A Dwarf Paladin Gleaming in Golden Light — Print & Oil Painting

The air in this picture has been made solid. A rose and gold haze fills the entire room, thick enough to hide the walls, and through it drift several hundred small white points that catch the light like dust in a window. The measured brightness is high but almost none of it is direct: everything here is lit through a medium.

He stands dead centre and frontal, feet apart, with no action of any kind. The plate is a deep teal-blue with broad gold banding at the collar, the belt and the boots, a crowned helm with a raised crest sits low over the brow, and a plaited orange beard drops from under it to the waist in a single tapering rope. Everything about the design has been simplified into flat shapes with clean outlines.

At his right hangs the weapon and it is the largest object in the frame. The head is a squared gold block the size of his torso, faceted, with a dark inset panel carrying a single square gem that burns orange at its centre. It is drawn less like a hammer than like a lantern, and it is the only saturated colour in the picture.

A second, much smaller figure walks away at the left in dark blue with a round helmet, out of focus and unexplained, and behind both of them a stone doorway is just legible through the haze. The scale relationship between the two is left ambiguous on purpose.

The power in that gem is not a god. What paladins in this world draw on has no scripture, no clergy above them and no personality to negotiate with; it answers conviction and it answers nothing else, which is why it has been withdrawn more than once from people who kept the armour and lost the argument with themselves. A portrait that gives a man a light source instead of an opponent, and then floods the room with what comes off it, is the right way round for that. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to another paladin of this world painted in full golden armour and a third of the same order raising a hammer of blue light.