Ner'zhul Wielding a Glowing Blade Amid Skulls — Print & Oil Painting

The armour is a building and the person is a window in it. Two vast pauldrons cast as snarling tusked faces flank the composition, spiked crests rise above them, tattered dark banners hang behind, and chains drop from both sides into a bed of pale skulls along the bottom edge. Somewhere in the middle of all that, at about a tenth of its scale, is a face.

The face is the reason to stop. Under a black crown topped with a small skull and a white flame, it is grey-green and orcish, gaunt to the bone, with two short lower tusks and eyes that burn a pale blue. Three ropes of white hair fall straight down past the jaw. It is an old face and it looks tired rather than triumphant.

The blade crosses the lower half of the picture on the diagonal. Blue-white and translucent, ridged along the flat, with two round gems set in a spiked crossguard, it is rimed with frost and lit from inside, and it throws the only cold light in an image otherwise held in olive and rust. Its point disappears into the skulls at the lower left.

Everything has been made symmetrical on purpose. Left and right mirror each other almost exactly down the whole height of the canvas, which turns the picture into an altarpiece and the figure into an object of display rather than an actor. The measured saturation is low and it is carried entirely by that blade.

He was talked into it. A shaman of his people, he was given instructions by what he believed to be the voices of his own ancestors and passed them on: that the neighbouring race was an enemy and had to be removed. When he worked out who had actually been speaking to him he tried to stop the thing he had started, and his own apprentice simply went around him, took the same offer, and finished the job with the clans behind him. Everything this armour later became began with an old man being lied to by something wearing a familiar voice. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the apprentice who went round him, enthroned on a sea of skulls and the same armour later, with somebody else inside it, surrounded by skulls.