Bolvar Fordragon's Forces Beneath a Floating Fortress — Print & Oil Painting

Two things are happening in opposite corners and the painting refuses to connect them. Down at the right, close to us, an armoured figure stands on a rise with a hooked blade held across the body, helmeted, tusked, with two points of cold blue burning where the eyes should be. Up at the top left, very far away, a fortress hangs upside down in the sky with a ragged hole of orange fire opening behind it.

The blue is doing something extreme here. This is by a distance the most saturated canvas in the group, and effectively the whole of that colour is one cold cobalt, laid over the ground, the mist, the armour and the sky alike. Only the tear in the sky is allowed to be warm, and it is the size of a thumbprint.

The nearest figure is drawn hard and everything behind him is not. A second shape stands at his shoulder, a third further back, and beyond them the plain fills with a low forest of leaning spikes, banners and shapes that never resolve into individual bodies. It is a crowd rendered as texture.

The fortress overhead is painted softer still, all buttress and spire seen through haze, hanging at an angle that no building should be at. The artist has not bothered to explain how it got there, which is the correct decision: the picture only needs it to be wrong.

The whole point of that army is that somebody keeps it still. When the crown holding it was broken, the leash went with it, and the dead did not wait for orders: they came up wherever they happened to be lying, in numbers nobody had counted, all at once, in every province at the same time. A painting that shows one of them fully armed and looking straight at the viewer, with the sky torn open behind him, is showing the first minute of that. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the crowned figure who was holding them back and the spire that army was quartered in, seen under the aurora.