Rhesa Morn

Rhesa, Cassian's sister, remains a remembered person in his life, not a prop for his suffering.

In The Godless Priest

Rhesa Morn was Cassian Veyr's sister, dead fourteen years before the book opens. She appears only in memory and through the demon Morrow, which had imitated her voice since her death. She was possessed in a plague room, tied down after trying to claw out her own eyes, and Cassian killed her with a knife.

For years Morrow accused Cassian of delay. When he drank her ash in broth at Sela Morn's funeral, he recovered an ordinary childhood memory of her painting blue flowers on his boots and laughing, and learned that in the plague room she had asked him to wait until the thing used their mother's voice, and that he had killed her before then out of fear. He later gave the painted-boots memory to the courier Vell to restore Sennic Arlo, keeping only the knowledge that it had existed. Morrow agreed to stop using her voice, and on the final road released a remembered last request of hers that no witness could confirm, leaving Cassian with a smaller but more honest account of her death.

Family

After the books

Dead before the main events; her incomplete memory remains part of Cassian's moral history. Her incomplete memory teaches that absence of a full record is not absence of value.