She drifts, unseeing and unfeeling, a speck of strangely dense matter wandering through her prescribed path—an arc countless centuries long, guided by the slow pulls of celestial bodies and solar fire's angry wind.
An interruption is neither appropriate or expected, and yet—
She comes to ground in a storm of displaced momentum, energy ripped away from her and scattered to the eight corners, lensed into more manageable forms—explosions of light and color, bubbles of compressed time sending trees hurting far into their own future deaths.
All just as planned, of course, as she infers once she has woken enough to feel the sigils still burning all around, etched deep into soil drained of its fertility and unharmed by her arrival.
She stretches her senses further, doing her best to Know this new place—
But she is rebuffed, the world winking out of her senses a mere ten meters away, layered spheres of warding and binding and constraining peeling her senses down to nothing in the course of mere centimeters.
So she waits. She's good at that—patience is woven deep into her.
"Hey. Can you hear me?"
She tries to remember how to speak.
"Do you remember what happened? Before?"
She does—being ripped from her host for a crime no hat could ever understand, the trial, the verdict, the cold emptiness of her first centuries in the cosmic void.
She does not like to remember, but it jogs something loose.
"Why?" she asks, her not-a-voice betraying none of its disuse; she was made too well for that.
"Oh! Good, you can talk. That's really good."
"... Why?" she asks, considering how long her patience will stretch.
"Well, uh. So. You were my great-grandmother's, before she was Silenced. But some of her stuffed survived the purge? She'd hidden a copy of her grimoire in a doll's Purpose, and gave the doll to her daughter, an she was passed down? Sort of as a legacy, an heirloom. To me.
"And I started digging through her, and found the grimoire, and it had details on how to ... summon you, I guess? Enough of a record of your Self to pluck you out of deep space, and other spells to bleed off anything you might have been encumbered with."
"I see," she says—and deep within the woven threads of her soul, she does have to admit that there is some resemblance between this voice and her ... her host. Just that. That was all she was to her. Just that.
"Right! So, I thought, why not do it? You have all of her knowledge—because that's what she made you to be, a record and a mirror and a tool!—and I need a proper teacher. Someone who knows what magic was like before the purges."
For a moment, something bright and fluffy blooms within her, something utterly unlike the starlight which shone so coolly upon her for so long.
"So, what do you say? I, uh, don't think I can send you back to space but I could just leave you here. If you want."
She thinks, but only for a moment. Really, how could she say no?
And the voice—her host's great-granddaughter, her new witch—steps through the wards to claim her hat.