@seirnarei replied to this post with:

This would make a great Jame/Tori AU

YEAH, IT ACTUALLY REALLY WOULD

I literally just said that I wasn't going to read this novel and you have severely damaged that resolve in one sentence. I should not read this novel purely to write a better Kencyrath AU. I am considering it intensely, though, because Torisen, twice-banished god of a long-dead culture, and Jame, Silver-Eyed Calamity who took over the ghost world almost by accident in her pursuit of having enough power to protect her brother, the only god worth her time, are now living rent-free in my frontal lobe.

Anyway, here are some loose Thoughts that are now clattering around my brain interrupting my workday.

Torisen ascends a third time entirely by accident, after eight hundred years of being a mercenary who's starving to death half the time because of his unfortunate tendency to give a shit. He's welcomed back to Heaven amidst a lot of chaos, a significant amount of mockery, and a general sense that he, dressed in worn black soldier's gear and stalked by bad luck, is only here for a matter of time before he gets banished again.

Torisen believes that his twin sister died as a child when she was cast out of his father's palace. Jame technically has a grave. Torisen is the only person who ever visited it. When he was bowing his head to Ganth and throwing himself into his duties as Crown Prince, Tori sometimes thought she got the better end of the deal. But even if he was trapped, at least he could do something for the common people. Like he couldn't for Jame.

The nameless ghost who fought at Tori's side and ultimately died for him was too old, too confident, too skilled, too everything, to be even under suspicion as being Tori's sister. He knows what happened to Jame, he knows what happens to little girls abandoned in the street, and he's just seeing things, in the long black hair this girl ties back into a braid, in the loud, easy way she laughs, in the way he can hear a smile under her mask when she calls him Your Highness. She tells him to call her Seeker, for the game children play with an eyeless mask, and he never sees her face, and then she's torn apart, Tori's last dedicate, his last worshipper, his last-- He seals up the grief in a corner of his heart next to Jame, next to his people, next to his failures, and keeps going.

The grey-eyed young thing who essentially moves into his life whether he wants her there or not, after he leaves Heaven to build his own temple (what else is he going to do, in this third and unwanted divinity--he's already wearing both punishments Heaven would normally dole out, and he hasn't been banished yet), tells him to call her B'tyrr, and he doesn't think anything of it. She answers his questions about Talisman, Jame, the Silver Calamity, with perfect ease; she repairs the temple door; she paints a portrait of His Highness Torisen, Crown Prince of Knorth; she--

She can't be Jame, because if she is, then Tori has been mourning her (or, rather, painstakingly not mourning her) for eight hundred years for nothing.

On Jame's side, she was tossed out of the palace and she doesn't want to talk about the next decade and change. The next thing she wants to talk about is her twin brother's ascension, about the knowledge that there was a god in Heaven who really, truly cared about people. She prayed at his temples and tried to find him in their kingdom and made offerings and defended his name and then--and then she found him. And he never spoke of his sister, never questioned their father when Ganth said he never had a daughter, and it hurt, it hurt, but Jame knows what Ganth's house was like and she doubts it's gotten better. So she starts looking for a way to be at Tori's side without being known, without being seen for what she is (princess, monster, killer, living curse--sometimes Jame can't keep straight the things her father called her and the things others have called her since). The war breaks out. She joins up as a nameless soldier. She puts on the mask. She dies for her brother, her soul, her god, without a moment of regret, and then--

Well, then she's dead, isn't she? But Torisen isn't, Tori is still alive and disgraced and she can't leave him, won't leave him, but she's too weak to be of any use to him--and, Jame thinks with the calm logic of a child who was chased out of her own home for being bad luck, of course she has to be able to be of use.

So Jame pours herself into the mold of a Ghost King, endures the trials and fights for the position and defeats all comers. Her bad luck died with her, it seems--now, when she puts her mind to something, the dice always fall in her favor. The world comes to be afraid of the youngest and most ruthless Supreme, with her silver eyes and white knife and tiny death-winged jeweljaws. The Talisman fights like a natural disaster and kills like an assassin and when she starts burning temples, even the gods are at a loss for what to do except damage control.

Jame builds first a library and an armory, and then a manor, something to replace the palace that was never a home, before Jame was tossed out and Tori survived inside. And then somehow it becomes a city, sprawling out around her like pooling blood and full of ghosts who need to be kept in line, and then she builds a temple because her brother is still out there somewhere, a god with one last worshipper, and gods need temples, and then when she turns around she's the lady of Ghost City, dressed in silver and black like a bad dream, armed with a cursed knife that holds a fragment of her soul, renowned among the gods for her ruthlessness and among the ghosts for her fairness and--and all she ever meant to do was to have somewhere to bring her brother, when she found him someday.

And then she gets word that His Highness, the Crown Prince of Knorth, the laughingstock of all the worlds, has ascended again, and Jame spins herself a new disguise, a skin close to her own but not nearly so identifiable, and goes to find him.

Finally and MOST IMPORTANTLY, I think Jame should be allowed to bully Torisen by calling him "gege." I just think she deserves that.