The DC-3 touched down at 06:12 a.m. on a disused military airstrip thirty kilometers south of Rome, wheels kissing cracked concrete that hadn't felt an aircraft since 1944.
No tower.
No lights.
Only silence and the smell of cypress and distant smoke.
Brother Anselm cut the engines.
For a long moment no one moved.
Then the cabin door opened by itself.
Sofia stepped out barefoot onto the tarmac.
The moment her feet touched Italian soil, every church bell in Rome—bells that had been electronically silenced for months—began to ring at once.
Not recorded.
Not automated.
Real bronze, real rope, real hands that did not exist.
The sound rolled across the Eternal City like a tidal wave of bronze and memory.
St. Peter's.
Santa Maria Maggiore.
St. John Lateran.
Every minor basilica, every parish, every convent chapel.
Even the cracked bell of St. Paul Outside the Walls that had not rung since the earthquake of 1915 cracked the air again, clear and defiant.
Rome woke to the sound of its own soul remembering who it belonged to.
Sofia closed her eyes and felt the vibrations in her bones.
She was here.
A single black Mercedes waited at the edge of the airstrip, hazard lights blinking like slow heartbeats.
The driver's door opened.
A man stepped out—tall, mid-forties, face carved from grief and discipline.
Wearing the black cassock of a Vatican diplomat, but the white collar was missing.
Monsignor Luca Moretti, former Papal Nuncio to the United States, one of the handful of clergy who had vanished from the Vatican the night of the disappearances and never returned.
His right hand was wrapped in gauze where the Mark had been removed by force.
He walked forward and fell to his knees in front of Sofia.
"They told us you would come," he whispered in Italian. "The angels. In dreams. Every night since the vanishings."
He looked up, tears cutting clean paths through three days of beard.
"Welcome home, daughter of the Church."
Behind him, the Mercedes doors opened and six Swiss Guards stepped out—not in the colorful uniforms of old, but in matte-black tactical gear, rifles slung, each forehead bearing a faint, scarred seal.
They knelt too.
Sofia placed her hand on Monsignor Moretti's head.
"I'm not here to be welcomed," she said softly. "I'm here to finish what began in a little village in Portugal."
Moretti stood, eyes shining.
"Then let us take you to him."
The drive into Rome took forty-three minutes.
They passed through checkpoints without slowing.
Every GEA soldier who saw the luminous cross on Sofia's forehead stepped back as though burned.
Some saluted.
Some crossed themselves.
Some simply wept.
The city itself was beautiful and broken.
St. Peter's Square had been cleared of the obelisk and the colonnades draped in blue and gold banners bearing Alessandro's personal sigil: a circle of twelve stars around a single all-seeing eye.
The bronze doors of the basilica stood open.
Inside, the pews had been removed.
The floor was now one vast mirror of black marble.
At the far end, beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment, a single throne of white marble waited.
Empty.
Alessandro was not there.
Instead, a path of white rose petals led from the entrance to the throne.
Sofia stepped out of the Mercedes at the edge of the square.
The Swiss Guards formed a silent honor guard behind her.
Monsignor Moretti whispered, "He is waiting in the Sistine Chapel. Alone. The seven days begin the moment you cross the threshold."
Sofia looked at the rose petals.
Then she did something no one expected.
She knelt, right there in the middle of the square, in front of the entire silent city, and began the Joyful Mysteries out loud.
Her voice carried on the morning wind.
Every sealed soul still hiding in Rome—hundreds, maybe thousands—heard it and began praying with her from attics, basements, catacombs.
By the time she reached the fifth Joyful Mystery, the rose petals on the path began to glow gold.
By the first Sorrowful Mystery, they turned red.
By the Glorious, the entire square was filled with the scent of lilies and incense that had no visible source.
When she finished the final Salve Regina, the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in weeks and struck the dome of St. Peter's like a spotlight.
Sofia stood.
She walked the path alone.
The Swiss Guards did not follow.
At the bronze doors she paused, turned, and blessed the city with a wide Sign of the Cross.
Then she stepped inside.
The doors closed behind her with the sound of a tomb sealing.
But every person in the square heard her voice, gentle and unafraid, echoing from within:
"Day One."
And somewhere deep beneath the basilica, in the Sistine Chapel where popes were once elected, Prince Alessandro felt the first bead of the first Rosary strike the marble floor like a gunshot.
He smiled with too many teeth and rose from his seat.
The seven days had begun.
To be continued…