Bolvar Fireblood Engulfed in Flame — Print & Oil Painting

The fire behind him is a ring. It fills the whole upper half of the canvas as a great orange and gold torus with a darker centre, throwing sparks and small black fragments outward in every direction, and the head of the figure is placed exactly inside the opening. Whatever else this painting is doing, it has put a halo on him and made the halo out of a detonation.

His skin is not skin. It is a blue-grey mineral surface, dull and matte, broken across the chest, the arms and the skull by a network of glowing fissures that run like the cracks in a fired pot. Light comes out of every one of them. The eyes and the open mouth are the widest of the cracks and they burn the same colour as the ring behind.

The armour has mostly gone. One heavy pauldron remains on the left shoulder in green-grey steel, a plated belt sits at the waist, and a dark blue cloak hangs behind; the right arm and shoulder are bare and streaming fire from the elbow down. The asymmetry is deliberate and it makes the figure look like something half unwrapped.

The head is bald and the face is composed. No snarl, no shout, the jaw closed except where the light forces it open. He is walking forward out of the fire at an ordinary pace with the shoulders low, which is a stranger thing to paint than rage would have been.

The helm that made him what he is did not come off voluntarily. It was taken apart at his own fortress by somebody who had no interest in wearing it, and breaking it tore an opening between the living world and the country of the dead; he came out of that meeting alive, uncrowned, and still burning, which is the state this painting shows. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same figure crowned and reaching out with a molten hand and the gates of the fortress where that happened.