A Dwarf Paladin Wielding a Glowing Blue Hammer — Print & Oil Painting

The hammer is a lamp and the picture has been lit entirely by it. It is held up and out to the left at the end of a fully extended arm, and its head is a translucent cyan slab with pale bands running through it, glowing from inside, throwing hard blue rims onto the shoulder, the cheek, the beard and the knuckles beneath. Everything the light does not reach is charcoal.

He is lunging rather than standing. The lead foot is planted on a pale boulder, the trailing leg is extended behind, the body leans out over the front knee, and a second and much smaller mace is cocked back in the right fist at hip height. He is carrying two weapons and using neither of them.

The armour is drawn in the flat, hard-edged manner of a card illustration: dark plate with cream rims, red diamond-cut gems at the shoulder, the belt and the wrist, a horned crest at the temple, and gauntlets simplified into two or three shapes each. The beard is a single plaited brown mass clamped with two metal rings, falling past the belt.

The ground is night rock with a scatter of loose stones, two thin tufts of grass at the left edge, and one small orange fire burning at the lower right with a few embers rising off it. That fire and the red gems are the entire warm register of a canvas otherwise given over to blue.

His people are now governed by a committee of former enemies. When the last dwarven king was turned into a diamond by a rite that did not go as advertised, the throne could not be filled in the ordinary way, and the mountain ended up administered jointly by one representative from each of the three clans that had fought a war over it: the ones who kept the forge, the ones exiled north, and the ones who went underground. It is an arrangement nobody likes and it has held. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with a paladin of the same people holding off two of the risen dead and one of the three who sits on that council.