Scene 6

Cullen’s truffle hunt wasn’t turning out the way he had planned. He was too dim to realize this, but most of the things in his life tended to turn out this way. It wasn’t that he had bad luck or anything, he just had a poor understanding of how the universe actually worked. A lot of this had to do with him being sixteen years old, some of it was some unfortunate heterozygosity a couple of generations back, add to that the fact that he wasn’t educated in any way shape or form and it was pretty clear that the kid wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards. In his mind, the forest was teeming with truffles. He would march in there, dig a hole, and there would be a truffle in there. Easy.
What he didn’t realize was that his uncle was just trying to get him out of his hair for the afternoon, and this part of the world had no native black truffles. He had been sent on a wild goose chase. There were deer truffles, but they were only a culinary delight to the deer. Hence the name. This gander hunt of his did end up bearing some fruit though.
He had dug a couple of dozen holes, each one an exercise in frustration. The soil around there was notoriously rocky, and the progress was slow and tedious. Along the way, his holes had gotten smaller and smaller until each one was just a couple of shovel fulls. When he decided to dig his last hole for the day, he went all out. This last hole was the culmination of his frustrated rage. A cry to the universe for being so unfair. The universe, unconcerned about holes and the disposition of delinquent youths, carried on, leaving him to his tantrum.
Every hole has a bottom, it is the last part of the hole that you dig before you give up. In this final effort of his, the shovel hit something that wasn’t a rock. It hit something that produced a sharp ringing. Usually when his shovel hit a rock, the shovel would be the thing to do the complaining, producing a dull metallic report. Whatever he had hit rang like a bell. Intrigued, he threw his shovel aside and continued his excavation with his hands. He had found an artifact of pure destiny. Almost stereotypically so.
What he had unearthed was a sword. A sword awaiting his destiny beneath the earth. An ancient artifact from the old world. The sword itself was a very fine piece of work. As he drew it forth from its sheath, he admired its tasteful lines and quality of build. It was the most precise thing he had ever seen. Every facet, angle, and curve was perfect. It was the platonic ideal of a cutting instrument. Everything about it begged him to swing it. It wasn’t a light sword, but the center of balance made it a nimble thing to wield.
He gave it a couple of test swings, just to feel the pleasure of its weight. It was a truly astounding piece of craftsmanship. He lived in a world of dirty imperfect things, rough pieces of handiwork made by people just kind of scraping by. This was a shining beacon of order in a world of chaos.
When he swung the sword, it seemed to cut the air itself. He had never thought about the air being actually something that could be cut. He had been breathing his entire life and had never really thought about actual air being a substance, but this sword made that fact clear. When it was swung through the air, it gave off a crackling hiss, like ripping fabric. A faint blue glow danced along the leading edge of the blade. From this fact, Cullen was able to deduce that this was a magic sword. It dawned on him that he had been chosen by the sword to fulfill his destiny to rule this land and its dimwitted inhabitants. The world was his to conquer.
He probably wouldn’t even have to actually use the sword. One look at this thing and people would bow before him. This was a rather weak hypothesis, so he decided to do some practical testing of the sharpness and durability of the blade. He, being in the forest, was surrounded by trees. Trees, because of their inherent verticality and staunch refusal to roam about, made excellent stand-ins for aggressors. He could pretend that the trees were people, and test how he would do in some sort of ambush situation. Surrounded on all sides, desperate, fighting for his life. This was news to the trees, if they had been planning an ambush, Cullen would have fallen victim to a widowmaker years ago.
Cullen was not formally trained with a blade. He had dabbled in his younger years with sticks and the like, just as all children did. A lot of adults carried some very sword-like objects in their day to day lives, but he was not technically an adult, and normally there weren’t just swords laying around in the woods, so he had very little experience with the finer points of wielding a bladed melee weapon.
He squared up to the tree that had planned this poorly executed ambush and addressed it.
“You picked the wrong day to mess with a guy like me,” he said to his imagined foe.
His foe, scared stiff at the proposition of facing down a world class swordsman, declined to reply. Smugly satisfied with the abject terror that he had elicited in this cur, he struck him down. He was expecting some sort of resistance from the tree, but the blade slipped through it like it was a bank of fog and the swing went a touch wild. At first he thought he had missed his target all together because the tree was still standing. A couple of heartbeats later, gravity seemed to notice that it was sleeping on the job and slowly began to bring the tree to the ground.
He had executed an exceptionally clean diagonal cut on the trunk of the tree, and it had to slide sideways for a second before it began its descent to the forest floor. Cullen had to observe this out of the corner of his eye. It all happened pretty quickly, but when the sword had made contact with the tree, it had produced a blinding flash of blue light. This light had left an afterimage on his retinas and he was having some trouble seeing. This didn’t stop him from being fully elated though.
What he held was an object of absolute power. A wild grin grew on his face as he prepared to vanquish his next foe. The first tree he had taken down was barely more than a sapling, perhaps as big around as his bicep. As he grew bolder, he went for larger and larger trees, taking down around half a dozen. Each tree that he took down was punctuated by a brilliant flash of electric blue light.
It was getting quite difficult for him to see clearly. The center of his vision was becoming a washed out orange blur, so he took to closing his eyes when the sword struck a tree. This did very little to block the brilliant flashes of light. He could see them directly through his eyelids. He could also feel them on his cheeks. It was the same feeling he got when he got too close to a campfire.
Shock is a funny thing. It affects everyone differently. Some people laugh, some cry and go pale, some people get very polite for some reason. Cullen was one of these people that would get very polite. When he approached the very last tree that he wanted to cut, he was half blind and panting with exertion. Midswing, he stumbled into one of his exploratory truffle holes that he had dug earlier. This caused the stroke to have a bit more English on it than he was prepared for. As a result, the path of the blade and the space his leg occupied experienced an unintended confluence. His leg, like so many trees before it, was callously bisected in a practical demonstration of operator error. It stayed standing in the hole that he had dug, and he tumbled to the ground.
His blood, crimson against the green of the forest floor, issued forth at an astonishing rate. He was astonished at least, but the forest paid him no mind. One of his final thoughts as he politely returned the sword to its sheath, was that he had no idea that he had that much blood in him. Quickly, his vision began to go dim. It started in the periphery, and he rapidly went fully blind due to the afterimages of his swordplay. In one final effort, he threw the sword as far away from himself as he could. Which wasn’t very far.