Arthas Menethil Wielding Frostmourne in Ice — Print & Oil Painting

The sword is the light source and everything else in the picture is lit by it. Held vertically with both hands on the grip and the point driven into the ice at the bottom edge, the blade runs the full height of the canvas in cyan and white, its edges hard, its centre almost too bright to read. The glow spreads outward into the storm and dies about a third of the way to the frame.

The design of the weapon is worth the attention. A skull sits at the base of the blade with the guard curving out of it in two hooked arms, runes run down the flat, and the ice at its point has split into pale shards that catch the same colour. The armour behind it answers in the same language: skulls on the belt and the shoulders, spiked plate, a heavy cloak hanging in dark folds.

The face is unarmoured and that is the whole tension of the image. Long white hair falls on both sides of it, the skin is grey-blue, and the eyes are two flat cyan slits with no pupil in them, looking down the blade rather than at the viewer. He is young. Nothing else in the picture is.

The background is weather and nothing else: blue-black cloud, thin lightning at the left, snow driving across in fine streaks, and a single pale spire behind his shoulder that the paint never brings into focus.

The blade was not always his. He went north as a paladin with a warhammer, and to take this weapon out of the ice he put the hammer down and left it in the cavern, where it stayed. Every version of him painted afterwards, this one included, is a portrait of somebody holding the thing he traded for. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same prince before any of that, armoured in gold under a full moon and the spire he eventually rules from, piercing a frozen sky.