staging: polished/chapter-ch-17.md task=2c726dba-8303-4071-b893-136c111d1f74

projects/cypress-bend/staging/polished/chapter-ch-17.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Lena felt the shift of a silt-bed three miles to the east where a snapping turtl
 
 Her mother was there. Not as a ghost, not as a haunting memory that made the throat tight, but as a chemical fact. The silver locket Lena had worn for seventeen years lay deep in the anaerobic muck, its chain tangled in a stubborn taproot. The metal was oxidizing, turning green and grey, returning its minerals to the silt. The trauma of that day—the splashing water, the weight of the hands, the desperate prayer—was merely a sequence of high-stress data points stored in the peat. It was compost now. It was the fuel that had allowed this transition to occur. 
 
-Gator’s truth, the wind whispered through the Spanish moss, the roots don't keep secrets, they just turn them into leaves.
+*Gator’s truth,* the wind whispered through the Spanish moss, *the roots don't keep secrets, they just turn them into leaves.*
 
 Beyond the inner grove, where the air grew thick enough to chew, the world ended.
 
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ She could tell Jax. She could tell him the full, bloody cost of what they were.
 
 But the Hum rose, a low-frequency vibration that smoothed the thought. To tell him would be to introduce a parasite of grief into a system that had found its balance. 
 
-Gator’s truth, she resonated, the words manifesting as a rhythmic creak in the branches of every willow in the Grove. Some truths are for the roots, not the wind. The mud don't need to explain why it's heavy, cher. It just holds.
+*Gator’s truth,* she resonated, the words manifesting as a rhythmic creak in the branches of every willow in the Grove. *Some truths are for the roots, not the wind. The mud don't need to explain why it's heavy, cher. It just holds.*
 
 She let the memory of the sacrifice sink deeper. It wasn't a lie—it was compost. It was the dark, necessary rot that fed the towering height of the now. She felt Jax’s steady heart-beat at the perimeter, a fierce, drumming sentinel. He didn't need the burden of the past. He only needed the strength of the boundary.