In the bustling intervals of the market square, above (or perhaps below the clamoring voices) lingered a forgotten resonance; a tune haltingly woven through melodies untold. Was it the echo from a lost chapter or merely the wind's ghostly gossip of stories yet unwritten?
Valeria paused, clutching her woven basket, filled with morning's offering of herbs and fleeting thoughts of what she might become. As the tune lulled her weary soul, she noted an odd presence by the ancient gnarled statue of Maris, the Keeper of Thresholds, its face partially obscured by thyme and shadows.
There stood a figure, indistinct yet definitive, as if they had stepped forth from the illusive pages of a tale flossed clean of reality’s mundane grip. Curious (and unawares of the boundary she edged ever closer to), Valeria's heart, emboldened by the tune’s melancholic splendor, whispered her name into the fog surrounding its being.
"What precedes, follows," the figure voiced, each syllable a paradox of certainty and implication. Valeria recalled a mythical saying about the Keeper’s Riddles; about choices tethered beyond the boundary now ripping asunder through the fabric of her unsuspecting world.
Her grip around the basket slackened, each handled thread dissolving into whispers of potential unraveling. Down the throat of pressing path unknown, she was impelled to follow — as if destiny itself wove her the pathway through obliquely narrowed margins of space definable only by touch or the pure act of walking forth. The tune grew louder, more distinct, wrapping them in its insistent harmonies.