Alexstrasza in Dragon Form Bound by Chains — Print & Oil Painting

Follow the chain and the picture explains itself. It leaves a harness at her throat, sags across the middle of the canvas in two heavy catenaries, and ends at the bottom right in a black iron clamp bolted directly into the bedrock, drawn with more mechanical detail than anything else in the frame. Somebody engineered that anchor. It is not a prop.

Above it the dragon is at full stretch. Head thrown up and back, jaws open, the throat exposed, gold caps on both horns and a violet gem set into the collar; the near wing fills the entire left of the picture in dark blood red, the far one lifts behind. She is roaring and going nowhere.

The sky behind is a cold night blue with cloud, and four other dragons cross it at various distances in green, blue and near black, all of them small, all of them free, none of them coming down. Below and to the right the ground burns orange, and a green-scaled creature crouches at the edge of the fire watching.

The colour has been split down the middle: everything above the horizon is cool and everything below it is hot, and the animal in the centre is the only object that belongs to both halves. The measured saturation is moderate and the picture keeps its strongest reds for her wings.

This is the worst thing that happens to her. An orc clan holding a stolen artifact took her alive inside a mountain fortress and used it to make her produce eggs on demand for years; the adults that hatched were broken to harness as war mounts, the young were raised inside the fortress, and the threat that kept her compliant was always the clutch rather than herself. She was got out eventually by people who destroyed the artifact rather than the guards. A painting that spends its detail on the bolt in the rock has understood which part of that story matters. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same queen in her walking shape, crowned and the dragon who arranged it, meeting three others head on.