Everything

Woody Creek is a single-barrel Kentucky bourbon, with a rich and complex scent and a surprisingly deep flavor. It’s 90 proof when it goes into the bottle, at which point a black wax seals in the cork. The distillery stamps a distinctive logo into the wax on top of each bottle, actually a Wyrmish rune. Every time a seal breaks, those who know the language of spirits can hear a quiet cry for help. Drinking Woody Creek for any length of time exag­ gerates the drinker’s palate, making her more sensitive to tiny differences in flavor, and making other whiskies taste subtly wrong. She becomes more and more of a whiskey snob, dismissing everything but Woody Creek as entirely inferior. After a while, she won’t drink with people who don’t share her tastes, because having to put up with the opinions of those who are so plainly wrong is too much for her to bear.

Almost one in five hundred bottles of Woody Creek contains a Bane bound to the glyph on the seal. If the drinker finishes the whole bottle in under a week — without sharing — the Bane latches on to her soul. She becomes first elitist, then impossible to please, pioneering implausible positions just for the love of arguing and the joyous feeing of being persecuted. After a month, the black thoughts that have gnawed away at her family and friends turn inwards, distorting her into a fomor. For those lucky enough to avoid a Bane-tainted bottle, Woody Creek

causes a drinker to show up as tainted in the same man­ ner as Blue Stripe, with a shot replacing a bottle of beer.