A Weathered Map of Kalimdor and Azeroth — Print & Oil Painting

The whole design turns on a hole. Dead centre, between the two landmasses and drawn small enough to miss, a spiral has been inked into the sea: half a dozen turns of a whirlpool with fine hatching around the rim, no bigger than one of the labelled cities. Everything else on the sheet is arranged symmetrically around it.

The two continents are painted as raised leather rather than as coastline. Ochre and gold, blotched and scuffed, with mountain ranges drawn in the old convention as rows of little peaks and forests as clusters of dots, and the sea between them a mottled grey-green that has been rubbed thin in places to show the fibre underneath. The edges of the parchment are torn and scorched.

The lettering is doing the storytelling. On the left, a single word runs the height of the western landmass with two smaller places named inland and one island city floated above it. On the right, five names are stacked down the eastern one, and the largest of them, set across the middle of that continent, is the same word this whole world is called by. It is the older usage: the name belonged to one kingdom before it belonged to the planet.

Around the margins the cartographer has enjoyed himself. Two coiled sea serpents fill the lower corners, a sailing ship crosses the strait under full canvas, a compass rose sits at the bottom centre, and small monsters break the surface in three or four places, all of them drawn in thin brown line rather than colour.

There used to be one continent. A single landmass covered most of this world until a well of raw magic at its heart collapsed in on itself at the end of a war, and roughly four fifths of the land went with it; what is left are the fragments on this sheet, and the spiral in the middle is the hole the well left behind. A map that shows the wreckage tidily, with monsters in the corners, is showing the aftermath of the largest single event in the setting. It hangs in our World of Warcraft collection between another world charted in the same antique gold and one of the cities named on it, charted street by street.