So earlier today I was just moseying around Goldenglow Estate with my mage, when I encountered a dragon. I hit it with a few lightning bolts and it went down in the Estate, where I finished it off at range. I then found out I couldn't get in, because I wasn't in the Thieves' guild, therefore I couldn't absorb the soul or loot the dragon's corpse; it just stayed there, dead, heavy, and scaly. I looked at it and said, "Hang tight, I'll be back for ya." When I finally did the thieves' guild stuff to get in there, the corpse was gone. However, when I went to around where the corpse was, the "absorbing soul" effect showed up around my character, without sound effects. It finished and I heard the musical bit for "Dragon soul absorbed" and I believe the accompanying text did show up, though it may not have.

I looked in my shouts menu, and sure enough, it said I had 1 dragon soul. Buuuut when I tried to use it to learn another word, a message showed up saying I don't have any souls. Color me sad, since my game has almost never let me fight dragons in the first place (70% of the time they just fly around for a few minutes and then leave, compared to my first character, who gets attacked 90% of the time they appear).

Long story short, it looks like when you kill a dragon but don't go near enough to the body to trigger the soul-absorption event, then go back after the corpse has been "cleaned up", you'll absorb a dragon soul that you can't use.

Given you did something completely one off to have this happen calling it a bug is valid because it gave the soul.....one that needs/gets immediate fixing.....mmmmm not so sure. There will be issues like this that happen 1 out of a million that may never get resolved, but cool story bro indeed. If it ever happens to me I now know to just reload. Sounds like they will still need to refine how dragons are handled given their importance and frequency in the game. So you will always have 1 soul available in your menu now that you can't use?

Just curious. Did you unlock a learned shout by pressing square?

bolded: I agree, it's not a big priority given that this has probably only happened in maybe .01% of dragon attacks, but I wanted to report the bug. The solution is probably in whatever script they updated to make dragon corpses clean up properly, with the 1.2 patch; it doesn't remove the soul-giving and/or doesn't make an exemption for dragon corpses that have been left unabsorbed.



It didn't seem to work when I tried it first, but I've restarted the game since the OP (started lagging something awful), and now it does. So I suppose the only glitch is that it's still possible to absorb the soul after the body has been cleaned up, if it wasn't absorbed before. And that no sound accompanies said absorption.

Thanks for your curiosity.