A Worgen Warlock Casting Fel Magic Beneath the Moon — Print & Oil Painting

Two light sources of opposite temperature and the picture is the argument between them. High at the left a white moon sits in grey-violet cloud, flat and cold, throwing a pale rim along the top of his shoulder. Low at the right and left, in both of his hands, two spheres of acid green burn hot enough to light the underside of the muzzle. Neither light reaches the other.

The hands are doing the same thing twice at different heights. The left is turned palm up at chest level with the fingers curled and a sphere resting above them; the right is dropped almost to the ground with a larger one, brighter, throwing green up the inside of the forearm. Over the far shoulder a staff carries the same fire at its head, so there are three of these things going at once.

The costume is expensive and unbloodied. Violet plate with gold banding, four round green cabochons set along the pauldron, a knotwork buckle at the waist, a purple robe beneath. The fur is a warm brown, the eyes are two green points, and thin green vapour trails from the corners of the mouth as though he has been breathing it.

The ground has been burnt out. Orange cracks run through black rock across the bottom of the frame, bare charred trunks lean at the left, and the measurement puts the dominant hue firmly in the red band, which belongs entirely to that ruined earth rather than to anything on the figure.

Green is not a decision the painter made. The power in those hands is taken from consumed life and it stains everything it passes through, which is why every practitioner in this collection glows the same colour whatever their people, and why long users end up with it in their eyes whether they wanted the look or not. A picture that gives him three sources of it and one moon is being accurate about the ratio. Shown in our World of Warcraft collection with another practitioner of the same craft working alone at night and the king of his people roaring in a candlelit hall.