The Desecration of the Arizkun Graves is the investigation’s pivot from an apparent act of grave desecration to evidence of a wider system of ritual violence. The unusual bones left in a church point Amaia Salazar toward Rosario as the only person who could have supplied the knowledge needed to locate her family’s Mairu-beso Bones; the discovery also helps her connect the desecrations to the attempt to sacrifice her son and to a secret group’s use of children’s remains.

The Bones and the Question of Access

Among the bones abandoned in the church, Amaia identifies some as different from the others. She reasons that Garrido could not have known where to find them, and that no one else would have known either unless they had spoken with Rosario. The bones therefore raise two linked questions: who had access to her information, and where was the body—or the grave—from which the remains had come? Amaia puts those questions directly to Doctor Berasategui, whose composure and faint, self-satisfied smile offer no immediate resolution.

That exchange makes the desecration more than damage to a burial place. The remains are evidence of knowledge being transferred, and of a body or grave whose location is still in dispute. Amaia’s suspicion is sharpened by the particularity of the bones: their significance depends on the family history and on information she believes Rosario alone could have provided.

From Desecration to a Larger Pattern

When Amaia later shows Sarasola a photograph of the cave where Doctor Berasategui and Rosario had intended to kill her son, she argues that the Tarttalo murders are a conspicuous distraction from something more important. In her reading, the profanations, the unmistakable use of her family’s children’s bones, and the reason her son was targeted—and ultimately not killed—belong to the same pattern. She also suspects that an initially less alarming act of desecration caused alarm within the Iglesia católica.

Sarasola interprets the photograph as the setting for a human sacrifice and places the Arizkun remains within the practices he associates with witchcraft and offerings to evil. He distinguishes the use of human remains, especially those of children, from the killing of a child as the offering itself, which he describes as the most extreme form of that practice. His account gives the desecrated remains a ritual meaning, while Amaia’s investigation supplies the practical question of who knew where to find them and why they were used.

Historical Precedent and Ritual Rules

To explain why such evidence could be overlooked, Sarasola recalls the seventeenth-century investigations of Salazar and Frías into the presence of evil in the valley and across the French border. As he recounts it, the investigator found local magical practices deeply rooted in older cultural beliefs, interwoven with Christianity. Sarasola also points to unresolved declarations concerning the deaths of children under two and adolescent girls, and the later disappearance of their bodies. Once confessions extracted during the Inquisition were judged wholly false, those accounts were left without resolution.

The novel does not establish that the Arizkun desecrations were simply a continuation of those historical crimes. Rather, Sarasola’s history offers a precedent for treating the bones and the missing bodies as a pattern worth investigating, rather than dismissing them as isolated or incredible claims. His explanation also makes clear how institutional judgments about unreliable testimony could erase evidence of violence against children.

The ritual logic described later supplies more specific criteria. Jonan Etxaide explains the belief that children remain between two worlds until the age of two and can therefore serve as intermediaries with spiritual worlds. A witness adds that a child offered to Inguma had to be a girl, under two, and unbaptized; baptism was understood as an offering and commitment to another god. The same account says that the child’s body was to be surrendered after death and that victims were selected in cycles by sex, age group, and circumstance. These are the group’s beliefs and rules, not independently verified supernatural facts, but they help explain why the Arizkun bones become central to Amaia’s inquiry.

Consequences for the Investigation

The grave desecration gains further weight beside Amaia’s concern that her son had been selected for sacrifice. She sees the remains not as an incidental trace of the Tarttalo murders but as part of the same hidden structure that made the attempted killing possible. Sarasola’s interpretation and the later testimony about the group’s rules give her a framework for connecting the use of children’s bones with the group’s ritual aims, while the unresolved question of the body’s location keeps the evidence concrete and investigative.

The novel also places this uncertainty alongside Yolanda Berrueta’s insistence that her children’s bodies are not all in their grave. After a judge stops the proposed opening, Yolanda explains that, had the tomb been opened merely to confirm the presence of the other children, no one might have discovered that one baby’s body was missing—or listened to another mother in Elizondo who had also lost a child. Her account is not proof that the Arizkun remains and the missing infant bodies share a single origin, but it reinforces the danger of accepting a grave’s apparent contents as conclusive.

Resolution and Significance

The desecration’s decisive significance lies in the way it changes the meaning of the remains. What first appears to be the disturbance of graves becomes a clue to hidden access, missing bodies, and a ritual system whose rules reach into the attempted sacrifice of Amaia’s son. It also joins present-day investigation to older, suppressed accounts without reducing the historical gap between them to a proven unbroken tradition.

After the group is stopped, Amaia tells Elena Ochoa’s daughter that her mother did not die by suicide and that her letter helped bring the child-killing sect to a halt. That aftermath confirms the wider investigative stakes surrounding the desecrations: the bones were part of a case in which concealed information and dismissed warnings had allowed danger to persist. Amaia’s later grief, which she releases in Engrasi’s arms before preparing to act, registers the human cost of confronting the deaths, the remains, and the secrets attached to them.