This was commissioned for IlluXcon, and my concept was based on Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer. Yeskov is a paleontologist and an obsessed fan of The Lord of the Rings, and in the tradition of the parallel novel, his work shares Tolkien's created world Middle-Earth. But much as as in Gregory Maguire's Wicked – a parallel novel about the events of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz – in this universe the original becomes a distorted view, the sagas of the heroic men of Westernesse and the craven evil of Mordor really fables told for propaganda by the victors, and where we see the morally turbid, secret dealings behind the War of the Ring laid bare.

The first Lord of the Rings drawing I did as a teenager was of orcs, and they've always fascinated me. In The Last Ringbearer, orcs are not monsters but human beings of a non-Westernesse race who call themselves Orocuen, plying their livings as nomadic herders upon the arid expanses of the Mordor plain. This troupe is fleeing the invasion of Mordor at Cirith Ungol and seeking a pass over the Morgai range, finding that the destruction has preceeded them. Oroduin smolders in the background, and the enormous pillar of smoke beyond marks what used to be Barad-Dur.