He didn't know which way he was falling any more.

Time had given up meaning as well.

It could have been seconds minutes days hours years but he didn't know.

It could have been forever.

An eternity of darkness light black white colors fading into a rainbow to infinity.

Perhaps he was dead.

Or maybe he was dreaming.

Past present future all mixed together, like a snake devouring its own tail.

North south east west the winds of fortune had always blown in his favor but no longer.

Why?

Did it matter?

Lying crying dying, a full circle, and always

falling

falling

falling.

He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded by a fog so thick he could have cut it with a knife. After a few moments he became aware of a whistling in his ears; when several more had passed, he realized that it was the wind. He looked down, or was it up? But the mist obscured his feet and he couldn't tell if he was standing on solid ground.

With a suddenness that made him blink, the fog vanished. He found that he could see a huge landscape spread out before him, or beneath him as the case may have been.

With mild surprise, he noted that it was rapidly drawing closer.

He had a slight sense of déjà vu, as though he had been here before, but the when and why escaped him.

He watched, fascinated, as the ground raced towards him, wondering idly if it wasn't the other way around and he was falling towards it.

With that thought, everything snapped into terrifyingly clear focus.

If he hit the ground at the speed he was going, he would break every last bone in his body. He would have to divert the force elsewhere- calculating quickly in his head, he realized that putting all of it in one place would have roughly the same effect as dropping a small bomb.

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes… and teleported.

In the middle of New Mexico, a huge explosion shook the ground. Rocks and clumps of dirt were thrown into the air as it opened an enormous crater in the arid landscape.

Twenty-five miles away, in a small town that had recently become the headquarters of a secret organization, alarm bells were ringing. After the Asgard fiasco, the agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D. had become particularly attentive to anything odd that happened in the desert nearby.

When a group of agents arrived at the crater roughly twenty minutes later, they found it inexplicably empty.

"Mr. Fury, sir?" said one of them into a cell phone, "Here's something you'll want to see for yourself."