Mouth full of dirt

Donut grabbed the horse’s mane and jumped on. The horse moved so fast, the ghost thought her face might get turned inside out. Instead, bolt after bolt of lightning flew past, blasting trees, shrubs, and clouds of dirt out of existence.

“The Naga’s castle,” Donut somehow managed to say over the sounds of horses hooves pummeling the forest floor at absurd speeds.

“Yes,” the horse responded.

They seemed to only occasionally touch the ground and yet, somehow, they now had both Stylus and a handful of frogmen riding giant dragonflies chasing them. From cruel looking satchels, the frogmen pulled out jagged pine cones. With grinning mouths, they threw these pine cones at the fleeing ghost atop the horse. Wherever a cone landed, there was a blast of black smoke and red fire. One pinecone came whizzing through a dark cloud made from the explosion of a lightening bolt and out of instinct, Donut caught it.

She stared at the sharp, unnatural thing that was shaped like something so natural.

“Throw it,” the horse said while veering to the right. “Throw it back at them.”

And so she did. Donut threw it back at the fireflies carrying frogmen and the cone landed right in one of those cruel satchels, creating an explosion worthy of an apocalypse, turning all the fireflies and frogmen into dust. Stylus, sadly, had fallen far behind in the chase and merely received a mouthful of dirt.