I was writing the chest scene—Gregor making Niels feel the clay bowl in the dark—when I stopped mid-sentence.
The Boneholders are hypocrites.
Not in the obvious way. Not the hypocrisy of power, though that's there too. Something I'd built into the settlement without realizing what I was building.
Later, we'll meet the Greens. I haven't written them yet, but I know who they are. Magic users. The Boneholders call them Bloodless—parasites who wave their hands and get what they want without working for it. No hunting, no killing, no earning.
That's the contempt. That's what makes a Green lesser than a Boneholder.
And I was writing this scene where Gregor talks about bone warmth bleeding through walls, and I thought: he doesn't know how that works either.
Nobody does.
Dragon bone radiates heat. Dragon blood hardens into gemstones. Dragon meat doesn't rot. The whole settlement runs on properties no one can explain. They just happen. Magic they benefit from every day without understanding.
So what's the difference between a Boneholder and a Green?
The Boneholder killed something first.
I sat with that for a while.
The extraction is the justification. The labor of hunting, the risk of dying, the blood on their hands—that's what makes it earned. Not understanding. Not creation. Just violence.
They didn't make the warmth. They took it from something that had it.
That's not actually different from what they accuse the Greens of doing. It's just bloodier.
Which means the Edge-dwellers are the only ones living by the principles Boneholders claim to hold.
Clay they fire themselves. Wood they fell. Things they make, things they understand.
I went back and reread Chapter 16 after realizing this. Gregor holding that bowl, showing Niels how heavy it is, how fragile. He thinks he's demonstrating Edge-dweller weakness. Look what they're stuck with. Look what their pride costs them.
But he's holding the work of the only people in the settlement who actually live what they preach.
Called proud. Foolish for refusing warmth they could have just... taken.
Here's where I got stuck.
The Edge-dwellers freezing right now—they didn't refuse bone warmth. Their grandparents did. Three generations ago, someone made a principled stand, and now their great-grandchildren are cold because of it.
Gregor's whole philosophy is blood remembers. Your ancestors chose, so you're bound. Their contempt is your contempt.
But the people shivering in leather-walled homes didn't choose anything. They were born into it. Born into poverty, born into cold, born into paying for a decision someone else made before they existed.
I kept trying to write something about how blood doesn't actually remember. But it sounded like a thesis statement, so I cut it.
The harder question: does accepting Fionn's warmth make the Edge-dwellers hypocrites too?
Their ancestors rejected bone warmth because it came from killing, because they couldn't explain it, because they couldn't make it themselves.
Fionn's warmth comes from him. No killing. But they still can't explain it. Still can't replicate it.
I went back and forth on this. In one draft I had an Edge-dweller woman justify it—explain why this was different. It felt wrong. Too neat. The author stepping in to explain the theme.
What I landed on: they've been quietly keeping Fionn alive for fifteen years. The bread left where he'd find it. The rope raised when he grew taller. That's not nothing. And now he's giving back.
I don't know if that distinction holds up philosophically. But they're cold, their children are freezing, and someone they've watched grow up is offering help. Maybe that's enough. Maybe principles bend easier when your kids can't sleep for shivering.
Gregor's curfew makes more sense to me now.
He's not just punishing disobedience. He's punishing people for accepting something that undermines his whole worldview. If warmth can be given instead of taken—if you can have comfort without killing for it—what was all that violence for?
His family kept thirty-seven bolts on the wall. Kept what they earned. And now some curse-touched boy is giving away what they spent generations killing for.
No wonder he can't let it stand.
None of this will be in the text directly. The characters aren't going to stop and debate the ethics of extraction.
But I think it'll come through anyway. In Gregor's grip on that clay bowl. In the way the Edge-dwellers look at each other when someone mentions what their grandparents chose.
They didn't choose. They just inherited.
Same as Niels, sitting in a room full of his father's certainty, learning lessons from a man who can't look at flame.
Same as Fionn, sentenced at three days old for something he didn't do.
The whole settlement is people trapped in choices they didn't make.
Until someone breaks the pattern.