Tyrande Whisperwind Channeling Magic Beneath a Crescent Moon — Print & Oil Painting

Two great arcs of violet light curve into the frame from the left and the right and meet above her head, and they turn the whole composition into a pair of brackets with a small pale figure inside them. Each arc is a wide band of colour, dense at the core and fraying into sparks along its length, and neither one has a visible beginning or end.

She stands at the centre in a white layered dress that goes to blue in the shadows, both elbows bent and both palms turned upward, with violet motes gathering at the fingertips. The dress is loaded with silver: filigree over the bodice, a band of it at the waist, teal stones set down the front, and a hem cut into soft points that lifts as she turns.

Behind her a crescent moon sits high and slightly left, thin, hard-edged and unmodelled, and a silver headpiece on her brow answers it with the same shape in miniature. It is the sort of rhyme that could be heavy-handed and here it is played quietly.

The setting is a dark blue wood with pale columns standing among the trunks at the right and a broken step or two at the bottom of the frame. Small blue-white points drift through the middle distance. Everything not touched by the violet is held in deep indigo.

Her goddess has a second face and the priesthood does not talk about it much. Late in the war the high priestess took up that darker aspect in a ritual that had killed everybody who tried it before, came through it alive, and the moon over the province where it happened went out and stayed out. The power in this painting is drawn as something arriving from outside the figure rather than radiating from her, which is the more accurate way round. Kept in our World of Warcraft collection with the same priestess crouched low beneath a full moon and another of her people reaching for falling stars in the dark.