They buried Captain Sarah Kline three days later, beneath the pines behind the monastery, wrapped in a white Cistercian habit she had never lived long enough to profess.
The ground was frozen solid.
The monks used pickaxes blessed with Lourdes water and still it took four hours.
Sofia stood barefoot in the snow the entire time, olive-wood rosary clenched so tight her knuckles went bloodless.
Sarah had died the night before, at 2:17 a.m., in the infirmary cot closest to the chapel door.
She had volunteered to take the midnight watch on the ridge, the one place the drone jammers didn't quite reach.
She had seen the GEA strike team coming—six black helicopters, no lights, moving like hornets.
Instead of sounding the alarm and waking the children, she had walked out to meet them alone, rifle raised, brown scapular flapping in the rotor wash.
Security-camera footage (later recovered from a smoking helmet cam) showed the last thirty seconds of her life.
A lieutenant stepped forward with a scanner.
"Captain Kline. Mark status?"
Sarah smiled—tired, fearless, radiant.
"Negative, sir. I belong to another kingdom."
The lieutenant raised his sidearm.
Sarah dropped to her knees in the snow, made a perfect Sign of the Cross, and began the Fatima prayer out loud:
"O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell…"
The lieutenant fired once, center mass.
Sarah finished the prayer anyway.
"…lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy."
Then she fell forward, face in the snow, blood spreading like a red scapular across the white habit.
The strike team advanced on the monastery—only to hit the invisible wall the monks had been praying around the perimeter since 1917.
Every soldier who crossed the line dropped unconscious, Marks boiling off their hands like acid.
By the time the community reached the ridge, the helicopters were gone and Sarah Kline was already cold.
Now, at the graveside, Dom Pius spoke the final commendation.
"Go forth, Christian soul…
In the name of the Father who created you,
of the Son who redeemed you with His Precious Blood,
of the Holy Spirit who sanctified you at Baptism and sealed you this week…"
He made the Sign of the Cross over the shallow grave.
Sofia stepped forward last.
She laid Sarah's brown scapular—the one that had never burned—on top of the simple wooden cross.
Then she spoke, voice raw but steady.
"She was the first.
She won't be the last.
But every drop of her blood just bought ten thousand souls time to choose."
She looked at the community—seventy-two now, swollen with refugees who had trickled in since the sun danced.
"From today forward, we don't hide.
We pray in public.
We walk the roads.
We offer the Rosary to anyone who still has ears to hear."
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
Father Elijah stepped beside her, eyes still red from weeping.
"Sofia… the GEA will come in force now. They know where we are."
She met his gaze.
"Good. Let them come.
Sarah showed us how to greet them."
Diego, standing behind her with the shotgun he had barely put down in three days, spoke for the first time since the burial began.
"Then we need a name," he said. "Something they'll fear."
Little eight-year-old Lucia—one of the sealed children—tugged Sofia's sleeve.
She held up a crayon drawing: stick-figure people with glowing foreheads, holding hands in a giant circle around a blue lady crushing a snake.
At the bottom, in purple crayon:
THE ROSARY ARMY
Sofia knelt, took the drawing, and pinned it to the wooden cross with Sarah's scapular cord.
"That's our name," she said.
Dom Pius smiled through tears.
"Then the first battalion has its first martyr.
And its battle standard."
That night, for the first time, they did not pray inside the chapel.
Seventy-two souls walked single file down the snow-covered gravel road, rosaries glowing like torches, voices rising into the frozen sky.
They prayed all fifteen decades on the public highway, visible for miles.
By the time they reached the final Salve Regina, headlights appeared on the horizon—GEA convoys, dozens of them, racing toward the monastery they now knew they could not ignore.
Sofia raised the olive-wood rosary high.
"Let them come," she said again.
And somewhere in the pines, Sarah Kline's fresh grave began to smell of roses in the middle of winter.
To be continued…