His prison heaved to one side, throwing him heavily against the gently sloping wall. Female voices, loud but muffled, bled through the fabric; no doubt mocking the tiny man who languished in the solitary darkness of the velvet pouch.

Blood trickled from where his lip had slammed against his kneecap. It was hot, the copper taste frothed in his mouth. His entire body was a patchwork of cuts and bruises, oozing gashes and black welts whose numbers increased with each cruel shake of his cloth cell.

His mind was a cold slate, barren of all feeling but pain and despair. He was the last one of his batch, the final survivor of Their cruel games. He hated how his internal monologue capitalised Them, raising his merciless owners to godhood but what else were They? What else but Goddesses were the two titanic women who had slaughtered so many for Their own twisted amusement?

He rolled again, his arm bending behind his back at a painful angle as he was pitched forwards. He slid helplessly, his pained arms struggling pointless for purchase against the wrinkled fabric wall as peals of laughter thundered into his cell.

He would be next. He would be thrust into the light to be torn and broken like so many men and women before him. A shudder wracked his cold, naked body. Another shake, another blow, another bruise. In between his torments he found himself praying, praying that They would end his life quickly, that he be reduced to nothing but a tiny smear of red paste beneath one of Their feet rather than being subjected to one of Their games.

He shuddered harder at the thought, the vomit rising in his throat a product of both the endless turbulence and the atrocities he had watched Them commit. Their captives were nothing but insects to Them, nothing more than screaming toys to be bent and squashed and subjected to more tortures than his human mind could comprehend. But then again, They were not human, not compared to him and his fallen comrades, They were Gods.

He began screaming even before his eyes registered the light flooding in from the far end of the pouch. He clawed frantically at the fabric as his prison tipped to one side, causing him to roll painfully towards the widening opening. His chest heaved as he fought desperately to escape back into the darkness, to scale the ever tilting wall and so escape the light that doomed him.

Already Their voices boomed around him, cooing and pleading with him to come and joint Them. Terror burned his mind as the pouch was drawn away from him. His legs lost purchase and swung out into nothingness, drawn and teased by swirling tendrils of high altitude wind. The light was blinding as it swallowed him. He could see the purple fabric billow and expand as he slid from the prison, moving as if time itself had slowed.

Gravity pulled at him, throwing his stomach into his throat as he dropped into the abyss. Desperately he threw out a hand, crying in pain as his bruised and aching wrist took his full weight. His fingers burrowed deep into the fabric, locking together as his other limbs flailed wildly in an attempt to latch on to the now fully inverted velvet pouch.

The world around him was a whirling kaleidoscope of light and colour, everything far too distant and massive to comprehend. His pupils shrank to pinpricks as his chest struggled to suck in air while fighting back motion sickness. He forced his burning shoulder muscles to drag his other arm upwards, turning his head as he pivoted his body to allow his left hand to latch on to the soft material that was so far the only thing preventing him falling to his death.

And then he stopped. Everything stopped as his eyes fell upon the lilac thumbnail, the size of a van, which hovered impossibly next to him. Freshly tanned skin surrounded it, following the digit to a hand that could have smothered a passenger plane.

Since his capture, during which he had felt as though heavily drugged, he had never been this close to either of Them and now Their sheer size of paralyzed him. The futility of his struggle slammed into him like an iron nail.

Mocking laughing rained down on him like physical blows. Their voices were almost too immense for his ears to process, each word rattling his entire body. ‘Aww,’ She chided, ‘I don’t think he wants to play!’

‘Sure he does!’ the voice from above replied, ‘Come on little guy!’

The hand twisted, raising the pouch ever higher before flicking it like the tip of a whip. His hands were torn painfully from the fabric as he was flung carelessly into the air.

The wind ripped his voice from him as he fell, spinning his body like a shed leaf. It chilled him to the bone, snatching and scratching at his unprotected flesh with frozen talons. Through eyes blurred by streaming tears he glimpsed Them, flashes of the female form grown to impossible proportions that filled his vision as he span by.

The ground twisted into view, an endless expanse of teak that leapt hungrily towards him. A black clad foot, rested to his left, extending up and above him to vanish into the rippling folds of a short blue and green tartan skirt. It should have filled him with dread. The knee that he sped past belonged to a violent and insatiable Goddess who could crush a suburban block beneath a single footstep if She so wished. And yet he no longer feared Her. The earth that rose to take him would surely provide him with a swift death. He was falling to his demise and for that he was thankful. Through chattering teeth that shook his pounding skull he allowed himself a grin. He had been spared from Their games.

A second and a half later he collided with the floor. His bones shattered on impact, his mind turning to instant blackness like the switching off of a light. He had escaped.