Deathwing Diving Through Flame with Weapon Raised — Print & Oil Painting

What stands in this fire is not a dragon. It is a two-legged figure in black plate, shoulders squared to us, one arm lifted with a heavy spiked head of dark metal gripped in the fist, and it fills the frame from edge to edge. The identification comes from the title; the painting itself shows an armoured biped with wings.

One mark tells you which one. At the centre of the chest, exactly where a breastplate would close, a seam of molten orange has opened and burns white at its core, throwing a short glow onto the plates around it. Thinner cracks branch away from it up the collar and down the flank. Everything else about the armour is matte and cold and gives nothing back.

The wings are cut into hard black shards rather than membranes, sprouting in overlapping ranks from behind both shoulders and reaching past the top corners. The face beneath the helm is grey-green, lipless, with a row of teeth and two pale eyes set deep, and one bare forearm shows the same grey-green skin below the gauntlet. It is a design that keeps refusing to settle into either animal or man.

The rest of the canvas is fire and it has been laid on in long diagonal strokes running from lower left to upper right, so the flame reads as moving past him rather than around him. Brightness is low, the colour is one continuous orange-red, and the figure survives as a silhouette with a single lit point in the middle of it.

He could walk when he wanted to. For a stretch of years between wars he lived in the human kingdoms as a nobleman, tall and clean-shaven and good company, claimed kinship with a mountain prince, worked the councils of an alliance that was hunting his own flight, and came within an arrangement or two of being handed a crown by acclaim. A painting that puts him upright, on two legs, in armour rather than scales, is closer to that period than to any battlefield. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same destroyer raised as a stone monument over a burning gate and his head in its true shape, arriving above a burning town.