The outrider Kris Kestees kept to a slow trot on his approach to the crystalline ruins of a city that no one any longer knew the name of. He readjusted in the saddle and gave a low haa to Boreas, his mecha-horse, as they eased through the arched stone gateway. The outrider scanned what he could see of the ruins ahead of him for any movement, for any sign of life. He was wary, and cautious, and that was unlike him. To hesitate, he knew, was to die.

As he edged nearer the cracked and dashed crystal structures that once made up the great towers of a civilization long dead, the wide road Boreas carried him along began to fill on all sides with twisted metal and broken glass. He spotted the wrecks of old hovercrafts which now lay blackened, empty, immobile; relics of an age nearly forgotten. He noticed the shattered cockpits and broken wings of small ships which might have raced through the skies from one crystal tower to the other. Now they all lay dead, with no carrion birds to pick from their ruin. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true, thought Kestees. 

And then his mind went, for a moment, to imagination. What world had truly been left behind? What greatness had the races of TItan achieved before the fall, and before the evernight had swallowed up the world? The chronicles told of glory and majesty, but he’d dismissed it as folk tale and myth most of his life. Here, however, he began to wonder. He turned his mind back to the task at hand.

As he passed through the arched and tarnished gateway of the old city, and entered into its high walls, the darkness of the evernight eased, which put him off. The old city’s collapsed crystal towers, long dimmed of their own brilliance, seemed inclined to it anyway, and caught the moonlight, reflected it, and otherwise illuminated a world that had been so long without. He pulled Boreas to a stop. Anything could be hiding behind the refracting crystal structures which protruded jagged and serrated like broken teeth from black, dead earth.

Kestees lowered the crimson scarf that covered the bottom half of his face and spat. He was only just beginning to realize how claustrophobic he found cities. He’d never had to think about it before because none any longer stood. Neither did this one, he thought ironically. Though as Boreas, with a blow through his nose, took him to within its walls and through its arched and tarnished gateway, he could feel it encroach upon him, as if it remembered what it once was, looming and glorious and replete with wonder. 

A crack some distance sixty yards away to the left of him pricked up his ears and turned him around double quick. He threw his woolly black cloak over his shoulder to reveal the guns which hung on crisscrossing holsters either side of his chest. They were chrome and silver and black, and heavy, though perfectly balanced in his practiced hands. They were thick as bibles, and electric blue fire ran through them through translucent tubes connected from the butt to the barrel, which acted as a propellant for the thick slugs the guns took as ammunition. A coolant ran through another tube, on the opposite side of the guns, stopping them from overheating in Kestees’ leather gloved hands. They were as much machines, tools of his trade, as was his horse Boreas, as much machine as wild beast. 

He drew the guns and fired toward the sound, pulling both triggers one and then the other. Sparks and fire exploded from their chambers, as if the guns were old flintlocks, and two great silver slugs with the width of bottle caps banged out, leaving trails of electric fire like lasers hanging briefly in the evernight. The sound of Kestees’ guns was deafening, a sound like the scream of a banshee and the roar of a tiger cat. It was a sound set to get your guts to drop and your heart to stop beating in your chest. The sound of those guns had earned them their reputation. They told stories about the sound of Kestees’ guns. They called them The Judgment in the stories. 

Kestees kept his guns raised and waited in deafened silence for the exhale of smoke from the bores of his pistols to clear.  Then he saw what made the noise, and it was as he’d thought. Nothing but a manrat, a sort of underworld scavenger scarcely seen above ground. Little was known about them, but rumour was they’d built up tunnels and cities in the underworld, in the outer reaches, and lived in packs and the like. Kestees felt no sympathy. They were more beast than man in his eyes. The manrat was probably up here looking for loot, or salvage, trying what he must to make his way among the ruination of the world, for whatever that was worth. 

He expected the manrat to be stone dead, but wrapped as he was in his own mind, tired as he was in pursuit of the priestess, he’d only winged it. Still, slugs like the ones he was firing would tear you in half, winged or otherwise. The manrat was torn across the belly, eviscerated, huffing and puffing and bleeding out of the charred tear that would kill him momentarily.  Shouldn’t have made a sound, Kestees thought. Would have lived a little longer. He turned away. 

And then he thought twice. The sound of his guns would no doubt have tipped off the priestess, who could only have been some ways up ahead of him, somewhere among the ruins of the Crystal city of Gossamer. He turned back to the manrat. Better to get some information. 

“Manrat,” he called over, “I’ll trade you mercy for information.”

The manrat’s eyes beamed up at him as he huffed and puffed for breath, as each and every beat of his heart forced more blood out of the wound in his gut, every second a closer step towards death. 

“Outrider,” coughed the manrat, “th-the p-pr-priestess… she, she makes communion…”

The outrider Kris Kestees hopped out of the saddle of the great steel and flesh beast, Boreas, and knelt next to the dying manrat. “She what?” Had he heard correctly? If the priestess had found a temple here and communion was made, he would be no match for her.

“Sh-she makes communion, Outrider… Turn back, turn b-…” The manrat’s own beating heart had finally killed him, it seemed. His beady eyes still glared up and into Kestees’ own, but the fire in them was out. 

Kestees thought before rising. He’d hesitated entering the city, he’d been cautious in his approach, and now he’d missed his shot at a godforsaken manrat. If it had been the priestess, the bullets never would have left his guns. He collected himself and turned to Boreas. 

“Boreas, report to base. The priestess makes communion. Make the walls of the inner world aware, should we not ride home.”

The machinery that made up the inner workings of the mind of the great beast did as it was commanded, and it raised and lowered his head in affirmation to Kestees. 

“Right. Come on boy,” Kestees began as he jumped back into the saddle. “We’ve got us a witch to hunt.”