A Lone Warrior Marches Toward Orgrimmar at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

The axe arrives before the figure does. A single enormous crescent blade, pale steel with a dark engraved fuller, is swung out to the left on a long hafted shaft, and it crosses a full third of the canvas at a hard diagonal. The artist has given it the sharpest edges and the coolest colour in the picture, so the eye lands on the weapon, then travels up the arm to the shoulder, and only then finds the head.

The body behind it is caught at the worst moment of a stride. Weight fully committed forward on the left leg, torso twisted away from the swing, both arms at opposite heights, the near fist closed around the haft and the far one clenched empty. He is bare chested in orange brown, with heavy pauldrons of pale bone or horn strapped over both shoulders, a broad plated belt, dark trousers bound with chain, and a hide bracer on the leading forearm.

Fire is falling. Three or four burning masses come down through the upper left of the frame trailing smoke and sparks, and more of them glow further back in the haze, while a wall of orange flame climbs the right edge behind the figure. Between the two, stone architecture is just legible: a heavy lintel, a tusked cornice, a lamp housing hanging from a bracket, all of it half lost in smoke.

Two more armoured figures crouch in the lower corners with their backs to us, helmeted and spiked, painted dark and left unresolved so they read as foreground rather than as company. An arrow stands upright in the ground near the centre bottom. Measured brightness is low with red leading orange and saturation high, and every warm value in the painting is coming from the fire rather than from the sky.

The warlord who fought his last battle inside this burning city was not killed in it. He was beaten in the vaults beneath his own throne, and when the shaman who had given him the office moved to finish him with a hammer, a human king stopped the execution on the argument that no single person should decide it. He was handed instead to the monks of a third nation and tried in their temple, with an elven priestess speaking for the prosecution and a plains chieftain obliged to defend him. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the vault beneath that throne, with an old god's heart still pulsing in it and the same warlord seated on the throne he lost.