Dwarf Shaman Conjuring Magic in an Icy Cave — Print & Oil Painting

Two small gold lights are doing the work of a sun in an entirely blue room. One burns at the head of the staff in his right hand, caught inside a ring of toothed gold like a bearing; the other sits in the great pauldron on his left shoulder, larger and lower. They are placed at opposite corners of the figure and they light him from both sides at once.

The cave is the reason it works. Ice climbs both walls in stacked blue-white blades, a frozen fall hangs behind him, a glassy stream runs across the floor and takes the reflection of everything above it, and small white motes drift through the whole depth of the frame. There is not a warm surface anywhere except the ones he brought.

He is broad and low to the ground. The robe is a deep blue studded with pale cabochons and cinched with chain, white fur bunches at the collar and the cuffs, and a helm with a raised blade sits over a red beard plaited into one heavy braid. The shoulder piece is deliberately out of scale, a slab of dark and gold metalwork wider than his own head.

The paint is smooth and cool throughout with the hardest edges reserved for metal, and the measured hue sits squarely in the blue-cyan band. Against that, the two gold points read as considerably brighter than they physically are, which is the oldest trick available and it is worked here without fuss.

This is not the trade his race is known for. Dwarves in this world are remembered for forges, firearms and archaeology, and the ones who talk to the elements are a separate clan altogether: the branch driven out of the mountain after the civil war, who settled the northern crags, kept gryphons, and came back into the alliance generations later bringing a practice their cousins had never had. A portrait of a dwarf in an ice cave with two small suns and no hammer is showing the other half of the family. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with a warrior of the clan that kept the forge and the snowbound peaks of their country.