Deathwing Gliding Through a Smoky Sky — Print & Oil Painting

Everything here is soft and that is the surprise. The paint is thin, the edges are wet, the background is a single wash of olive and grey-green with no horizon in it, and the whole canvas has the low contrast of a lithograph. After five paintings of the same animal in an inferno, this one has been given weather instead.

He is gliding from right to left with the wings fully extended and the head turned back over the shoulder, jaws parted just enough to show a flicker of orange between the teeth and two yellow eyes above it. The pose is level and unhurried. Nothing about the body is exerting itself.

The wing membranes are the best passage in the picture. They are a translucent amber-brown, thin enough that the light comes through them and the bones show as darker ribs, and one of them carries a torn crescent near the trailing edge that has been left unrepaired. Against those warm panels the body reads as almost black.

The molten seams are still there but they have been rationed. A short bright fork on the chest, a thinner one down each hind leg, a few points along the spine, and nothing else. Only one canvas in this group of six holds less colour than this one, and what is here belongs entirely to those few centimetres of orange and to the wings.

The flight did not survive him. By the time he was finished there were effectively no black dragons left that were not either dead or unusable, and the line continues only because a red dragon spent years working through captured clutches to produce one clean egg, which hatched into a whelp who grew up believing himself the last of his kind and set about proving it. A portrait of a black dragon alone in an empty green sky, with nobody to fight and nothing underneath him, is the only one of these six that looks forward. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between another dragon of that flight amid fire and smoke and the same animal met head on by three others.