Varian Wrynn Bloodied Amid the Rain — Print & Oil Painting

The only colour in this picture is blood. Everything else, the armour, the rain, the sky and the ground, has been reduced to charcoal and pewter, and against that the artist has placed perhaps a dozen red marks: a smear across the near pauldron, a run down the breastplate, a spatter on the gauntlet, a line on the blade. The measured saturation barely registers, and what there is belongs entirely to those marks.

He carries two swords and holds neither of them up. One hangs from each fist, points down and slightly forward, the arms loose and heavy, the shoulders rolled in. It is the stance of somebody at the end of the work rather than the start of it, and it is the most tired figure in this collection.

The plate is enormous and it has been drawn with the patience of somebody who likes armour: layered pauldrons rising into spikes, a lion's face cast into the centre of the chest, ribbed tassets, a mail skirt, buckles and straps described one by one. All of it is dark, so it reads as a silhouette first and a suit second.

Rain falls in fine grey diagonals across the whole frame and the background has been left as an unlit murk with nothing in it. The face is small in all that: dark hair pulled up, deep lines at the mouth, a scar down one cheek, the eyes shadowed and looking down and away.

Two swords is the correct number for this particular king, though not for the reason a painter would assume. A dragon's magic once split him into two separate men, a diplomat and a gladiator, who lived apart for years and were made whole again by accident; the pair of night elf blades they had each been carrying fused into a single weapon at the same moment. Painting him with two is painting him before he was put back together. It belongs to our World of Warcraft collection, near the same king charging with that weapon whole and lit and the son who eventually carried it, raising it under moonlight.