“Kaixo!” said Ainhoa as she walked into the bar and sat down next to them. 

“Zer nahi duzu?” asked Kepa as he waived over the waiter. “What would you like?”

“Mil esker!” replied Ainhoa. She looked up at the waiter. “Cortado, mesedez.”

The waiter nodded as he disappeared.

Ainhoa turned back to Kepa and Maite, who was already nursing her coffee. “So,” she began, “I admit, when we met, I didn’t think you’d keep reaching out like this. It’s a bit…” she paused a moment while searching for the right word “…unusual. I don’t usually get this kind of attention.”

Maite nodded. “We’re sorry to be bothering you so much, but the truth is, you are just so interesting. I can’t get enough chatting with you.”

Ainhoa looked at Maite a bit warily. “See?” she said. “Strange…”

“Ok,” said Kepa, trying to alleviate the tension that was quickly growing at their small table. He pulled out the journal they had found in Marina’s destroyed baserri. He put it on the table and pushed it over toward Ainhoa. Maite gave glared at him as he did so, but he shrugged as Ainhoa picked up the book.

“Zer da?” she asked as she opened the cover. “What is this?”

“To be honest, we don’t know. I found it at an antique book store and thought it was pretty cool. Some of the designs in there are just pretty awesome and I thought I could use them for some graphic design work I hope to do. But then I remembered…” He pointed at Ainhoa’s bare shoulder, where there was a tattoo of a triangle inscribed within a circle. Next to the point of the triangle was another circle, on the left, and a crescent on the right. “That tattoo you have, it’s one of the symbols that is pretty common in this book. I hoped you might know what it means.”

Ainhoa absentmindedly rubbed her shoulder as she thumbed through the book until she saw the same symbol. “Huh” is all she said as she stared at the book and the other strange symbols that filled the page. 

“I’ll be honest,” she began, “I don’t know what it means. It came to me in a dream one night. I don’t even remember the dream, but I remembered the symbol. It spoke to me, you know? I could sense a power within it.” She shrugged. “So, I thought it would make a great tattoo.”

“It is pretty cool,” admitted Kepa. “Do you know anything else about it?”

AInhoa was silent as she sipped on her coffee. “Well,” she said, “I only have some vague images from the dream, nothing coherent. Just images of three woman. One was older than the other two, who looked like twins, except one was very bright and the other was obscured in shadows. However, all three smiled at me. I could feel an immense power coming from all three of them. They then somehow morphed into this symbol -” she pointed at the open page of the journal “- and then the dream ended.”

“Three women, one older, and two sisters?” repeated Maite. “Reminds me of the legend of Amalur.” 

“Of course!” exclaimed Ainhoa. “How could I not have seen that? That’s exactly what it is. Amalur and her daughters Ilargi and Eguzki.”

“If this symbol represents Amalur and her daughters,” pondered Kepa as he tapped the drawing in the journal, “what do the rest of these symbols mean?”

Ainhoa shrugged. “Sorry, but I have no idea. They don’t mean anything to me.”

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