Billy Cotton was never nearly as extraordinary as he liked to believe.
The eldest of four children, and the only male among them, young Billy was granted and enjoyed a certain amount of prestige in his immediate family circle. His opinion he was quick to give on anything and everything: the state of the roads, the proper way to milk a cow, the best time for planting corn. Whether or not he had actually knew of such matters or engaged in such activities was irrelevant.
His list of accomplishments was almost as small as his very limited vocabulary, and even less varied. He was the tallest in his class (and still growing, or at least according to his mother) and arguably the strongest (once he had uprooted a sapling in a fit of anger), though teachers and parents alike agreed that he was not perhaps the brightest. To his credit, he had won the local spelling bee twice, only cheating one of those times.
Nearing adulthood, poor Billy was plagued with a cracking, nasal voice and sallow skin liberally dotted with brilliant red blemishes. Having very little to his credit by which to impress the ladies, he was forced to showing off his prowess by jumping off of tall buildings, taunting wild bears, and seeing how long he could hold his breath in the murky creek.
After enough bones had been broken (his nose never did quite heal straight) and enough potions bought, he was barred from doing anything "stupid, disrespectable, shameful -- wholly not fitting of a Cotton!" So, he had to resort to more basic tactics, like pulling the hair of whatever young lady he happened to be interested in at the moment.
Now you may be surprised, dear reader, to learn that none of these things served to endear him to those he was trying so desperately to impress. Quite the contrary; when Billy would saunter down the lane whistling an off-key rendition of "Your Mother Was a Murloc, But I Love You Anyway," people would point and snicker and leave as quickly as possible. It was their whispered insults, their terrible nicknames that hurt the most -- names like "Pie-Face Billy" or "Onion-Breath Cotton" or worst of all, "that-guy-who-got-chased-by-a-wild-boar-and-fell-into-the-creek."
Whatever the rest of the world thought of Pie-Face Billy, his younger sisters adored him. Sally Mae, only five fingers old, nearly worshipped the ground he walked on, sometimes covering it with flowers. For all the times he would hurt himself, she would do his crying for him while he was busy trying to look like a man. This same manliness also prevented him from showing too much affection for Sally Mae, instead sneering at the "kid stuff" like teddy bears and tea parties and flowers. Also, he was obligated to laugh at the little girl's aspirations of becoming a mage.
Magic was, in Limdon Valley, something largely deemed unnecessary. There was only one priest, and he was only kept around so that star struck young lovers could be married. After marriage, people were generally content to build a farm, have several children, and fight their enemies with pitchforks and their fists -- they needed no aid of wizards and necromancers, thank you.
It's hard to say if things would have ended differently for the people of Limdon Valley if they had been a little more capable in the ways of the arcane. As it was, there came a day when the sun was bright and shining, and the hills were swollen and black: churning with the armies of the Scourge. Pitchforks and fists don't do a lot against swords and claws; within hours there was not a person alive.
No, not even Billy Cotton.
(( Author's note: For those of you who read How to Lose a Girl in 10 Minutes, it should be noted that this is Keiren Hawthorne as he was before the plague. The change of names took place after he awoke as one of the Forsaken; a man has to sound respectable, you know. ))