Sylvanas Windrunner Reaching Through Shadow — Print & Oil Painting

Both arms are open and both hands are empty, and in a group of paintings full of drawn bows that is the most unusual thing here. The arms come down and out from the shoulders at matching angles, the gauntlets end in long curved claws, and the fingers are spread wide with nothing between them. It is a gesture of display rather than of attack.

The picture is very dark and almost featureless behind her. A flat grey-brown smoke fills the whole background with a slight lightening around the head, no horizon, no floor and no second figure, and the measured brightness sits near the bottom of the range for this group. She is lit from directly in front, hard, as though by something the viewer is holding.

Two thin curved blades rise from behind the shoulders like antennae and cross above the head, and a pale hood sits low over the brow with the ears pushing out through it. The eyes are a dull amber-red, the hair is black, and the armour is a cold grey-violet with a skull worked into each pauldron and a quiver behind.

One long mauve cape streams away to the left and it is the only movement in the image. It has been painted as a single flat shape with almost no folds, which keeps it from competing with the hands.

Her people were not liberated. The dead who follow her simply stopped being controlled one day, when the will holding them was pulled elsewhere and its grip slipped, and they woke up standing in the fields where they had been left, with their own thoughts back and nowhere to go. She was the first of them to work out that this was permanent. A painting of her arriving out of the dark with both hands open is the closest thing to a founding portrait this collection has. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between the same figure with violet mist boiling up around her and her rangers standing in the dark on either side of her.