They didn't leave the buried ruins immediately.
Now that Sage understood what was forming beneath Greyfen, the strange events of the past several weeks were no longer separate mysteries, and Rowan wanted to reconstruct the sequence before they returned to Dunmere.
They climbed back toward the upper ruins and stopped inside a chamber that had survived their battles relatively intact, where Iris cleared centuries of dust from a broad stone platform and Sage unfolded the rough map Garran had prepared from the Guild's accumulated missions.
Rowan added everything they had discovered during the expedition: abandoned nesting grounds, reversed migration trails, the dead Gravehorn Ravager, territories emptied of smaller creatures, the abnormal Cindermaw and every report collected from Dunmere.
By the time the marks covered half the map, the pattern had become impossible to miss. Rowan rested one finger near the northernmost section and slowly traced it south.
