Zeratul Confronts Ghostly Spirits in Battle — Print & Oil Painting

A wide banner of a canvas, barely more than a third as tall as it is long, and it has been loaded from both ends. On the right a cloaked figure lunges in from the edge: a grey clawed hand thrown forward, a gold vambrace with a green stone set into the back of it, a short blade of green light held low. On the left an armoured warrior braces behind a wall of steel.

The dark templar on the right is drawn with real precision. His cloak is torn into strips that trail behind him, the fingers are long and taper to points, the goldwork on the vambrace has been chased with a pattern, and the warp blade at his fist is the hardest and brightest edge in the picture.

His opponents hold the middle. Three or four spirits hang in the fog with pale skull faces and open mouths, lit from inside in blue-green, and jagged blue crystal forms float around them with light crawling over the facets. Nothing there is solid; the paint is thin and the edges dissolve into the smoke behind.

The figure on the left belongs to a different world altogether. He is green-skinned and tusked, in riveted plate over a red tabard, with a wolf's head cast into the boss of the shield he is bracing behind. Nothing about him is protoss and nothing about him is terran. This is a crossover piece rather than a scene from the war, and the painting makes no attempt to explain the pairing.

What holds it together is light: every figure in the frame is lit by the same cold blue-green fog, so two separate worlds at least share a room. From our Starcraft collection, where the dark templar crouched on a fiery ridge shows the same character on his own ground.