The cause for the perpetual gloom in Falkreath was something that interested Elayne Ashing greatly, as with all unknowns. The hold's denizens, if ever they were asked, insisted that the area's unending drear had some sort of divine cause. Usually, this supposedly mystical phenomenon was hypothesized by the peasants to have something to do with the town of Falkreath's unusually large graveyard. A goddess demanding respect for the dead, for instance, or the spirits of the deceased manifesting as grey clouds. Elayne herself suspected, less superstitiously, that the hold was merely affected by natural atmospheric phenomena relating to the nearby and mighty Jerall Mountains. Magic was a pervasive force in Nirn, but it seemed unlikely to the young Breton mage that a wizard of such immense power as to control the skies themselves would waste their grip of Aetherius on making it slightly foggy in a particular area of the backwoods of Skyrim.

Despite the Nordic tomb's remote location, the adequacy of the directions that Elayne had been given in Cheydinhal were enough for her to arrive right on time. As her robe-clad figure appeared to those adventurers already assembled, Elayne eschewed introductions to instead study the ruins. While her small, soft hands, covered by mage's gloves, gently dusted dirt and grime off of an inscription on the barrows' largely decorative exterior, Elayne considered her history with such locations. This would not be the first Nordic ruin that she would explore. Though her glory-and-wealth adventures thus far had not taken her into any long-dead Jarl's tombs, she had undertaken an extensive excavation of an ancient Nordic site during her days in the College of Winterhold. The site, situated a fair distance west of the city, in the wind-swept wastes of Skyrim's far north, had been cleared of threats and obvious valuables long before Elayne had the opportunity to explore it. That, of course, did not phase her in the slightest; Elayne was then and is now far more interested in sites of this sort for their historicity, rather than the treasures they might happen to hold. It seemed queer to Elayne that her counterparts were often so entirely disinterested in the purpose of the ruins they explored. After all, which was more interesting: the necklace around a deceased man's neck, or the man himself, and his story? Very few baubles were of greater note to the collective body of knowledge of Tamriel than the man or mer who carried them. An unexceptional tomb in an even more unexceptional area of Skyrim was unlikely to contain one.

Reaching the end of her train of thought, and all at once realizing that her lack of formal greeting might raise eyebrows of social conscience, Elayne decided to give salutations to her partners in this expedition, all of whom had almost certainly already both seen and heard her during her thoughts. Taking a second to turn her gaze towards the small crowd gathered at the tomb's entrance, Elayne noticed that her fellow Breton, Merci, had apparently just arrived.

"Hello," she muttered to the group absent-mindedly, but in a friendly tone and at appropriate volume. Having now read the inscription that had earlier caught her eye, she moved on to examining the general architectural style of the structure, her green eyes slowly grazing about as she surmised. This ruin was from around the same era as the one she'd excavated along the Sea of Ghosts, with her classmates. It besmirched Elayne's thorough nature to have to do a more 'smash-and-grab' style excavation of this second site, and to thus be left unable to adequately compare and contrast the two, but the young mage doubted her less educated partners were willing to wait the many weeks that a formal excavation would take. Turning her attention entirely towards the group now, Elayne continued, "Have any of you any experience with tombs of this type? I visited one much farther to the North once upon a time. Worked there for a little under a month, with some others from the College. My superiors had already cleared the ruin of Draugr and such, of course, so I'm afraid that whatever it is we face in there I'll have only read about. It is best to use fire, yes?"