My character is approaching Rorikstead, and he notices a dragon circling overhead. He takes out his bow and fires one off, and there's no report of damage, because it's Alduin, and you can't damage him in flight. He's there to raise Nahagliiv from his burial mound.

So I follow and watch, and the swirly light show starts up over the burial mound, and Alduin spouts some dragon tongue and then flies off again. I stand and wait for Nahagliiv to rise up and do battle with me.

Except that he doesn't. The light show continues, but no dragon popping out of the mound and getting its flesh back on. Eventually I get bored and go up the hill and ransack the Forsworn camp instead.

Heading back down to Rorikstead, it appears that Nahagliiv did in fact emerge, as he's waiting by his mound, and I finally get the battle I expected, and another Dragon soul for the collection.

Anyone have any ideas what controls the playout of that scene? What could I have done that broke the chain, and was there any way to get the exhumation of Nahagliiv to continue?

This is the ONE spot where this has happened to me OFTEN. I call it "Alduin Interruptus." He rarely finishes raising Nahagliiv, instead deciding to fly away. Am I that scarey?

[EDIT]

I either re-load a previous save and try to trigger it again, or just not worry about it.

Is this with or without the unofficial patches?

if with, try consulting arthmoor in the unofficial patches thread.

It's a really complicating process. I deconstructed it a few months ago.

Nearly all the mounds Alduin will go to an resurrect dragons. But it's done so in a manner where you can easily miss it.

If you're wanting to mess around with this a bit, check out how the mounds are set up in the CK, and then refer to MQ106 for the scene setup, quest frags and stuff.

As for him never finished. Just a scene issue, he probably wasn't given a long enough package through the scene phases or needed an action timer.

I've seen many posts on the forum about how attacking Alduin interupts the resurrection. Sounds like you got lucky though, usually the dragon never appears and the light show never stops.

Also, while all the dragon mounds do end up opened by the end of the MQ, you can only witness 4 of them. Sahloknir, Vuljotnaak, Nahagliiv and Viinturuth

A PC user can with the help of the disable command disable the light show, then you could prid each dragon and enable them that way, that should trigger their uprising.

Actually, I think those he listed ARE the only ones that play the animation, actually come up, and is resurrected by Alduin. All the rest are scripted to "open" at certain points to give the illusion that they were brought up.

It appears Beth intended for all them to be resurrection scenes, because the dragon models are near the mounds, along with their crash landing markers.

After hundreds of hours of playing, this finally happened to me. I was shocked when I saw it. It was near Rorikstead, so it must have the been the same one you're talking about OP.

I had no problems with it. Not only that.. But as soon as I defeated the dragon, I came across yet another random encounter that I had never seen before.

It's with the unofficial patches.