Siege of Orgrimmar, an Orc Leaps Amid Falling Meteors — Print & Oil Painting

This is the darkest surface in the entire lot and the measurements agree: the lowest brightness reading and the lowest contrast of any canvas here. The artist has painted almost the whole frame in a single close range of soot brown and grey, and the subject has to be found rather than seen. Give it a few seconds and a figure resolves out of the murk at the centre, descending, with everything around it left as smoke.

Two pale crescent blades do all the work of legibility. They are the only objects given a clean bright edge, one swung wide to the left and one held close in on the right, and their curved profiles are what first read as a shape against the brown. The artist has lit them from an unseen source below and left every other metal surface in the picture dull.

The head above them is crowned with horns, four or five of them, heavy and outward curving, banded in red and white at the roots. More red and white banding runs across the shoulder plates and down a heavy vambrace, and a mass of dark fur or pelt hangs at the waist. The face itself is barely indicated: a smear of warmer paint and a glint where an eye should be.

Below and around, the picture is all debris. Broken rock steps down through the lower third, a pale curved object like a snapped tusk lies across the bottom centre, and small burning fragments drift up and across the frame in loose orange flecks, brightest at the upper left where two or three dark shapes are falling. There is no horizon, no architecture and no ground you could stand on.

The horned peoples of the plains had their own reason for coming to this city with weapons. Their old chieftain had accepted a formal duel with the warchief and been killed in it, and the duel had been rigged: a rival of his own tribe had treated the warchief's blade so that a scratch would finish the job, which turned a lawful contest into a murder. His son inherited the chieftainship that day and was among those who marched here years later when the same warchief had to be removed. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the son who inherited that chieftainship, with a hawk circling above him and the gate that assault came up to, burning in its canyon.