A Night Elf Hunter Beside Her Black Panther — Print & Oil Painting

The wood is painted in peach, apricot and pale gold, and it is the friendliest landscape in this whole collection. Tall smooth trunks recede on both sides hung with pale vines, a mossy track runs back into the centre catching the light, a shallow stream lined with yellow moss comes in at the right, and the air between the trees has been washed with pink. Nothing here is threatening anybody.

Two things in the picture refuse that temperature and they are the two living creatures. Her hair is a saturated cobalt blue falling to the elbows, and the cat lying at the lower left is a solid unlit black. Everything else in the image, including her skin, has been pulled toward the warmth of the wood; those two shapes stay out of it.

She stands in the middle distance, full length, weight even, and she is not aiming at anything. The bow hangs at her left side with the string slack and a single arrow is held down along the right thigh, nocked to nothing. Lavender skin, long ears swept back, a spiked leather pauldron on one shoulder only, a laced bodice, a belt of hanging leather strips with small metal discs, fur-topped boots.

The animal is doing the work of a second portrait. It lies flat on the moss with its forelegs extended and the head up, the tail curled back along the flank, and two flat yellow eyes are the only warm points in an otherwise unlit mass. It is closer to the viewer than she is, and it is looking at us while she is not.

The generation in this painting is the first of her people that will get old. Her race went ten thousand years without dying of anything except violence, and that ended when their great tree was spent in one night to stop an invasion, taking the arrangement with it; the ones alive now are mortal and know exactly when the change happened and what it bought. A picture of a young hunter standing in an autumn wood with the light going warm around her carries that without saying it. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside another of her people painted close, looking out through blue hair and the city in the boughs where they live.