Geralt Faces a Purple Portal by Candlelight — Print & Oil Painting

Thirty or forty small flames burn in a row at ground level across the middle of this canvas, set out on the flagstones in front of a ruined wall. They are the warmest thing in the picture by a long way, and someone has taken the trouble to light every one of them.

What they are burning in front of is not comfortable. A half-timbered facade with most of its plaster gone, hung from the beams with long grey strips of rag, and spread across the wall above the candles a spidery dark structure that could be a dead tree brought indoors or could be something assembled out of bones. The artist keeps it just below the threshold of legibility.

To the right, at head height, hangs the violet mark: a small bright sigil of two triangles meeting at their points, ringed in a magenta haze with a few sparks coming off it. It sits flat on the air like something written rather than opened, and nothing is coming through it. Whatever it is, it is a message or a ward, and it is very recent.

He stands at the right edge in profile, white hair, two hilts, hands empty, doing nothing at all except reading it. Behind him a doorway glows amber and a lantern burns at the far left, so the composition has three separate small warm lights strung along a canvas that is otherwise entirely blue-green and very dark.

It sits in our The Witcher collection. The turquoise light burning at the foot of a misty citadel is the other picture here where a single point of cold magic is left glowing in a landscape and nobody explains it.