Amaia and the Supernatural Call of Baztán

Amaia and the Supernatural Call of Baztán names the growing force that draws Amaia Salazar back toward her family’s valley, even as she tries to imagine a life elsewhere. The call is at once intimate and uncanny: it runs through childhood memories, a DVD she keeps locked away, Engrasi’s tarot reading, and Amaia’s sense of an obligation to the dead. The novel does not reduce that pull to a single explanation. It lets family belonging, remembered violence, investigative purpose, and supernatural possibility gather around the same landscape.

A home that offers safety and a past

Amaia’s attachment to the valley is not uncomplicated nostalgia. In her aunt Engrasi’s house, she remembers rooms as enormous, a fireplace she could stand inside as a child, polished furniture, and the deep-red silk-satin coverlet on her grandmother’s bed. These tactile recollections make the family home a place of protection and inheritance. Yet Amaia also knows she has unfinished business with Elizondo, Amaia’s hometown; safety does not mean that returning there is free of fear.

The possibility of bringing Ibai into that family landscape gives the question of return a future-facing dimension. James believes it would be good for Ibai to spend part of his childhood there, in the house that belonged to his family. He explains that becoming a parent has made him want Ibai to know where his family comes from and, if possible, to feel closely connected to that inheritance. For Amaia, the suggestion touches both the comfort of the house and the unresolved force of the place beyond it: a return would be something she chose for her child, but it would also renew her own bond with the valley.

The image held in the safe

Amaia understands that her recent returns to the Baztán Valley are not explained only by having told James what happened to her when she was nine. She feels that she is also trying to keep alive a connection to the Lord of the Forest. That connection has a concrete focus: a DVD kept in her safe. She has not watched it again since the first viewing, with bear experts in a room at the Hotel Baztán, but its presence continues to affect her.

When she opens the safe to put away her gun, Amaia sometimes touches the disc with her fingertips. The image of the being’s amber eyes then comes back with the sharpness of something real. The gesture links the ordinary routines of her work to the memory she has chosen not to revisit: weapon and disc occupy the same protected space, but they represent different forms of confrontation. Recalling those eyes makes doubt and fear disappear. The call therefore does not simply frighten or lure her; at moments, it steadies her, though the reason for that certainty remains unexplained.

Engrasi’s reading of forces and origins

Engrasi’s tarot reading gives Amaia’s sense of a pre-existing bond a larger, more troubling shape. When Engrasi touches one card, she reacts as though it has given her a small shock and says she has never been shown this before. She interprets the cards as revealing that the condemnation hanging over Amaia was present before her birth. In her account, Amaia’s unusual strength did not begin with the experience of death: Engrasi believes she was already different, a judgment shared, she says, by Amaia’s grandmother Juanita, her father, her mother, and Engrasi herself.

Engrasi recalls the child she knew as watchful and guarded around her mother: keeping her distance, avoiding touch and eye contact, holding her breath under scrutiny, and staying awake so she would not be devoured. The reading connects that childhood vigilance with Amaia’s later capacity and discernment, without presenting the painful experience as a simple gift. Amaia has changed, Engrasi says, and that change is both necessary and dangerous because powerful forces pull her in different directions.

One card represents a guardian who loves Amaia purely and will not leave her, because protecting her is his purpose. Another represents a demanding priestess who drives Amaia toward battle and treats her as a weapon, a soldier to wield against enemies in an ancient struggle to restore balance. Engrasi links the broken balance to an abominable act that awakened beasts and powers that had slept for centuries in the valley’s depths. When Amaia asks whether the priestess is good, Engrasi refuses a simple moral division: she is neither good nor evil, but a force of nature, capable of cruelty like the earth itself. The reading makes protection and danger inseparable from the same struggle.

The call of the dead and the question of return

Amaia responds to Engrasi’s account by recalling Aloisius Dupree’s advice to look for the first act, the event that set the evil in motion. Her attention turns from the cards’ images toward origin and consequence. This is an important distinction: the reading gives her a framework of forces, but it does not identify the initiating act for her. The investigation still requires her to search for what happened and how it produced the present disorder.

Elsewhere, Amaia’s thoughts about Zarautz sharpen the contrast between chosen home and inherited summons. As a child she wanted to live there, and she notices its tree-lined road, seaside houses, lively old quarter, and the force of the Cantabrian Sea. She once believed she did not love her own town or want to return to Elizondo; over the past year, those certainties have shifted. The roots of the valley seem to call its children back, but Amaia can still resist that particular call. What she cannot ignore, she understands, is the call of the dead: she feels a pact over her head, compelling her again and again to face those who would desecrate the valley.

That distinction keeps the concept from becoming a straightforward homecoming story. Zarautz remains an imaginable life elsewhere, and Amaia can still choose not to follow the pull of her roots. The dead exert a different claim, bound to the valley’s violated balance and to the work of confronting its desecrators. Across the remembered house, the guarded DVD, Engrasi’s cards, and Amaia’s reflections by the sea, the supernatural call is presented as a pressure on her choices rather than a fully explained force. Its power lies partly in that unresolved overlap: the valley is family ground, the site of remembered fear, and the place where Amaia believes she must answer.