Celia (Old)

Chapter 7

When Harley woke up that morning, he was cold and his fire had died out. He also woke up feeling depressed and full of regret. He had time to think about his past, he missed his family very much and wished he could've stopped them from going to that town, but nobody would listen to him, the only midget in his family. He knew that they were all dead, there was no way that they could be still alive. He knew that they ended up at the Victoria Lizen Rehab where they were killed for just being a feather mane. Despite now having peace with the humans, Harley never forgave them for killing his bloodline. Harley continued to lay where he slept for a few more minutes, pondering over his past from twenty years ago. As he thought about it more, he still had family, though they weren't related to him by blood, but it was better than no family for Harley. After pondering on everything, he decided to get up and stretch. He stretched his arms before his legs, yawning. He decided to stand up on two legs this time as his arms were more sore than his legs. He continued downstream on his journey, hoping that Rowan and Celia were still alive. As he wandered, memories of his mother kept flashing in his mind. He could remember her voice and face almost exactly, but the rest of his family was just a blur. After about an hour of following the river downstream, he came across a part where the river split off into two directions. Harley sat down in defeat, they could have gone down any path. After thinking about it for a while, he found a solution.
"My instinct is telling me they went down the one with trees and not the same flat landscape, so it must be that one." Harley told himself as he stood back up on all fours and readied himself to leap into the water as the path he wanted to take was on the other side of the river. Harley was a strong swimmer, stronger than Rowan for sure. It didn't take him long to cross the river, but once he got out his clothes and feathers felt heavy as he stood back up. He shook some of the water off of him and continued forward, motivated and believing that they went down that way. Harley even started running a bit, hoping to run into Celia and Rowan along the way. After another hour of wandering down the rocky shoreline of the river, which became more shallow as he continued forward, he began losing hope in finding them and motivation to continue, until he discovered some things between some of the rocks. The river was now covered by trees with leaves that were starting to turn orange with some bushes off to one side and a dirt cliff to the other side. Harley kneeled down and discovered a purple feather between two rocks near the water. Harley knew it belonged to Celia, but if they were there then he would have seen them by then. He then thought that they were out gathering stuff and would return soon as he noticed another rock circle with some dry sticks in it. He held onto the feather as he sat down by it, and as he looked around a bit more, he noticed some dirt Lizen footprints that were small enough to be Celia and Rowan's that headed downstream, along with some larger ones that belonged to an adult regular-sized Lizen.
"Strange, I thought that they would have headed upstream, but these look recent, like, from today." Harley said to himself as he stood up again and decided to follow the tracks. He only followed the tracks for a few minutes before they started to fade and he started to feel less alone for some odd reason. Harley started to become more cautious with each step he took, looking around constantly. When he started to rub off this feeling as just his instincts, he was jumped by two regular sized Lizens with strange collars and attacked. Harley fought back, readying his energy orb, but he was knocked unconscious before he could fire it.