Guided by the Erdtree — Print & Oil Painting

A rider has stopped on the last rock before the drop. Mount and rider sit in the lower left, both in silhouette, the animal carrying a pair of heavy curved horns and the rider a broad sword up over one shoulder, and they are the only living thing in a very large picture.

What they have stopped for fills the right half. A tree of an impossible size, its trunk pale and smooth, its branches gold and radiant, standing so far off that its roots are below the horizon and so tall that the canopy runs off the top of the frame. Light comes down from it in wide vertical shafts that fall across the entire valley.

Between the two lie the ruins. A curtain wall with towers runs along the left, broken arcades cross the middle distance, and beyond them a plain of low forest fades into gold haze. Everything built is grey and everything growing is dark, so the only colour in the picture comes off the tree.

The grading is unusual and effective: the sky has been pushed towards yellow-green, which makes the cloud read sulphurous rather than warm, and small gold motes drift through the foreground air. It is a plain statement of the game's central image and it does not overplay it. From our Elden Ring collection, and the same tree taken close enough to lose its outline is the study in white and gold. For the country beneath it with the tree out of frame, see the view through the arch.