Kepa lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Maite had gotten up early to go for a jog along La Concha. She had invited Kepa to join her, but he wasn’t really a jogger. He needed a competitive element to get him motivated to exert himself. A game of basketball with friends, that was great. A partido of mano in the fronton, that was the kind of thing that got him going. Running for the sake of running? He never quite understood that.

He let his eyes sort of defocus as he stared at the ceiling, little floaters flittering across his vision. Sometimes he saw shapes in the fuzzy black blobs and lines that danced across his vision, but most of the time he simply tried to track them. When he shifted his eyes to look more directly at one, it always seemed to shift away, to the side of his vision, always fuzzy and grey.

“Just like these symbols,” he said to himself. “Always just a little out of focus, always just beyond my grasp.”

He flicked his eyes back and forth, driving the floaters across his field of vision, not ready to get out of bed and start his day. 

After a while, he got bored of chasing floaters. He held his hand in front of his face and forced his finger tip to glow. Staring at the bright light, he moved his finger, drawing in the air. When he closed his eyes, the after image remained, his drawing almost brought to life on the back of his eyelids. He wrote out Maite’s name and there it was, almost burned into his vision. He tried to draw a virtual picture of her face, but it turned out to be a distorted caricature. He blinked furious to try to erase the hideous image from his eyes.

He absent mindedly continued drawing random shapes in the air, burning them into his retina and watching them fade against the blackness of his closed eyelids. At some point, without really thinking about it, he drew a circle. Within the circle he drew a triangle. Next to one point of the triangle he drew another circle and, next to the other, he drew a crescent. 

“Amalur,” he mumbled to himself as he closed his eyes, focusing on the after image of the symbol that Ainhoa had tattooed on her shoulder, that filled Marina’s journal. “What does it mean?”

Instead of fading, the symbol grew brighter and brighter against the back of his eyelids, to the point that it was almost painful. He shoved his hands against his eyes trying to block the light, but it was coming from inside his eyes. He was about to scream when the light suddenly vanished. Rubbing his eyes, he opened them. Blinking, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust back to the ambient light. As they did, he found himself staring at the apparition of a woman.

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