Thrall Conjuring a Glowing Orb of Spirit — Print & Oil Painting

There are two hands in the lower half of this picture and only one of them is real. The near one is solid green, cupped, thumb forward, holding a small blue-white sphere against the fingers. The other rises above it at twice the size, translucent, drawn in pale green with the background visible straight through the knuckles, and it is reaching down toward the same sphere from outside the frame.

The sphere itself is small and very bright and it lights the whole composition from below. It throws cold blue up onto the underside of the jaw, along the inner edge of the hood, into the palm above, and out into three or four soft rays that climb into the dark at the top left. Nothing else in the picture emits anything.

His face is in the upper right, tipped down and watching. The brow is heavy, the tusks small, the mouth closed, and the expression is concentration rather than command. A stiff leather hood frames the head, and below it the shoulder carries a cluster of four polished red spheres set into the armour like fruit, which is the one warm note anywhere on it.

The construction below is deliberately crude. A wooden vambrace bound with hoops, a curtain of hand-linked mail hanging from it, a plain belt with a stamped disc, all painted with visible seams and no gilding anywhere. Behind him the ground is a wash of blue-green and charcoal that never resolves into a room or a landscape.

The practice in his hands came down through one clan and it survived because that clan was thrown out. When the bargain was offered that armed his whole people, one group refused it, was exiled to a frozen valley for the refusal, and went on doing things the old way in the cold while everybody else took the shortcut. He was taught by what was left of them. A painting that shows one green hand and one spectral hand meeting over a small light is drawing an apprenticeship rather than a spell. Part of our World of Warcraft collection, beside the same orc pulling lightning out of a violet sky and the same figure set beside a visitor from another story entirely.