt experiencing the first three Star Wars movies as they premiered in theaters firing “pew pew” blasters at passing cars on the way home, I went on to earn a Physics degree and serve in nuclear reactor departments in the U.S. Navy years later. Something happened during that time in a rock gorge in Oman that changed me.

With a head full of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, old John Wayne western movies, and the first three books of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, I was on a six-month deployment in the Persian Gulf. Some friends and I spent the night in the desert in Oman to swim in a rock gorge out there and sleep under the stars. It wasn’t a dream or a vision, nothing that definitive, but I clearly saw at once that night in my mind’s eye the image of a lone gunslinger figure walk into a dusty saloon unarmed. Everyone inside, mostly tired soldiers and bandits, froze in fear – not at any guns he might carry, but rather at the shadowy snipers who accompanied him: those outside, and possibly inside as well.

I can’t explain how fully formed that picture was, and all the questions it raised have fueled what became the world of the Salt Mystic. I’m still answering them.