Ragnaros the Firelord Wreathed in Molten Fire — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is a wide letterbox and the body has been cropped into it without ceremony: no legs, no full arms, no ground. What fits is a chest, two forearms and a head, and the near forearm alone crosses more than a third of the frame. The scale is established entirely by what has been left out.

The arms are the best thing here. They are molten rock, orange going white in the fissures, and they have been bound at the wrist and the bicep with heavy dark iron hoops that bite into the material and make it bulge, as though the limbs would come apart without them. The near hand is closed into a fist the size of the head.

Above, the face refuses to resolve. A black horned crown sits low over two dark sockets with fire behind them, and below it the jaw is a mass of flame and shadow with the suggestion of teeth. A mane of fire rises off the skull in two curved horns of its own. The picture never commits to whether there is a face under there or only more burning.

At the left, a banner hangs from a pole in gold and deep orange with a dark device on it, the only manufactured object in the frame. At the right, grey-white smoke rolls in and takes up a quarter of the canvas, and it is the single cool passage in an image that is otherwise entirely alight.

Killing him in the wrong place does not take. He was cut down once in the halls under the mountain by people who had gone a very long way to do it, and it accomplished nothing permanent, because a creature of that kind is only ever visiting when he stands on ordinary rock; the body dispersed and re-formed at home in the fire world, and the whole job had to be done again on his own ground before it counted. A portrait cropped so tightly that he has no legs and no floor is not a bad way of saying he is not really standing here. From our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the same body painted closer, with the hammer in frame and the same lord rising out of a column of fire.