A lizard swims uncertainly through the shallows of an ocean on Markoff Prime. There's something it's trying to remember, some sense of terrible wrongness. This is not where it was moments ago. This is not what it was. It doesn't belong here.
It struggles to remember what it really is, where it really belongs. Something incomprehensible to its lizard mind lurks, buried deep in its tiny mind. Something huge, ineffable, something it simply can't focus its minimal intelligence on no matter how hard it tries.
As its quest for its memories distracts it, a bird descends to the water and snaps the lizard up with its beak. Dragged out of the water into blinding bright sunlight and harsh dry air, with the horrible cutting pain of the beak digging into its middle, the lizard has time to realize that somewhere, somehow, it has made a terrible mistake. Somewhere it made a choice, and the choice was wrong, and has led it to this.
And then the beak snaps its back in half, and it knows nothing more.