Thalia and the Seven Royal Knights

"Your highness, this is preposterous! They want to give us their royal rejects as a form of offer and expect us to accept them with open arms?!" Hildrad Severi, the right hand man and not to mention the emperor's best-friend protests.

"This is undeniably a form of insult!" The other board members pleaded.

"Hmmm, we'll accept their tributes but we shall accept them as down-payments. We shall take the full payment with interest now. Marcus! Lucas! lets move out." The Emperor orders as he stands and walk to the door.

"Your highness, what are we going to do with all their 'royal down payments', we can't just let them be?" Hilrad stopped the king in his track.

"They're all young boys right? Assign them to a knights order or a parliament, train them, make then work for their place here. Easy." The emperor sluggishly answered as if irritated that he was stopped.

There was silence in the meeting room, none of the generals or the heads were willing to take these "royal tributes" into their wings.

"None of you want them? Can I take them instead?" A little girl in knight's armor announced as she comes into the meeting room.

"You always know you can get whatever you want *sigh* of course you can have them." The king sighs in defeat and pats Thalia in the head before walking towards the door.

Thalia giggles in victory while victoriously walking towards where all the royal tributes where held. As she held the door open she looks upon 7 boys roughly around her age with a dead look in their eyes as if waiting for their death.

Thalia offered them a plan and one by one their eyes starts to light up at the spark of hope offered to them by this little lady in a knights armor.

They all stood up and followed the girl in armor around the castle and unknowingly the little girl in armor became an important figure in the eyes of these hopeless little boys from that day on and for the many years to come.