A Warlock Summoning Fel and Fire in the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

Two spells are running at once and they are different colours. In the lower left, gold and orange fire pours out of one lowered hand and piles up on the ground in a blaze that lights the robe from below. In the lower right, the other hand grips a dark shaft topped with a spiked green orb that burns cold. He is holding a hot spell and a cold one at the same time and looking at neither.

Behind and above him a third thing is arriving. An enormous translucent green figure rises out of the murk with one arm lifted and a hollow skull-like face, drawn thin enough that the sky shows through its chest, and it is easily eight times his height. Whether it is his work or his employer is left open.

The figure himself is small and unimpressive on purpose. A dark hood with a black horned collar spreading behind it, a layered robe with pale scrollwork down the front and a small skull at the waist, and under the hood a compact yellow-green face with a broad nose and an open mouth. He is dressed like a functionary.

The rest of the canvas is weather and architecture. Blue lightning forks across the upper middle, a spired citadel stands in silhouette at the right with a winged shape crossing in front of it, and dead branches claw into the lower right corner. Brightness is very low and the saturation is split between one green and one orange with nothing in between.

His profession has no licence anywhere. Warlocks in the human kingdoms are tolerated rather than chartered: no guild hall, no public standing, and in the largest human capital the practitioners meet in a cellar under a tavern in the old quarter because nobody will rent them anything above ground. They are useful and everybody would prefer they were somebody else's problem. A picture of one working alone at night, outdoors, in the rain, with something far larger than him standing up behind his shoulder, has the working conditions about right. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the warlock who taught the whole practice to his own people and the streets of the city they work underneath.