A free standalone chapter of fiction about injustice and faith from The Price of Silence
🔒 Free Chapter Usage & Copyright Notice
Copyright © 2026 Zyphar Animas. All rights reserved.
No part of this Fiction About Injustice and Faith may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations used in reviews or scholarly discussion.
⚖️ AI Use Restriction
This Fiction About Injustice and Faith is not licensed, sold, or authorized for use in any machine learning, artificial intelligence training, dataset compilation, or automated content generation. Any attempt to scrape, reproduce, or process this work for AI training or synthetic reuse is strictly prohibited.
This story is a work of fiction. The views and actions expressed by characters are part of the fictional narrative and do not represent the views of the author. Any references to real-world events, organizations, or ideologies are used strictly within a fictional context.
Reader discretion is advised.
Story Chapter Name: Sins of the Forgiven
Book name : The Price of Silence
Series name: Sigil of Silence
Sequence : Book 3 of the series
Author: Zyphar Animas
Editor: Nimo Verin
Publisher: Print & Digital
Published: 2026
ISBN Ebook: 978-984-35-9353-5
ISBN paper back: 978-984-35-9368-9
Read the previous chapter here>The Laham Mandi — Fiction About Refugee Life in Istanbul
When truth is buried, faith becomes the only witness. A free standalone chapter of fiction about injustice and faith from The Price of Silence
Sins of the Forgiven
The Republic of Cyprus
They had argued over strategy the way men do when danger is still far off—tension simmering beneath every word. Now, they were teasing each other like brothers.
The original plan had been to crawl across the northern guard lines like thieves in the dark: sweaty palms, fake IDs, whispered prayers. But that plan was dead.
With Enoos at the wheel, the three of them cruised into Southern territory in their own car, cool air pouring in—twenty minutes of calm before whatever storm waited beyond the coastline.
At the checkpoint, the northern guards barely looked up. They scanned Enoos Emaar’s Turkish ID, glanced at the time, and asked why anyone would head south this late.
Enoos just shrugged with a bashful smile, said he was taking his friends to Lamma Castle for a little midnight fun.
The guard smirked and waved them through. No one on the island questioned late-night border hops if it meant heading into the southern zones. Down here, tourism was king, and kings needed to be entertained.
Clubs.
Women.
Betting.
Vice was the welcome mat.
Their destination wasn’t far. Just beyond the mountain’s curve, a steel jungle of massive cylindrical tanks loomed into view—Vassiliko Oil Reserve Zone.
They passed rows of oil drums, each the size of a two-story house, crouched along the mountain’s base like sleeping beasts. Then came the real target: Vassiliko Port.
Calling it a port was generous. It was an LNG terminal—a deepwater station feeding pipelines that stretched out into the sea like arteries. From land, a narrow catwalk jutted two kilometers straight into the black surf.
At the far end, a floating platform split into an L-shape. That’s where the tankers offloaded—mother vessels docking to bleed fuel into the country’s heart.
Tonight, three ships blinked their signal lights out at sea. One of them was their target.
Enoos had followed this madness halfway across the island. But standing here now, staring at the sea-slick steel and the wind-bent causeway, he knew there was no way he could make it out there. Not physically. Not at his age.
The others picked up on it and started ribbing him again.
Ahmed grinned, nudging him with a laugh,
—Sheikh Emaar, this spy game was never your style. Allah saved your dignity tonight.
Even Omar Hassan cracked a smile at that, which for him was rare.
They adjusted the plan.
Enoos would stay back, closer to shore. If something went sideways, he’d act as their spotter. They handed him the night-vision binoculars and a handgun.
He hesitated, thinking the weapon should go with them, but they waved it off and said they had their own ways of protecting themselves. If it really came down to a chase, they explained, the best thing Enoos could do was fire a few warning shots into the air.
It wouldn’t stop armed pursuers, but it might slow them—make them pause just long enough to rethink. Confusion buys seconds. And seconds matter when death can run faster than thought.
So the handgun stayed with Enoos. Cold steel, warm breath, and the sea whispering its secrets just beyond the light.
Through the night-vision binoculars, Enoos Emaar had been tracking Omar and Ahmed. For a while, it worked. They moved along the narrow steel artery that snaked over the sea—just shadows among the tangled pipes and machinery. But eventually, fatigue set in.
His eyes burned. He shifted focus, panning slowly toward the ships.
The first two vessels looked exactly as expected in a place like this—bulk tankers, bloated with oil. But the third one was different. Starliner Z.
No crew on deck. No loading cranes. Nothing moved.
He frowned. What exactly were Ahmed and Omar planning to find on that thing? How would they even reach it?
He dragged his sightline back to the catwalk—where the hell did they go? The pipeline bridge, cluttered with equipment and cables, was now a field of ghosts. No figures. No trace of them.
Sweat bloomed at his temples. Panic pushed behind his ribs. Enoos swept every angle, every crevice. Nothing.
After nearly thirty minutes of scanning, he gave up looking for them. He turned the binoculars back toward Starliner Z.
And then—movement. Far end of the deck, near the captain’s cabin—something shifted. Just a flicker at first.
A figure, trying not to be seen.
That could only mean one thing.
Enoos locked in.
A moment later, Omar Hassan stepped out—hands full with a wide metal case, posture tilted like a man backing away from a sleeping animal.
His eyes never left the cabin door. Something in there had changed his pulse.
He was walking backward.
Fear-first.
Then the monsters appeared.
Two figures emerged behind him.
Towering.
Inhuman.
Maybe six and a half feet tall. Maybe more.
Each built like a cage full of war.
Ahmed was already in their crosshairs.
Not even struggling.
Just… cornered.
Rifles snapped to Ahmed first.
Then fired.
The first shot hit Ahmed in the hip. He dropped like a marionette whose string had been clipped. Omar—still clutching the case—caught the second round in the knee. The box clanged against the steel deck. The scream vanished, never made it past the wind.
Then came the bats.
Baseball bats. Steel pipes.
Something blunt and merciless.
The two giants didn’t shout. Didn’t posture. They broke bone with the same calm as men counting cash. Then they’d pause—say something Enoos couldn’t hear—and start again.
Frozen in the dark, Enoos gripped the handgun tighter.
He had never fired one before. Had never even held one until today. But he could still recognize a suppressor.
Those rifles in the crew’s hands weren’t standard issue.
No sound. No smoke.
Bile clawed its way up Enoos Emaar’s throat. Helplessness is a sickness that starts in the gut. He could feel it spreading—choking his nerves, tightening every muscle in his body.
The gun in his hand was worthless. No suppressor. No line of sight. Even if he fired, there was no way in hell a bullet from this range would hit anything.
Call the police?
He nearly laughed.
That might’ve worked if they were still in the north. But here—in the southern territory—an unregistered refugee and a Turkish citizen from the north, snooping around a sensitive terminal after midnight? Whatever came next, it wouldn’t be justice.
Down on the deck, the monsters had changed tempo. Ahmed and Omar were barely breathing. Their bodies had gone limp, folded into the deck like trash someone forgot to sweep.
Enoos was hoping, praying, maybe the crew would just detain them—call the cops, turn them in, anything but—then he saw the forklift.
The kind used for moving crates.
Or deadweight.
Two men brought it out. Stacked high with steel chains and overhead rigging hooks—the kind dock crews use to lift engine blocks and bulk metal off cargo ships.
Enoos froze.
No.
Please, no.
They were doing it.
The men moved with surgeon’s precision—wrapping chains around Ahmed and Omar, tightening the rigging across their torsos, looping the steel hooks like collars of execution.
One man adjusted the counterbalance—he was laughing.
They were going to drown them.
Alive.
The prayer in Enoos’s chest cracked apart.
It never made it past his lips.
He didn’t even think—just aimed and fired.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
His handgun kicked like a mule.
Loud, uncontrolled.
The night split open with the echo of gunfire, bouncing off sea and steel like thunder.
Through the binoculars, chaos erupted. Half a dozen men scrambled across the deck.
Some ducked behind railings. Others barked orders into radios. A few aimed their rifles toward the shore. More boots hit the deck. More rifles appeared.
But Enoos wasn’t watching them. He was watching the hooks.
Still attached.
Maybe—just maybe—they’d forget Ahmed and Omar in the scramble. Maybe that moment of confusion would be enough for them to slip loose.
Crawl. Run.
He kept the binoculars up, whispering the same line over and over—Ya Allah… save them…
Enoos kept watching—his prayers diverted back to reality.
Omar went first.
Rolled across the deck like a bag of gravel, his arms bound in rusted iron, his ribs crushed under the weight of that steel coffin he never got to fill. They didn’t even pause.
Just hoisted him by chain and dropped him into the sea.
The splash was dull.
Then came Ahmed.
He didn’t go quietly.
One arm flailed mid-air, clawing for anything—God, air, mercy. The other reached forward in a blind cry for help. And in that final instant before he vanished, Enoos caught his eyes.
Fear of death. Urge to live.
The kind that stained his bones.
He would carry that look forever.
Ahmed had reasons to live.
The man was no soldier.
His war was unborn—four months inside the wife he left behind. Last week, Enoos had scolded him into seeing a doctor.
The man was all nerves and shaking hope, scared not for himself, but for the future pressed against a woman’s belly in a refugee shelter. That thought didn’t even finish forming before the chain pulled.
The body fell.
The water took him.
And Enoos broke.
His knees gave in first.
Then his arms.
Then his will.
The gun was in his hand.
Four bullets left.
Not enough to kill those monsters. But maybe enough to kill a man whose world just died. He raised it—barrel trembling, teeth grinding—but the memory came first.
A verse.
One line.
“Never despair of My mercy.”
It didn’t help.
What good was heaven now?
He shoved the gun back into his waistband and turned away. The guards had already spotted his position. No time to mourn. No time to breathe.
He forced himself down the hill.
Legs shaking.
Heart loud enough to feel in his teeth.
The binoculars bounced against his chest.
His boots thudded on gravel.
Somewhere behind him, voices shouted.
The last thing he looked at was the box.
A thick, wooden crate. Built like it was made to survive a war. He’d seen boxes like that in movies—military couriers, smuggled death sealed in foam and steel.
This one had a mark: a red flower, strange and sharp like a bleeding orchid.
Underneath it, two words.
VEGA CROP.
He didn’t understand what that meant. Didn’t care to know more.
He just ran.
Back to the car. Back through black roads curling under the sky.
The gun jammed hard against his spine, his hands slippery on the wheel.
He didn’t remember driving—only the checkpoint lights cutting through his windshield like sirens on judgment day.
Same guard as before.
Same smile, now gone.
The officer opened his mouth.
—Where are your…
Then he saw it.
The gun, grip sticking out like a black tooth from Enoos’s waistband.
Enoos froze.
He couldn’t shoot this man.
Not even by mistake.
He raised both hands.
Slowly.
Behind the first guard, two more emerged.
Three rifles now.
They told him to turn around.
He did.
Walked behind the outpost.
Faced the wall.
He was waiting for cuffs. What came was a hard crack to the skull—enough to blacken the stars and split his thoughts into blood.
Enoos Emaar hit the ground before his soul could scream.
Turkish-Controlled Northern Cyprus
The first thing Enoos Emaar felt was fatigue. He tried to lift his head, but it spun like a broken compass.
There was light—sunlight. Leaking through a half-cracked curtain. One he meant to replace yesterday, but never got around to. But this room, this view—it wasn’t where he was supposed to be. And that alone made his pulse shift.
He sat up on the edge of a stranger’s bed, in what should have been his own second floor.
Outside, someone was leaning on the bell like it owed them money.
Cold water, sink, reflex.
Splash.
Clarity.
But not enough.
The bell buzzing from the stairwell—the one with the steel security door he’d added to keep strangers from climbing uninvited. Whoever was out there… hadn’t gotten through yet.
Then he looked down over the rail. And his soul flinched.
Full Turkish SWAT—geared, positioned, locked.
Seeing them, the flashback of last night hit him like a stab wound.
He had planned to go to them.
To surrender. To testify.
Let the Turkish system do what it does: arrest, fine, maybe punish him for intrusion—but ultimately uncover what happened to Omar and Ahmed.
But now they were here.
Armed and aggressive.
Not like a country calling in a witness.
Like a state hunting down a threat.
The ringing stopped.
Replaced by a new sound—mechanical, violent.
Took him a few seconds to register it.
A grinder.
Cutting steel.
His head began to clear.
He turned back toward the door.
That’s when he saw it.
The table.
Omar’s pistol. Still there.
But now—beside it—several sealed plastic packets, powder-white.
Multiple.
Lined in rows.
—What the hell is this?
His hands didn’t move.
His thoughts did.
Either way, he hesitated just long enough for fate to decide.
Metal crashed.
The grill downstairs must’ve been cut clean—The SWAT team didn’t wait. They broke in like war. Steel rods slammed the main door, and then they were in—black masks, rifles, boots, precision.
They slammed him down to the ground, wrenched his arms behind, cuffed him, and pulled a black hood over his head.
He tried to lift his face—a mistake.
Something hit the back of his skull so hard, the world slipped into black for the second time.
Later, of course, there was noise.
Talk shows.
Telegram threads.
Editorials that sounded braver than they were.
The incident, as they called it, became a national pastime.
And under that pressure, the law—usually content to crawl—decided to sprint.
The verdict on Enoos Emaar came fast.
Too fast for truth. Just fast enough for headlines.
A former criminal lawyer himself, Emaar knew the weight behind the word merit. Which is to say, he recognized when the facts had been edited into a verdict. And he was not surprised.
According to the state:
He ran a drug ring. Harbored illegal Palestinian refugees. Worked with Hezbollah to fund terror operations through narcotics.
That’s why—said the brief—he bought a secluded bungalow in Turkish Cyprus years before. A strategic asset. A staging ground.
That night, as the state tells it, he and his associates were en route to a luxury hotel in the south. Pure leisure.
Except he voluntarily informed the northern checkpoint of his plan—on camera.
So that checks out.
What didn’t check out, they said, was that before reaching the hotel, he took a detour to the quiet industrial coast near Vasiliko Port. Security footage captured him there—gun holstered, binoculars raised.
Then, four gunshots.
Loud and crisp.
He panicked, tucked the weapon away, tried to flee.
At the return checkpoint, the guard asked a question. Enoos, they said, answered with the hood of his car—flattening the post and driving straight through.
His car—found later in his own garage—had the dents to prove it.
What it didn’t have were the passengers. Every witness confirmed: he returned alone. And what of those two men? According to dockworkers, two bodies were seen falling—or thrown—from the pipeline platform.
After the shots. No one saw who pulled the trigger. No bodies were ever found. But the state didn’t seem to need bodies. They framed it as a fallout. A violent split in the profits of a secret trade.
Apparently, Enoos killed them both. No corpses. No counter-claims, either.
The state wrapped it up neat—gunpowder and ocean salt. Had the bodies washed ashore, the charge would’ve been aggravated life. Instead, he got the downgrade—ordinary life imprisonment, buried inside a high-security facility.
Still, in Türkiye, where moral panic writes law faster than ink can dry, being a Muslim citizen caught with drugs in your house might be worse than murder.
And then there was his old sin. Back in Sharjah—before he ever bought a Turkish passport—Enoos Emaar had already served time for “anti-state conduct.”
No one cared what that meant anymore. The label was enough.
The honorable judge made it clear:
This was not the West.
This was not a society willing to drown its values in the name of modernity. And so—by example—he sentenced Enoos Emaar to rot.
A sentence not just for his crimes, but for reminding the nation that here the monsters could not wear fangs—the justice was still on command.
Technically, Enoos had the right to appeal.
But he didn’t bother. Not because he accepted the verdict—but because he’d already seen what came with it.
Courtrooms packed with people who wouldn’t hear a word. The Muslim community that once praised his charity work now calling him a disease.
The hate didn’t shake him.
The disappointment did.
The case stayed on Turkish media for almost three weeks.
Talk shows.
Newspapers.
Even Friday sermons.
A “Muslim” running drugs, they said.
Helping Hezbollah launder money.
Buying citizenship just to disgrace the country. They didn’t just condemn him—they demanded an end to the passport‑for‑investment system that brought people like him.
Letting foreigners buy their way into Türkiye was a “national vulnerability,” one columnist wrote.
Another suggested rescinding the citizenship of anyone who didn’t “share the national values.”
When Emaar entered prison without contest, the story eventually dried up.
The rage moved on.
So did he.
He says nothing now. Prays five times a day.
Recites Qur’an in a cell with no lights.
It doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t need light.
He memorized every verse as a boy; his father made him Hafiz long before law school.
He doesn’t even ask the Lord why this happened.
The answer was always in His lines—you will be tested.
With fear.
With loss.
With pain.
If you hold on, you win.
In the places that matter.
So no, Enoos doesn’t fight his sentence.
He accepts it—with grace.
Whatever the Lord has written for him is right.
It always was.
But sometimes…
only sometimes…
he dreams of Ahmed.
The refugee who called him brother.
Who wanted to live—for his wife, and the unborn child they hadn’t even named. Who raised a trembling hand for help as they chained him.
That hand—shaking, bloody, terrified.
Enoos still sees it.
It drags him awake in the middle of the night.
And when it does, it’s not acceptance or grace that floods his chest.
It’s something raw, boiling inside him, like the Lord turned his blood to fire.
—*—
You have just read a fiction about injustice and faith from The Price of Silence, the third installment of the Sigil of Silence series by Zyphar Animas. If this chapter stayed with you, challenged you, or left you wanting to follow Enoos Emaar’s journey beyond these pages, you can continue the story by getting the complete novel from your preferred platform below.
Available at your preferred book stores
Story Summary
Sins of the Forgiven is a powerful work of fiction about injustice and faith, following Enoos Emaar as a single night transforms his life forever. What begins as a covert journey across Cyprus to uncover the truth behind a suspicious operation soon becomes a devastating confrontation with corruption, false accusations, and the unbearable cost of witnessing evil without the power to stop it.
As fiction about injustice and faith, the story explores the fragile space where legal systems collapse but personal conviction refuses to surrender. When Ahmed and Omar Hassan become victims of a brutal crime, Enoos is left powerless to save them. His desperate attempt to intervene only draws him into a carefully constructed web of fabricated evidence, political convenience, and public condemnation. Overnight, an honorable former barrister is recast as a criminal, his reputation erased by a narrative written long before he is allowed to speak.
What distinguishes this fiction about injustice and faith is its refusal to treat faith as an escape from suffering. Instead, belief becomes the only certainty remaining when institutions fail, witnesses disappear, and truth is buried beneath official versions of history. Even after losing his freedom, his profession, and the trust of the society he once served, Enoos continues to hold onto the principles that shaped his life, accepting neither hatred nor despair as his final answer.
Set against the political tensions of Cyprus and the wider geopolitical landscape surrounding The Price of Silence, this fiction about injustice and faith examines how power can manipulate truth while ordinary people bear its consequences. Beneath the thriller elements lies a deeply human story about moral endurance, spiritual resilience, and the invisible burden carried by those who survive when justice does not.
At its heart, Sins of the Forgiven is fiction about injustice and faith that asks whether a person can remain faithful to truth after the world has abandoned both. It is a chapter about loss, wrongful judgment, and the quiet strength required to continue believing when every earthly system has already delivered its verdict.
Beta Reader Reactions
“I expected a geopolitical thriller, but what I found was something much deeper. This fiction about injustice and faith stayed with me because it never asks readers to choose between realism and hope. Enoos Emaar’s journey is heartbreaking precisely because his faith survives what justice cannot.”
— Dr. Ibrahim Al-Mansoori, Abu Dhabi, UAE
“This fiction about injustice and faith refuses easy answers. Instead of glorifying revenge, it quietly explores how an innocent man carries unbearable loss without surrendering his humanity. One of the most emotionally honest chapters I’ve read this year.”
— Sarah Whitmore, Birmingham, United Kingdom
“The legal injustice, political manipulation, and spiritual resilience all feel remarkably authentic. As fiction about injustice and faith, this chapter succeeds because every tragedy serves the characters rather than the plot, leaving the reader thinking long after the final page.”
— Kemal Arslan, Ankara, Türkiye
Critical Review
Sins of the Forgiven stands as one of the defining moral chapters of The Price of Silence. As fiction about injustice and faith, it deliberately refuses the conventions of both courtroom drama and political thriller. Rather than asking whether justice will prevail, the narrative begins where justice has already failed, shifting its attention from legal procedure to the interior life of a man forced to survive the collapse of every institution he once trusted.
The chapter’s greatest strength lies in its understanding of helplessness. Enoos Emaar is neither an action hero nor a revolutionary. He witnesses violence he cannot prevent, watches innocent lives disappear before his eyes, and becomes the convenient author of crimes he desperately tried to stop. The narrative never grants him the satisfaction of immediate resistance. Instead, it examines the quieter and often more demanding question of whether personal integrity can survive public condemnation.
As fiction about injustice and faith, the chapter also avoids reducing faith to sentiment or miracle. Belief is presented neither as an escape from suffering nor as a promise of immediate vindication. It becomes discipline—a conscious decision to remain morally intact when courts, governments, media, and even public opinion have abandoned the search for truth. That restraint gives the spiritual dimension unusual credibility, allowing faith to function as an ethical foundation rather than a narrative reward.
Structurally, the chapter marks a decisive transformation within The Price of Silence. Earlier events establish Enoos as a trusted custodian of other people’s burdens. Here, the story strips away his freedom, reputation, and social standing, leaving only the principles he refuses to surrender. The imprisonment itself is not the chapter’s true climax. Its real turning point arrives when memory refuses to disappear. Ahmed’s final moments become an enduring moral presence, ensuring that injustice continues to live inside the conscience of the only surviving witness.
The geopolitical setting deserves equal recognition. Cyprus is never employed merely as an exotic location or political backdrop. Instead, it becomes a believable intersection of competing jurisdictions, contested identities, and institutional ambiguity. The result is a setting that strengthens the narrative’s exploration of responsibility rather than distracting from it.
Within the larger architecture of The Price of Silence, this chapter serves a foundational purpose. It explains not only who Enoos Emaar becomes, but why his later decisions carry such moral authority. Readers expecting conventional triumph may find its ending uncompromising. Readers willing to engage with its deeper questions will discover fiction about injustice and faith that explores the cost of remaining truthful when truth itself has become politically inconvenient.
Rather than presenting imprisonment as the end of a man’s story, Sins of the Forgiven quietly reveals it as the beginning of his moral transformation. In doing so, it becomes one of the novel’s most enduring meditations on conscience, endurance, and the difficult relationship between earthly justice and enduring faith.
—Nimo Verin, Editor