The Mark That Bears Witness  

The Mark That Bears Witness    -   in Persian   نشانِ گواه 

By: John Kazerooni

Once, in a vast jungle, many kinds of animals lived together in balance. Ants, deer, birds, lions, and gorillas shared the forest without any one creature claiming divine privilege. Life was guided by coexistence, not submission.

Then, a wolf rose to power.

He declared himself chosen by heaven. His authority, he said, was destiny—not consent. The jungle no longer belonged to those who lived in it, but to a sacred will only he could interpret. Obedience was not enough; worship was demanded. His laws were announced, never questioned. Repetition replaced truth, until lies sounded holy.

At first, the animals stayed silent. Silence felt like a shield. But silence rots. Years passed, and grief seeped into the soil. Songs disappeared. Play vanished. Hunger spread quietly. Dignity thinned. Even the trees seemed to lean inward, as if bracing for impact.

When the silence finally broke, it broke without weapons.

From ants to lions, from birds to gorillas, the animals gathered with empty hands and steady voices. They asked for nothing radical—only fairness, breath without fear, and the right to exist without kneeling.

The wolf answered with slaughter. His forces descended with precision and cruelty. In a single day, more than twenty thousand unarmed, innocent lives were erased. Parents fell shielding their children. Children died calling for parents who would never answer. Families vanished mid-heartbeat. Friends were cut down where laughter had just lived.

The jungle ran red—then was ordered to forget.

Leaves were thrown over bodies. Soil was packed over truth. Silence was enforced as law. Mourning itself became a crime.

The wolf spoke afterward without rage. He called the massacre divine. He said heaven had been offended by peaceful voices. He warned that next time, none would be spared, adding coldly that the animals were fortunate so few had died. He repeated this lie until cruelty sounded reasonable.

But the truth does not need to be shouted. The animals chose remembrance.

They marked their foreheads.  The mark was not a symbol—it was evidence. It carried the blood of sons and daughters, of mothers and fathers, of relatives, cousins, and friends. Entire bloodlines erased in hours lived on in that single sign. It was the mark of injustice made visible. The mark of pain that could not be silenced. The mark of torture, humiliation, tearing of flesh and spirit, of dignity stripped and lives reduced to hunger and ruin.

Every mark was a refusal. Wherever they walked, grief confronted the world. Faces became testimonies. Rivers reflected loss. Trees stood like witnesses who could no longer look away. The jungle learned a new language—one written in wounds.

Parents whispered names into the night so they would not vanish. The young carried memories heavier than their years. History, denied burial, began to breathe.

And a question burned through the forest, sharp and unforgiving: What kind of divine watches such bloodshed and calls it obedience?

What heaven demands the slaughter of the innocent?

The wolf began to shrink—not hunted, not overthrown, but stripped of belief.

The animals unearthed what had been buried. They spoke the names power tried to erase. They exposed the wolf’s past—atrocities once dismissed as rumor, now laid bare across paths, rivers, and gathering grounds. With every truth spoken, fear weakened. Memory sharpened.

His orders echoed into emptiness. His followers drifted away, unable to carry the weight of what they had served. Authority hollowed out. The wolf remained—but without shadow, without spell.

Time reclaimed what power could not. Vines choked the ruins of command. Paths reopened. Songs returned—not joyful, but unbroken. The jungle did not trade one ruler for another; it restored balance by refusing lies.

This was the victory. No throne fell. No crown shattered.

Only truth endured—and it was lethal to tyranny.

The wolf failed because fear dies when memory survives. Lies collapse when truth is carried on living faces. The animals won because they refused silence, because they bore grief openly, and because they forced history to speak.

Now the jungle leaves us with no comfort—only responsibility.

This is not a tale of fantasy. It is happening now—while we sit in comfort, while laughter fills our rooms, while life feels safe and ordinary. Somewhere beyond our ease, grief is being carved into faces, and names are being whispered so they are not lost. 

The brutal truth is that this cruelty began with one—and was allowed to continue because silence chose comfort over human lives.

The jungle is real. The wolf is real. And the mark remains—waiting to be seen.

Lingering Questions

How many must be slaughtered before silence becomes complicity?

How much blood must stain the ground before we stop calling it order?

What mark will expose our obedience when cruelty wears sacred language?

How many graves will we walk past before we admit we recognized the wolf?

When truth demands a cost, will we carry it—or will we look away?

If memory is resistance, what does our forgetting say about us?

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