Irmã Vesna has the composed, watchful bearing of someone accustomed to speaking over a crowd without raising her voice. Her dark hair is braided close to her scalp, then bound in a short tail with red thread. She breathes through her nose in slow, measured pulls; when startled, the rhythm catches in a dry, audible hitch before she regains control. Her broad jaw shifts slightly before she speaks, and her small, blunt teeth show when she eats or laughs. She chews with the same deliberation she uses to choose words. Her hands are ink-stained, her nails cut to the quick, and she walks with a careful heel-to-toe roll that makes her seem to arrive without haste. The unexpected thing is her habit of carrying a tiny paper windmill, which she folds and refolds during sermons.

Vesna is patient enough to let silence do the work of an argument, yet she can be startlingly direct when someone tries to soften the cost of the Éter. In private she is tender with the grieving and severe with herself; in a public sermon she is controlled, persuasive, and careful not to promise salvation. When afraid, she becomes more exact rather than more emotional, reciting dates and names as if precision could keep anyone else from being erased.

Vesna once kept records for a hospice that treated people exposed to the Éter. She watched patients lose names, memories, and eventually the ability to recognize their own families, while official notices called each death a necessary sacrifice. During a containment failure, she was ordered to seal a ward with its sick still inside. She obeyed, then heard a child knocking from the other side until the ward fell silent. That night changed her: she stole the incident reports and found evidence that the Five had known the seal would consume people, and had chosen to preserve the lie. The Sons of Hermes, Red Wing, gave her a pulpit and a network of listeners, but their leaders want her truth turned into a weapon. Vesna privately maintains a list of the dead and tries to find surviving relatives before the sect can use their grief. She has an uneasy channel to the Lanterns, whom she warns and tempts in equal measure. Her former hospice colleague, Thesra, still sends her scraps of evidence, but will not meet her in person. Vesna is currently trying to locate a missing page from the original seal report before her sect's more militant members do.