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I'm not sure I get this - the voice advising him seems like more than just Dunyain instincts, but an entity of some type. Or am I just bonkers?

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Ajokli?

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Or Kellhus.

The text of the book is EXTREMELY SPECIFIC in stating it is Samarmis, his twin brother--but we all seem absolutely determined to not believe the text, but to overdetermine the text with our own self-flattering interpretations (because I came up with this interpretation it is inherently better, no?)

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The Voice being poor old Sammy would also mirror the story of Kelmomas' namesake in the Sagas, who was born with a dead twin.

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The text of the book is EXTREMELY SPECIFIC in stating it is Samarmis, his twin brother--but we all seem absolutely determined to not believe the text, but to overdetermine the text with our own self-flattering interpretations (because I came up with this interpretation it is inherently better, no?)

We also got a pretty good indication of Samarmis' personality before he died from the text and there is a pretty high level of dissonance between that and lil Kel's inner voice.
IIRC its only lil Kel himself that identifies the voice as Samarmis.

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Actually, the Voice identifies itself as Samarmas as well. "Why didn't you kill me sooner?"

I think the Samarmas Esmenet and the rest of the world sees was just a broken remnant left behind when the bulk of its soul was torn away along with Kelmomas' eternal eye contact in their infancy. In fact, the Voice seems quite a bit more active after Samarmas' murder to me.

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It is without doubt Sammy.

What's not clear is exactly what Sammy himself is/was.

The concept of the "dead "bouncing" as it were came up a few times in TWLW.  Theres this quote somewhere about old men behind the eyes of babes or some such.  I tend to read this as a type of reincarnation, perhaps some souls have sufficient power to remain bound to earwa i dunno.  So Sammy is in my opinion something more than simply Kel's twin, who or what exactly I'm not sure.

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Yeh, I'm pretty caught up with the whole Ajokli thing.  He's in the background of many scenes in WLW.

I feel like there is a link between him and Kelmomas via Sammy.  I could well be wrong but I loves the speculating.

I'll reassemble my grand Ajokli crackpot theories if anyone is interested (after I've got these uni assignments done and I can spend a bit of free time on here instead of posting for procrastination purposes).

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But Curethan... this was all a targeted effort to make sure I didn't fail school alone with a TSA obsession .

I'm in a pretty mixed camp on Kelmomas. I almost certainly think that he is one of Kellhus' most devious agents in Momemn - whether he knows it or not. I also believe that Kelmomas has to have attracted Ajolki simply because Kelmomas is fulfilling all the loose tenets of Ajolkism in his narrative. Bakker isn't exactly overt.

Perhaps, it's even all three, that Samarmas and Kelmomas shared one soul, despite what I've described.

However, I think on that note Kelmomas is deluding himself. The Prologue in TJE is his cipher at this point. "She looked him square in the eye, and he stared into the pith of her, past the paint and skin, past the sheath of interlocking muscles, down to the radiant truth of her love. She would die for you, the secret voice - the one that had been within him always - whispered." (p14, TJE)

Clearly, the Voice was with him before Sammy died.

This is also the passage that really convinces me of the forth option, that Kelmomas' Voice is really just an expression of his Dunyain genes in a way a child might internalize, especially given the strange form his child's brain would take.

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I don't see the voice being with him before Samarmas died is at all incompatible with it actually being Samarmas' soul.

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Madness or Kelmomas's subconscious.  The only one who hears the voice is Kelmomas, who appears to be something like a high functioning, highly intelligent psychopath.  It doesn't matter what the voice calls itself because we have no way of verifying the authenticity of its claims.  Bakker has created high functioning characters with mental illnesses before, such a Cnauir and Conphas.  Why cannot Kelmomas simply be mad?

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He surely could be.  But the voice appears to have access to information that lil Kel doesn't and extraneous objectives to boot. Eg He assassinates the Yatwerian delegatation at its behest iirc.

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That's not true, Curethan. p. 404 - 413 TJE are Kelmomas' perspective of "deciding" to kill the Yatwerian Matriarch. The Voice stops talking after Kelmomas takes its warning not to be seen by Kellhus and Kelmomas, who had then gone to the Imperial Audience Chamber on nothing more than a whim, it seems, follows the scent of the Matriarch's piss to the Guest Compound and kills the Yatwerian delegation with nary an articulated, italicized thought.

It seems much more in line with the theory of the Gods exercising their agency in the very descriptions of our character's POVs. Like when Sorweel lies to Kellhus in TJE when he's declared a Believer King, when he charges back to save Eskeles in WLW, or when Achamian lies to the Skin Eaters about the coffers. Though there are other more and less explicit references for this type of theory.

So in this instance, Ajolki, Patron God of the Narindar, for whom murder is holy...?

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Thanks for the correction Madness. Restricted to posting from uni and my books are in boxes from my recent move so I can't check these things
But yeh, Ajokli...

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Siamese souls?