Thrall Summoning Lightning with His Hammer — Print & Oil Painting

The lightning has been drawn, not glowed. Six or seven forks of white and pale blue are laid across the canvas as hard-edged branching lines, each with a thin dark outline on one side, and they run from the hammer head outward to every corner of the frame. It is closer to engraving than to atmosphere, and it gives the picture an old poster's clarity.

The two arms do opposite things. The right is thrown straight up, the fist closed around a haft wrapped in chain, and the hammer at the top of it is a squat block of pale stone with a blue rune set into its face. The left comes down and forward with the palm open and the fingers apart, empty, at the level of his knee. One arm is issuing and the other is receiving.

He is an orc in a hood, and the hood is the surprise: rough grey-white cloth pulled up over the skull and pushed back off the brow, monkish rather than martial, over a heavy green body that is otherwise bare to the waist. A string of large red beads crosses the chest, a braid of hair hangs beside the jaw, and a broad belt with a bronze disc sits at the hip.

The sky is violet and mauve with the storm painted into it, and at the right, small and separate, a volcano is going off: a dark cone, an orange throat, a plume of smoke leaning away. The measured saturation is moderate and it is split between that one warm cone and the cold of the discharge, with nothing in between.

He did not choose his name. It was given to him in the human tongue by the man who raised him, and in that tongue it simply means a person owned by somebody else; the name his parents gave him is used by almost nobody and appears in the histories only late. Everything he built afterwards, including a nation and a capital, was built by a man carrying an owner's label for a name. A portrait that dresses him in a workman's hood and hands him weather has understood which part of him is the office. From our World of Warcraft collection, next to the same warchief sitting at a fire before a duel of honour and the same shaman cupping a small blue light in both hands.