Sylvanas Windrunner Kneeling on a Blood-Stained Floor — Print & Oil Painting

She has gone down on one knee on a dressed stone floor and the floor is the reason the picture works. It is pale, flat and lit, painted in wide slabs with the joints visible, and it carries long smears of red that run out of the lower corners toward her. Nothing else in the frame is that bright.

The pose is a pause rather than a defeat. The forward knee is up, the back knee is down, one gauntlet rests on the thigh, the spine is straight and the head is level. She is looking out of the picture past the viewer's shoulder with two red eyes under a tan hood, and the mouth is closed.

Behind her a blue banner hangs in tatters from somewhere above the frame, torn into four or five strips with the edges frayed and stained. It is the only large soft shape in a picture otherwise made of stone and metal, and the artist has kept it out of focus.

The armour is the palest version of it in this group: a bone-white pauldron set with turquoise stones and hung with white feathers, cream plate at the thigh, dark hose, and a scarlet cloth falling from the waist. A quiver of white-fletched arrows stands over the shoulder, full.

She lost her capital by wrecking it herself. Faced with an army at the gates that would certainly take the ruined city and the crypts underneath it, she ordered the whole place flooded with her own chemists' plague and walked out, which denied the enemy a prize and left her own people without a home in the same afternoon. Every painting of her after that point is a portrait of somebody with an army and no address. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, alongside the spires of that city painted while they still stood and her Forsaken fighting alongside orcs beneath dragons.