Ibai Nearly Sacrificed in a Ritual

Ibai Nearly Sacrificed in a Ritual is the attempted ritual in a cave that brought the investigation of Berasategui’s crimes into frightening proximity with Amaia Salazar’s family. Amaia connects the threat to a wider pattern of infant deaths and desecrations, and wonders whether someone is trying to summon Inguma; later, Father Sarasola confirms that Berasategui intended to carry out something in the cave involving Amaia’s son.

The ritual amid the anomalies

Amaia argues that the strange events in the valley cannot be dismissed as isolated crimes. Alongside the girls found by the river and the remains in Cueva de Arri Zahar, she recalls bones burning on a church altar. Infant deaths, especially deaths attributed to sudden death during sleep, seem to her to be entangled with Inguma, the mythic being said to steal the breath of sleepers. The cave ritual in which Ibai nearly died therefore becomes part of a troubling accumulation rather than a self-contained threat.

Amaia’s theory of an offering

Amaia asks Engrasi whether the desecrations and the remains of murdered women might belong to an offering ritual connected to the attempt on Ibai’s life. She considers the possibility that someone has begun a rite to call supernatural powers back, and asks whether Inguma could be brought back to claim a harvest of corpses. Her question about why anyone would take the body of a dead baby gives the theory a concrete, unresolved stake: the ritual may involve not only killing, but also the removal of infant remains.

Engrasi’s response frames the possibility through older accounts of powers sustained by sacrifices and offerings, and of lesser gods falling dormant until something awakened them. The image of awakening gains force from the evidence already haunting Amaia: the desecrations, her twin sister’s empty grave, and the dark-haired head of Valentín Esparza’s daughter visible in a backpack beneath the rain. She also remembers Inés Ballarena’s account that Inguma had awakened in 1440 and continued taking lives until its thirst was sated. These details do not prove that Inguma has returned; they show how the ritual threat draws Amaia’s present investigation into a much older story of violence and attempted invocation.

Berasategui’s role and the wider pattern

When Amaia later asks Father Sarasola what the ritual has to do with the murder of Jonan Etxaide, he cautions that the connection may be uncertain, but identifies Berasategui as a psychiatrist who had induced a series of horrific crimes. Berasategui was also implicated in the transfer of his mother to the clinic and her subsequent escape, as well as in the plan involving Amaia’s son in the cave. Father Sarasola says Berasategui’s plans were conceived and carried out over a long period: the earliest Tarttalo crimes dated back ten years, when Berasategui would have only recently graduated from university.

Significance

The near-sacrifice turns a mythic question into an immediate family danger without settling whether the supernatural explanation is true. Amaia’s effort to connect Inguma, infant deaths, missing bodies, and ritual violence remains a theory, while the cave plan supplies a human criminal link in Berasategui. The episode’s force lies in that double pressure: Ibai’s life was placed at risk by a deliberate plan, and the surrounding evidence makes the plan appear to belong to a history far older and broader than one crime.