Arthas Menethil Surrounded by Skulls — Print & Oil Painting

A single orange seam runs down the middle of the figure and it is the only warm thing in a blue picture. It opens at the base of the throat, widens across the chest between the plates, and dies out at the belt, painted as though the armour has cracked over a furnace. Everything around it, the ice, the walls, the shoulders and the air, is worked in cold blue-grey.

The skulls are architecture rather than trophies. Two enormous horned skulls form the outer edges of the shoulder pieces, jaws forward, and a third is set into the plate at the waist, all of them carved or cast rather than collected. They are the widest part of the silhouette and they turn the figure into a triangle standing in a cave mouth.

The helm looks down. Its horns rise and sweep back in two ranks, the eye slots burn amber rather than the usual cyan, and the head is tilted just far enough forward for the viewer to be underneath it. To the left, a gauntleted hand holds a long pale blade upright at the edge of the frame, cropped and half out of the picture.

The cave does the lighting. Vertical columns of blue ice rise on both sides and behind, glowing from inside, and the surfaces are rendered with the exactness of a cinematic frame: every facet, every internal fracture, every wet highlight.

The crown and the runeblade were made as a pair, and the first thing sealed inside them was not a king at all but the flayed spirit of an old shaman, shut into a block of ice and dropped into a glacier by the power that wanted an army. Everybody who has worn that helm since has been standing inside somebody else's punishment. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the spirit that wore the crown first, blade raised among skulls and the same armour lit by a burning crown instead of by ice.