This image was inspired by Arthurian legend. It's the Lady of the Lake.
In this rendition she is an entity forming out of the water and is either handing the sword to King Arthur (according to some stories he receives Excalibur from her instead of pulling it from the stone) or taking the sword back after the fall of King Arthur.
The scene was created in Blender (v2.36) and consists of over 3,000 objects across seven layers. Post-processing was performed in two programs: Corel Painter (to enhance the glow and diffuse a few edges of the glow) and Adobe Photoshop (Elements version, mainly for color/contrast tweaking).
While modeling/scene setup took about 8 hours to complete, I spent the past week and a half tweaking and trying different lighting setups to see how far I could push the image in Blender before having to resort to post processing to reach the final image I had in mind. The extra time spent pushing the native renderer I felt was worthwhile, since after that it was not long after some basic post work that I reached the end product as envisioned.
Well I hope you like the image. Thanks for checking it out!