Sylvanas Windrunner Before the Ruined Spires — Print & Oil Painting

The skyline behind her is a comb. Dozens of thin dark towers rise out of a violet mist on both sides of the frame, needle-fine, unequal in height, most of them ending in a point and several snapped off partway up, and they are repeated often enough that they stop reading as buildings and start reading as a texture. Not one window is lit.

She stands in the gap those towers leave, lit from the front, and her right hand is raised across the chest, the clawed gauntlet half closed as though holding something that is not there. The hand sits at the exact centre of the canvas and it is the sharpest object in it.

The armour is the most ornamented version in this group. Violet plate scrolled with gold along every edge, a green stone at the hip, two skulls set behind the shoulders in pale bone with dark eye sockets, and a thick ruff of white and grey feathers filling the space between them. Behind the left shoulder a quiver stands with four pale shafts in it.

The face is grey-blue under a bone-white hood, with two thin curved filaments arcing over the crown, and the eyes are flat orange. The mist behind is worked in long horizontal strokes so the towers appear to be standing in water.

Her capital is somebody else's cellar. When the old northern kingdom fell, its royal seat was left a burnt ruin above ground, but the crypts beneath it had been dug out and never finished, and that is where her people moved in: a nation living underneath the wreck of the country that used to own them, with the throne room of the murdered king directly overhead. A portrait that puts her in front of the spires rather than inside them is telling you which floor she lives on. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same queen beneath a full moon over those roofs and the same figure kneeling on a bloodied floor.