Blood Elf Paladin Before a Glowing Rune Gate — Print & Oil Painting

The gate behind her is a diamond and the whole picture is hung on it. A gold frame stands on one corner at the exact centre, its inner face carved with a running band of angular glyphs, and the space inside it is a flat sheet of turquoise light with no depth to it at all. Two pale columns rise on either side and a pair of gold hooks curl inward at the bottom.

She stands directly in front of the opening in red and gold plate, weight even, both arms lowered. The armour is all vertical panels: a long divided tabard, high shoulder guards flared like wings, thigh plates over dark hose, and a chain that loops from the belt across the hip. Blonde hair falls past the shoulders and the ears rise long and sharp on either side of the face.

Two swords, two metals, one on each side. In the left hand a broad serrated blade of dull gold points down and outward, its edge notched; in the right, a narrow blade lit from inside in acid green rests point down on the stone. The green is the most aggressive colour in the picture and it is used nowhere else.

Everything around them is a pale wash: cream flagstones with a fine crack running across the foreground, white walls, a rose sky above the wall and one branch of red foliage in the upper left. Small white petals fall through the whole frame, and a few drops of red have landed on the stone at the lower left and lower right.

The order these paladins belong to did not receive its power. It was taken by force from a captive being made of light, held in a vault under their city and drained to arm knights who had lost patience with faith after their homeland was overrun. They gave it up later, when the well at the centre of that homeland was restored, and went back to asking. A figure standing between a shining doorway and two very different swords is the right image for that history. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside a blood elf who took the other bargain, crouched in a green mire and another paladin of this world painted in full golden armour.