The five werewolves, with Lola riding on top of Russel, made excellent time across the Oclan countryside. Less than ten minutes after leaving for the castle, they came to a cobblestone road and their speed picked up even more. Lola leaned as far forward as she could, squeezed her eyes shut, and tried not to die from mind numbing terror. Russel was going incredibly fast and the feeling of it was like something wrenching at her stomach in a very unpleasant way. The only thing she could do to make the feeling a little more bearable was to clench her stomach as tightly as possible. As a result she ended up squeezing her knees together maybe a bit too hard. She was pretty sure Russel didn’t like it that much. She felt him tense up a bit but he never indicated to her that it was too painful.

The wind blew past her, tugging at her hair and clothes. The sparse, wooded sections and rocky hills sped past in a blur. The dreary, gray skies of Oclan seemed to grow even darker the closer they got to the castle. Not that she could tell with her eyes squeezed shut.

There was no else on the roads and the only sign of civilization was the cobblestone road they raced down. It wasn’t until they got closer to the castle that they started to see some instances of life. There were dilapidated, rundown huts and fields of depressed, scraggly crops that looked maybe one or two steps away from being dead.

As the group started to pass these places, they slowed down a little. Enough to where Lola didn’t feel the need to keep her eyes shut the whole time. Cautiously, she opened them, mostly because she really wanted to see the kind of place where Russel had grown up. She expected…well she wasn’t really sure what she expected, but it definitely wasn’t what she saw. The pathetic farmland full of near-death crops. Buildings and houses on their way to total collapse. Haggard, dirty, and stick-thin humans struggling to do anything because they were so obviously malnourished.

It was heartbreaking to see.

When Russel and his brothers sped past, eyes widened in evident fear as each human practically threw themselves to the ground in supplication. They kept their heads bowed so low, their faces were practically in the mud and dirt.

Lola saw it, saw all of this misery, and was appalled. How could anyone do this to their subjects? How could a king think to prosper when this was how he treated his people? She already hated the man but seeing all that only reinforced her hatred even more.

Not long after they flew past the beleaguered, malnourished humans, they got to Oclan, the kingdom’s central city. That, at least, was an impressive collection of stone buildings with wooden roofs covered in slate shingles. A tall, stone wall encircled the entire city and a single gate was the only point of entry. As they drew up to it, the portcullis rose with a shriek of rusty chains. Once they were through, the guards manning the thing reversed its course and it screeched loudly as it came back down. It was, Lola realized absently, even louder going back down than it had been going up.

Torches guttered from sconces attached to the buildings. People milled about. In the lower sections of the impressive city, most of the people she saw looked like they were human. She wasn’t sure how she knew that but her instincts told her this was true. However, as their progression continued onward, the buildings got more elaborate. More intricate. Those she saw here were werewolves. She had no doubt in her mind about that.