A Blood Elf Demon Hunter Crouched in a Green Mire — Print & Oil Painting

One long curve is repeated three times across this canvas and it holds the composition together. It appears first as the blade lying against her left side, a broad pale crescent tapering to a point; again in the two horns rising and sweeping back from her temples; and a third time overhead as a band of green aurora arcing right across the sky. Nothing else in the picture is drawn with a curve at all.

She crouches on a low spit of rock at the right with one knee up and the other leg folded under, and the pose is a rest rather than a spring. The glaive is held loosely, point down. A second one lies behind her, half out of frame. Her forearm is bandaged, her trousers are brown leather with fur at the thigh, and the upper armour is a small red and gold piece with a worked ornament at the centre.

Across the eyes runs a plain cloth band, tied and slightly frayed, and above it the red-orange hair blows back off the face in a single mass. It is the most saturated thing in the picture and the only warm colour in it, which is presumably why the painter put it next to the one thing she cannot use.

The setting is green from edge to edge. A still lake the colour of weak absinthe, dark karst peaks standing in ranks behind it, a purple-blue sky with real stars in the upper left, and the aurora cutting between them. The water takes no reflection and the whole landscape has been kept flat and quiet so the figure reads.

The first job the order was given was a burglary. Before any of them fought a war they were sent through onto a demon world to take a single key off the thing that held it, an operation most of them were not expected to come back from, and the elves of her particular kind were in that party because their own prince had already marched his people over to that side of the argument years earlier. She is not a volunteer for a cause so much as an inheritance from a bad alliance. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to another of the order standing with two green glaives crossed and the demon hunter whose method every one of them copied.