The morning sun cast long shadows across the concrete gathering ground as Lex Morrison stood in the sea of humanity, his twenty-first birthday marked not by celebration but by the cold weight of inevitability. Around him, thousands of other young adults waited in silent terror, their faces pale and drawn as the alien selection process began.
Twenty years. That's how long it had been since the Daga had purchased Earth at the intergalactic auction, swooping in with their scaled hides and serpentine eyes the moment humanity's "protected low-tech status" had been revoked. The development of AI had been humanity's greatest achievement and their ultimate doom—catapulting them from a protected species to a commodity in the span of a single legislative session on some distant star.
Lex's hands trembled as he watched the towering Daga overseers move through the crowd, their reptilian forms cutting imposing figures in their utilitarian armor. They weren't here for Earth's resources—strip mining asteroids was far more efficient. They weren't here for labor—their robots handled manufacturing with precision no biological being could match. They were here for something far more insidious: exotic pets that could cook, clean, and provide the kind of organic interaction that many advanced species craved in their sterile worlds.
"Lex Morrison. Sector 7-Alpha." The mechanical translator crackled to life, and Lex felt his stomach plummet. His number. His name. His life, now forfeit.
The crowd seemed to part around him as he stumbled forward, his legs moving without conscious thought. Behind him, he could hear his mother's broken sob, the sound cutting through the morning air like a blade. He turned, desperate to see them one last time.
"Mom, Dad—" His voice cracked as he reached them, pulling them into a crushing embrace. His mother's tears soaked into his shirt, and he could feel his father's strong hands shaking as they gripped his shoulders.
"We love you, son," his father whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "Remember who you are. Remember where you come from."
Sarah pushed through the crowd then, her blonde hair wild and her green eyes red-rimmed from crying. She'd been his girlfriend for three years, and they'd talked about marriage, about a future that now would never come.
"Lex, please—" She threw herself into his arms, and he held her tight, breathing in the familiar scent of her perfume, trying to memorize every detail of her face.
"I'll find a way back," he whispered against her hair, though they both knew it was a lie. No one ever came back from the inner galaxy. "I'll—"
"Time's up, meat." The Daga overseer's voice was flat, emotionless. A scaled hand the size of a dinner plate clamped down on Lex's shoulder, and he was yanked away from everything he'd ever known.
The walk to the transport ship felt like a death march. Thousands of humans shuffled forward in a broken procession, their faces blank with shock and grief. The Daga herded them like cattle, their energy weapons crackling with implied threats.
The ship itself was a monstrosity of dark metal and organic curves, its hull scarred by countless journeys across the void. As Lex was pushed up the ramp, he caught a glimpse of the interior—row upon row of cramped holding cells, each designed to house a dozen humans in conditions that would have been illegal for animals back on Earth.
The stench hit him first—fear, sweat, and something else he couldn't identify. The sound came next: thousands of voices raised in terror, anger, and desperate prayer. As the Daga shoved him into cell block C-7, Lex realized with growing horror that this ship had been collecting humans for days.
The cell door slammed shut with a hollow clang, and Lex found himself pressed against eleven other people, all of them strangers united by their shared fate. The ship's engines rumbled to life, and through the small porthole, he watched Earth shrink away until it was just another star in the vast darkness of space.
A girl in corner was quietly weeping. Another man stared at the wall with hollow eyes. A woman clutched a photograph to her chest.
Lex sank down onto the cold metal floor, his legs finally giving out. He thought of Sarah's smile, of his father's pride when he'd graduated college, of his mother's cooking on Sunday mornings. All of it was gone now, replaced by the reality of their situation: they were cargo, being shipped to the inner galaxy where they would serve as playthings for species that viewed them as little more than intelligent pets.
The ship shuddered as it entered hyperspace, and Lex Morrison—former college graduate, former son, former human being—began his journey into the unknown darkness of the galaxy beyond.
Three days into their journey through the dimensional layers, Lex had begun to understand the rhythm of the ship. The constant hum of the dimensional drive, the periodic food drops, the way the Daga guards moved with mechanical precision through their patrols. He'd even started talking to Tim, a mechanic from Ohio who'd been selected from the same gathering ground.
"My wife's probably already moved on," Tim said quietly, staring at the porthole where swirling colors danced beyond. "Can't blame her. This ain't exactly temporary."
Lex was about to respond when the ship lurched violently. Emergency klaxons began wailing, and the lights flickered from white to an ominous red. Through the cell bars, they could see Daga crew members rushing past, their usual calm replaced by something that looked suspiciously like panic.
"What's happening?" the girl with the photo—Maya, he'd learned—pressed her face against the bars.
The ship bucked again, more violently this time. Lex could hear the dimensional drive's hum growing irregular, sputtering like a dying engine. Over the intercom, angry Daga voices barked orders in their native tongue, but the translation system had apparently failed.
Captain Xorth's voice crackled through the speakers, the universal translator barely functioning: "Drive... acceptable parameters... continue... profit margins..."
Tim grabbed Lex's arm. "That doesn't sound good."
Another violent lurch sent them all tumbling against the cell walls. Through the porthole, the swirling colors of normal dimensional space began to shift, becoming darker, more chaotic. The ship was falling—not through space, but through the very layers of reality itself.
"DIMENSIONAL BREACH! ALL HANDS—" The intercom cut to static.
The ship screamed through dimensions like a stone through water, each layer they passed through making reality itself seem to warp and twist. Lex watched in horror as his own hand seemed to phase in and out of existence, while Maya's terrified face flickered between human and something else entirely.
Down, down, down they fell, past dimensions where the laws of physics held different meanings, past realities where time slowed and space folded in on itself. The ship's hull groaned and buckled, but somehow held together as they plummeted toward the very bottom of existence.
When they finally crashed, it was with the sound of a bang but also a wet thud.
Lex came to in darkness, his head ringing and blood trickling from his nose. The cell door had been torn open by the impact, and around him, he could hear the groans and cries of other survivors. He stumbled to his feet, helping Tim up as they both stared out at their new prison.
The sky was purple—not the gentle purple of Earth's sunsets, but a deep, violent color that seemed to pulse with malevolent energy. Jagged lightning split the heavens constantly, providing the only illumination in this sunless realm. In the distance, countless worlds hung in the sky like broken ornaments, their surfaces scarred and twisted, debris from all the dimensions above.
The landscape around their crashed ship was a nightmare of broken reality—fragments of buildings from a thousand different worlds, seas of liquid shadow, and mountains that seemed to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. And moving through it all were things that had never been meant to exist.
Captain Xorth's voice boomed across the wreckage: "All slaves, exit immediately! Defensive perimeter! Move!"
As the cell blocks opened, thousands of terrified humans poured out into the hellscape. The Daga guards were shoving them forward, using them as living shields as the first wave of creatures emerged from the twisted landscape.
They came in a tide of darkness—beings of pure nightmare that had been feeding on the scraps of reality for eons. Some crawled on too many legs, others flew on wings of shadow, and still others simply oozed forward like living oil with eyes that burned with hungry fire.
"Run!" Lex grabbed Tim's arm as the swarm descended. Around them, humans scattered in all directions, their screams echoing across the broken world.
They ran across ground that shifted beneath their feet, past the twisted remains of what might have once been a city from some higher dimension. Behind them, the sounds of carnage grew louder—the wet tearing of flesh, the crunch of bones, the final screams of the unlucky.
A shadow passed over them, and Lex looked up to see something that his mind refused to fully process. It was insectoid in shape but the size of a small aircraft, with a dozen eyes that glowed like fireflies and a proboscis that ended in a wickedly sharp tube.
"Look out!" Tim shoved Lex aside just as the creature dove.
The tube punched through the back of Tim's skull with a wet sound, and immediately began to pulse. Tim's eyes went wide with terror and confusion as the creature began to feed.
"Help... ah..." Tim's voice was already slurring as the thing drained his brain matter. "Help me... Lex... please..."
Lex scrambled backward in horror as his friend's face went slack, his words becoming increasingly garbled. "Mummy... mummy... want... home..." Tim's hands reached out desperately, but his movements were becoming uncoordinated as more and more of his consciousness was sucked away.
The creature's proboscis pulsed rhythmically, and Lex could see something gray and pink flowing up through the translucent tube. Tim's body convulsed, his eyes rolling back, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
"No, no, no!" Lex looked around frantically for a weapon, anything, but there was nothing but broken stone and twisted metal.
A sound like thunder made Lex spin around. Rising from behind a cluster of broken buildings was something that defied description—a creature so massive it blotted out entire sections of the lightning-filled sky. It stood nearly five hundred meters tall, its body a writhing mass of tentacles and eyes and mouths that opened and closed with wet, hungry sounds. Its skin was the color of old blood, and where it walked, the very ground seemed to scream.
The titan's attention fixed on the scattered humans, and one of its massive tentacles swept down like a falling skyscraper. Lex watched in absolute horror as it scooped up a dozen fleeing people, including a woman who had been in the cell next to his. Their screams were cut short as the creature lifted them toward one of its many mouths—a gaping maw lined with rows of teeth like broken glass.
"MUMMY!" Tim's voice was now barely human, a childlike wail as the insect creature continued its feast. His body had gone limp, held upright only by the tube embedded in his skull. "MUMMY... WANT... WANT..."
Lex couldn't watch anymore. He turned and ran, leaving his friend to die in the most horrible way imaginable. Behind him, he could hear the wet sounds of feeding, the crunch of bones, and Tim's increasingly incoherent babbling growing fainter and fainter until it stopped altogether.
The massive creature's footsteps shook the ground as it moved through the crowd of humans like a child picking up toys. Each step crushed dozens of people into paste, while its tentacles grabbed others and fed them into its endless mouths. The Daga guards were firing their weapons at it, but the energy blasts barely singed its hide.
Lex stumbled over broken rubble, his lungs burning as he ran deeper into the nightmare landscape. Around him, the sounds of massacre echoed across the End Dimension—the last cries of humanity as they were devoured by things that should never have existed.
In the distance, more creatures were emerging from the shadows. Things with too many teeth, beings made of living darkness, entities that existed in spaces between spaces. This was the drain of reality, the place where all the broken, twisted, and damned things fell to feed and grow strong.
And now Lex was trapped here with them, in a dimension where death would be a mercy and survival meant something far worse than any slave could imagine.
As he ran through the purple-lit hellscape, one thought hammered through his mind: I should have died on Earth.
The lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the twisted faces of the creatures that had begun to hunt him, and Lex Morrison realized that his real nightmare was just beginning.
He stumbled through the ruins of what had once been civilizations from higher dimensions—broken spires of crystal and metal that defied earthly architecture, fragments of cities that existed in impossible geometries. Above him, entire urban landscapes drifted through the purple sky like diseased clouds, their buildings twisted and corrupted by their fall through the dimensional layers.
In the distance, something the size of a small planet undulated through the void between floating worlds. A worm-like creature with segments that pulsed with sickly light was wrapping itself around one of the smaller moons. Lex watched in sick fascination as the thing's massive jaws unhinged, revealing rows of teeth like broken buildings, and began to devour the celestial body. The moon cracked and crumbled, its surface peeling away like an orange as the cosmic worm fed.
The ground beneath his feet was a patchwork of realities—smooth marble from some elegant dimension mixed with rusted metal from an industrial hellscape, all held together by a substance that felt disturbingly organic under his boots. Every step took him deeper into the maze of broken worlds, but behind him, the sounds of pursuit were growing closer.
He could hear the wet slithering of things that moved without limbs, the clicking of chitinous creatures that had too many legs, and worst of all, the deep, rhythmic breathing of the titan that had been feeding on his fellow humans.
Lex scrambled over a pile of rubble that might have once been a temple, his hands scraping against stone carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. On the other side, he found himself in what had been a residential district from some unknown world—houses with doors that opened onto nothing, windows that showed pure darkness, and gardens where the plants moved like snakes.
The breathing was getting closer.
He turned to run down what had once been a street, but his foot caught on something metallic buried in the dimensional debris. He fell hard, his knee striking a piece of crystal that cut through his pants and into his flesh. Blood—his blood—began to pool on the alien ground, and immediately, things began to stir in the shadows.
Blood calls to them, he realized with growing horror. They can smell it.
The ground shook with a footstep that felt like an earthquake. Then another. And another.
Lex looked up to see the titan looming over him, its mass blotting out the lightning-filled sky. Up close, he could see that its skin wasn't just blood-red—it was covered in faces, thousands of them, all pressed against the creature's hide from the inside, their mouths opening and closing in silent screams. The faces of everyone it had ever devoured.
One of its massive tentacles descended toward him like a falling building. Lex tried to roll away, but his injured leg wouldn't support him. The tentacle wrapped around his waist with the strength of a hydraulic press, lifting him effortlessly into the air.
"NO! NO, PLEASE!" Lex screamed as he was carried upward, the ground falling away beneath him. The creature's many mouths opened simultaneously, releasing a stench like rotting worlds. He could see down into one of the gullets—a tunnel of pulsing flesh that disappeared into absolute darkness.
The tentacle positioned him over the largest mouth, and for a moment, Lex hung suspended in the air, staring down into the abyss that would be his tomb. The creature's breath washed over him, hot and fetid, carrying the dissolved remains of countless victims.
Then the tentacle released him.
Lex fell screaming into the darkness, his voice echoing off the wet walls of the creature's throat. The walls of flesh pressed in around him, slick with digestive fluids that immediately began to burn his skin. He could feel himself sliding deeper into the thing's gut, the muscular contractions of its esophagus pulling him inexorably downward.
The passage grew tighter, squeezing him like a vice. He couldn't breathe—the air was thick with acidic moisture that seared his lungs with every desperate gasp. His screams became weaker, more desperate, as the walls of living meat pressed against his face, his chest, his entire body.
"Help... somebody... please..." he wheezed, but his voice was lost in the wet, rhythmic sounds of the creature's digestion.
The walls contracted again, and Lex felt his ribs beginning to compress. The darkness was absolute now. He was suffocating, drowning in the creature's digestive tract, and with each passing second, the walls pressed tighter, squeezing the life from his body.
His vision began to fade at the edges, not from lack of light—there was no light to see by—but from oxygen deprivation. His lungs burned as he struggled for air that wasn't there, his hands clawing weakly at the slick walls that held him prisoner.
This is how I die, he thought as consciousness began to slip away. Not as a hero, not fighting for freedom, but as food for a monster in a dimension that shouldn't exist.
The walls squeezed tighter, and Lex Morrison's struggles grew weaker and weaker, until finally, there was only the sound of the cries from the countless faces on tge titans body.