Scene 4

Cullen was generally dissatisfied with his lot in life. From a very young age he had known deep down in his heart of hearts that he was destined for greater things. He wasn’t the sort of person to sit idly by and wait for that destiny to come and find him, he was smarter than that. He knew that he had to go and seek it out. Fortune favored the bold.
Today, his fortune lay beneath the earth, so he was digging. Normally, in the empty world that he and his countrymen called home, this would take the form of some scavenged piece of junk out of the Waste. Some piece of old world garbage that you could trade to the people in town for food or clothes. That sort of thing was for suckers. He was after something far more precious.
He had heard a story from his uncle Jarret of a mushroom that grew beneath the earth that could be traded to the discerning buyer for great wealth. They were called truffles, and they were worth a fortune. Jarret had said that they were used in cooking, but Cullen didn’t really care about all that. He cared about the riches they could bring him. From what he heard, there were idiots in the tribes to the north that would sell their kids for these things, and he wanted in.
Cullen had grown up in his brother’s shadow, and he had begun to tire of it. The problem was so bad that most people, even family members, mostly referred to him as the boy. They knew his name, but instead of saying things like “Cullen lacks direction in his life,” or “Cullen doesn’t play well with others,” they would say “I’m worried about the boy,” or “the boy ain’t right.” It was infuriating. Everybody knew his brother’s name, and never referred to him with a dismissive moniker like “the boy”.
His brother Hunner was always the first to do things, granted, he was his older brother, but he was always stealing the show. He was first to take an ear, he was first to run a successful raid on a neighboring village, he was always finding things in the woods to trade to the assholes that lived in town. He was Hunner, a notorious figure in their valley. Cullen was sick of it, and he wanted some fame for himself.
So there he was, shovel in hand, way out in the eastern hills where nobody goes, seeking his fame and fortune. Why did nobody go into the eastern hills? Cannibals. His family wasn’t very well liked in the valley, and had to operate on the fringes of society to get by. There were rumors that a couple of generations back, his family had been cannibals, and that’s why nobody liked them. If you traced everybody back far enough though, they were all from cannibal stock. Bunch of hypocrites.
He couldn’t operate in their territory with impunity, but if he stayed quiet and kept his head down he could feel relatively safe digging for some truffles. What’s the worst that could happen though? Cannibal attack? He would hear them coming a mile away, hide somewhere and ambush them. Maybe he could take his first ear today? That would be a good story, with some proof. Then they would remember Cullen Brown. Or maybe Cullen the Conqueror, who knows, destiny was a funny thing.