Sylvanas Windrunner's Red Eyes Piercing the Dark — Print & Oil Painting

No hand has touched this image. The skin carries the fine subsurface glow of a modelled surface, individual hairs catch the key light along the outside of the cheek, the metal takes a hard photographic highlight, and nothing in the frame holds the mark of a brush. It is a rendered still.

The colour has been pulled out of everything except the eyes. Two red discs burn under the brow with a soft bloom around them, and the rest of the image runs from white through pewter to black without a single other hue in it. Black streaks descend from both lower lids, thinner and straighter than the ones in the painted portraits of her.

The crop is aggressive. The face fills the centre of a wide frame with the hood cut off at the top edge, and two fine pale filaments arc across the upper corners from somewhere behind the head, catching the light like wires. Long ash-grey hair falls forward over the near shoulder and is the softest thing in the picture.

Behind her the background is smoke and vertical grey shapes at the right, out of focus and unexplained, with a faint suggestion of heat in the way the light scatters. The expression is level, unhurried, mouth closed: the face of somebody watching something they have already decided about.

She gave an order once that nobody in the story has finished arguing about. Told that a city had surrendered and there was no further need for force, she had it burned anyway, with the population still inside, on the grounds that fear does work that victory does not. Half the war that follows is people responding to that single decision. A close-up that gives you a calm face, dry tear tracks and two red lights is not asking you to sympathise. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same figure reduced to one red eye in the dark and the same queen striding out through the flames.