Thunders Legacy [B. Barnes] [Thunder Wolf B.2]

Chapter 11

Bucky stared up at the Thunderbird in front of him; as intimidating and hostile as Boran was, Bucky still wasn't as scared of the adolescent beast as he was of the late Thunderbird Queen. "You probably aren't going to answer me, but is there something special about her? Fern. Why do you trust her more than anyone else? We're all just as willing to help you, all trying as hard, so what makes you trust her more than the rest of us?"

Boran turns his attention to Bucky, taking in the broody human, "I could be asking you the same thing. You trust her more than the other puny humans." Bucky staggered back a step at the Thunderbird's communication. "You have a history with the girl. It is obvious you've been under the Queen's power before; you've had a taste of what is possible."

"You know about Thunder's ability to show visions?"

Boran let out a chuffle. "What a foolish name for the Queen."

"It's not like we knew any better," Bucky grumbled.

Boran fluffed out his feathers and stretched his wings, "Queen Aella had many abilities, all of which seemed to not have passed onto the tiny one." Boran looked to Mellan and Fern across the field, the battle to raise a Thunderbird was becoming more of a challenge by the day. Having to care for two others wasn't helping much, either. "Your Fern, her connection to the Queen, might have been broken as she passed, but it is still there. I could feel it when I first flew over her. I had felt a pull from the moment she entered the land months ago, but I did not know what it was until I lost my connection to the Queen. Fern now possesses the connection."

Bucky couldn't take his eyes away from the back of Fern's head as he listened to the Thunderbird. "She is the new Queen, even if I didn't want to accept it initially. Seeing her play with the tiny one and how she so calmly interacts with Thora or me, she completely understands us without being one of us. But, without truly having the powers Aella had, she is of no use to our kind aside from being a beacon for us to gather around."

"What if she has them, the powers. What if she has them, but because of something that Thun– Aella said, she believes that she doesn't. Is there a way to awaken them?" Bucky's brain blew past some of the information he had been given, only to hear what he hoped would fuel his assumptions. Truthfully, he didn't want to think that if Fern was now Queen of the Thunderbirds, that could mean losing her.

"I do not know. The nearest nest that houses older Thunderbirds is more than a five-day flight, at the minimum. I cannot fly there in back in the amount of time that Thora has left, nor can I give you the location; it is ingrained in my memory as the flight pattern, no true location that you would need to locate. If I sent you, it would also throw the nest into a frenzy, likely killing you and many of them, and if that didn't happen, Thora and I would surely be exiled from ever seeing another of our kind for the rest of our lives." That had to be the least helpful Boran had been to Bucky in their talk.

"So unless Mellan somehow unleashes the powers that his mother should have passed onto him, or if Fern somehow manages to find them deep down somewhere within her, those power will be lost forever. Fan-fucking-tastic." Bucky grunts running his hands over his face.

"Thora might also lose her life if one of those doesn't happen."

"Even better! Then you're going to let all hell break loose." Boran didn't answer Bucky, purely giving the human a sideways glance and lifting himself into the air with two beats of his wings. "Just fucking perfect. What else can go wrong at this point?"