Widukind distillers

A farm some six to eight miles west of Loshev, belonging to Silvius Armel Widukind, who has not been the same since his wife died. His two sons, Roan Shay and Arvid Vetle, keep a still in the barn. They are in their late teens or a little past, and the still is not a hobby: they intend to make their own liquor and sell it into the town, and that is the whole of the plan.

The company came on them in a blizzard, on the long walk home from the Valley of Doom, and only found them at all because Aldo had been a week without a drink and could smell a working still through the storm. He led everyone off course to it. Whoever answered at the house was not welcoming and shut the door on them, so they took the barn instead and the brothers, surprised in the middle of their own business, made them welcome anyway. They shared out jerky and their liquor and stabled the horses, and the party spent a warm night off the road that they might not otherwise have survived. The spirit was middling at best and had not been distilled far enough, which is how Aldo drank himself into genuine poisoning on it: passed out, sick, and near enough dead. When the storm broke the sons were out digging the walks and the yard clear.

Aldo, still drunk, promised them he would put in a word with Nathan Fox and get the operation booming, and offered to help them make it taste of something. Sober the next day, he said plainly that he was not going to talk to Nathan Fox about it.

Gnolls came through the following winter and burned homesteads on the outskirts, this farm among them. The brothers did not lose it. One of them threw a lit bottle of his own liquor out into the dark and it broke over one of the animals, and that is how it was discovered that gnoll fur takes fire readily. More bottles followed and the pack was driven off. The charred body was brought back for the butcher to look over, and Yullen Gemsmith was still telling the story in Loshev that spring.