Alexstrasza Standing Before Crimson Mountains — Print & Oil Painting

The red that fills both sides of this canvas is not rock. It is her own wings: two enormous membranes of orange-red stretched between dark struts, held open behind the shoulders and running off the frame at left and right, and they take up more of the picture than she does. The only actual mountain visible is pale and snowbound, small, at the far left, under a violet-blue sky.

She is painted waist up and dead centre, turned very slightly, with the hair blowing hard to the right in a single crimson mass. Two horns sweep out and up from the temples, ringed with gold caps and hung with small red drops, and between them sits a crown of red and gold with a raised centre point.

The armour has been designed rather than improvised, which is rare in this collection. Navy and white plate with gold edging, a gold collar closed by a red cabochon at the throat, shaped panels over the ribs, and a spray of white fur at the left shoulder. Everything is symmetrical, everything is finished, and none of it looks as though it has ever been hit.

The face is composed and slightly severe. Pale skin, dark red lips, long pointed ears, and eyes that look past the viewer rather than at them. The measured hue sits in the red band and the saturation is high, so the one cold passage in the picture, that distant white peak, has to work hard to stay visible.

Her flight was handed life and it turned out to be an obligation rather than a gift. The charge given to the red dragons is the preservation of living things, and the awkward part of it, the part their allies find hardest to work with, is that it does not come with a list of exceptions: they are expected to heal what is in front of them, including whatever has just been trying to kill them. A portrait that gives her ceremonial armour, a crown and nothing to do is painting an office, not a fighter. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with the same queen holding her dragon-topped staff and the same queen in her own shape, held down by chains.